Managing Your Territory Introduction Go where the money is Those running elsewhere Prospecting sp. sections Time mgt. mistakes A little each day More on special sections The fastest way to increase sales! Participate in this award-winning, newspaper-specific ad sales course on-site or in a Webinar.  • Get past upfront stalls and objections without any pushing  • Make the account believe he really needs you  • Get better information from your prosepct  • Develop quick ad strategies that work the very first time  • Eliminate size, frequency, content, cost and most other objections before they ever arise  • Get dramatic responses for all kinds of advertisers  • Never have to push an advertiser to run again click here

A typical new ad salesperson starts out spending a lot of their days prospecting, making one cold call after another. Eventually, his hard work begins to pay off and he starts making the revenue goals his manager has set for him.

It's this point where many salespeople breathe a sigh of relief and begin to focus less on making cold calls–which weren't that fun anyway–and instead starts spending more and more time servicing their existing accounts.

Their days fill up with picking up rough ads their accounts have made up, then dealing with proofs of those ads, and then picking up cash for those advertisers who haven't established credit, and so on.

Also instead of cold calls, they just start mailing out or simply dropping off media kits and special section promotional pieces. And when they leave the office every morning, they meet with some other ad reps at McDonalds for an hour to commiserate about how many mistakes the production department makes, how high the ad rates are, and how low their compensation is.

The salesperson is making money now, and so they stop cold calling altogether. Then the inevitable happens.

First one of their big advertisers goes out of business. And another decides to try TV since it's so cheap to buy time at 3 am. And another decides to cut back on advertising in your newspaper and run on the Web. And soon this salesperson finds that he's not even close to making his goal, and he has nobody else he could possibly get in the paper fast enough to make up for the loss. So the salesperson misses his goals, and resolves to start cold calling again. At least until his sales are back to where they were before.

And then the process repeats itself. This scenario has happened to almost every salesperson I've ever worked with, myself included.

A much better, and much less stressful approach to ad sales is to do a little of everything each day or at least each week.

Next: A little each day