What Is Response Oriented Selling Newspaper Training?
Response Oriented Selling is an award-winning ad sales training course and selling system in use at hundreds of newspapers across the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., from many of the largest daily metro newspapers to smaller weekly and monthly publications. More than 400 newspapers currently use the techniques.

It enables your advertising salespeople to eliminate the roadblocks that get in the way of advertisers running, and at the size and frequency your salespeople recommend. The full course involves separate sessions for your salespeople, managers, artists, and prospective advertisers. The course can be conducted live at your newspaper or live over the Internet using web conferencing technology.

If your prospective advertisers complain that your rates are too high, if you're in a competitive market, experience too much account churn, your advertisers are running too small or infrequently, dissatisfied with their response or guidance from their ad reps, then this course is for you.

Hear what's being said about our course from the publisher of one of the largest U.S. dailies.

What Will Response Oriented Selling Teach My Staff?
Your advertising sales staff will learn simple but powerful ways to eliminate up front stalls and objections, get the information they need from their prospects, create consistently effective ad strategies, make flawless presentations, and effectively overcome objections. Here's a full outline.

With our unique skills, your ad staff will be able to eliminate these objections within the first two minutes of a sales call, including objections associated with rate, ad size, frequency, and response without doing anything that feels like selling.

Each salesperson will learn how to move forward to develop an exceptional strategy and make a case, beyond a shadow of a doubt, why their recommendation will get a strong response the very first time the ad runs.

Your salespeople and artists will also gain the analytical and strategic skills to deliver these exceptional results consistently over time, no matter what type of account they're working with.

Who Should Attend?
Inside and outside retail display, classified automotive, real estate, and recruitment display salespeople are the best candidates. Advertising salespeople of all levels will benefit from this course. That's because while we teach our approach within the consultative selling framework, the specific techniques are very different from what an advertising representative would have been exposed to previously.

What Publications Have Participated In This Course?
Publications of all sizes have participated in the Response Oriented Selling course. Major metro newspapers such as the Providence Journal, Hartford Courant, Cincinnati Enquirer, Honolulu Advertiser, and Tulsa World use the Response Oriented Selling techniques, as do countless dailies in smaller markets. Many weekly newspaper groups use our techniques as well, including Community Newspaper Company, with 106 weeklies, dailies, and shoppers. Having conducted this course at over 400 publications, you probably know some of our clients personally.

How Does Response Oriented Selling Differ From Other Ad Sales Approaches?
Other programs tend to get bogged down with the mechanics of consultative selling, analyzing customer personalities, and other general sales theories, failing to provide ad reps with the specific, practical tools needed to change the critical belief behind nearly every prospect's decision not to run: "I don't think the money I'll need to spend with your publication will provide enough of a return to be worth it."

In a time when both advertisers and salespeople alike find advertising unpredictable and unreliable, proving that an advertiser will get a strong response isn't as easy as it sounds. This problem is compounded by the fact that advertisers hold tightly to their own, often faulty, advertising approaches and take any advice to the contrary as a personal criticism. Their misconception that advertising is an art form--and therefore a subjective process--leads them to believe that their approach is as valid as any other, incorrectly concluding the fault is with your newspaper's high cost/low response rate.

Response Oriented Selling teaches advertising salespeople how to easily eliminate these problems head-on, making every sales call more effective and making the idea of cold calling much more attractive. You can watch a movie about our course and download a brochure in PDF form as well.

What's Your Training Style?
Your ad sales staff will quickly see that program creator and instructor, Bob McInnis, is one of them, understanding their unique challenges, and offering new, practical techniques that will help them with their toughest challenges. He presents his material in a warm, down-to-earth, entertaining manner that salespeople of all levels can identify with.

If you talk to our clients, they'll tell you Bob creates a nurturing environment where salespeople can ask questions, challenge the concepts, and practice the new techniques without fear of looking bad in front of their peers or managers.

They'll also tell you how relieved they and their staff were to find no condescending tones and intimidating tactics that other trainers sometimes use to discourage dissension and mask weaknesses in content.

Hear what one newspaper thinks of our course and style.

How Long Is The Course?
Our full course, which the majority of daily newspapers over 30,000 circulation choose to implement, involves two morning sessions for the sales staff as well as remote online one-on-one sessions in Web meetings later in the month where the techniques are applied to each ad rep's accounts. Other sessions for managers, artists, and prospective advertisers round out the course. We also have other configurations for smaller publications that involve anywhere from a half-day online to two or three days on site. We're flexible.

We're a small publication. Can I share training and fees with another publication nearby?
Absolutely. We can work with two or more publications in a centralized meeting place to reduce costs, and the split doesn't have to be necessarily even. For example, one newspaper may elect to just participate in the two-morning "core" sales training and the management session, while the other publication may elect to also conduct an advertiser seminar. If you have a limited budget, our training over the Internet option with online conferencing is a great alternative and exceptional value.

Booking and Registration
We are a small training and consulting firm and our availability is relatively limited. Although we may have openings one or two months out from your booking inquiry, we recommend reserving dates as far in advance as possible. Call (631) 477-2505 for more information or email mcinnis@ads-on-line.com.

Fees
While we're not inexpensive, we can create a configuration that's affordable for your publication, even if it's a very small weekly, daily, or monthly newspaper or magazine. Our live online version is even less expensive and an excellent alternative for those with little or no budget. With either version, we'll come up with a configuration that provides more value than any other training option and an instant return to offset the costs. Contact us for more information.

Where Can I Get More Information?
Call Bob McInnis at (631) 477-2505 or email mcinnis@ads-on-line.com. Our 6-minute walkthrough is a movie that explains the problems we solve. You can also download an 8-page color brochure in PDF format. It describes each part of the program in detail, tells you more about us, and shares feedback our clients have provided. You can also listen to Dave Hunke's (Publisher, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle and former VP, Marketing at the Cincinnati Enquirer) impression of our course and read other comments from clients.