Time Management
Most salespeople start out making a lot of cold calls, that is, stopping in to prospects and going through the sales process. But eventually, the salesperson's hard work will pay off, they'll start selling ads, and they'll start making the revenue goals their manager has set for them. Then many salespeople breathe a sigh of relief, and begin to focus less on making more cold calls, which weren't that fun anyway, and instead spend more and more time servicing their existing accounts.

They begin to spend their days dropping off and picking up rough ads their accounts have made up, then picking up and dropping off 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 and how high the ad rates are.

The salesperson is making money now, and so they stop cold calling altogether Ð eliminating the uncomfortable process of walking into a new business and trying to get them to advertise. Until 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 simply decides to cut back on advertising in your newspaper. 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 they their sales back to where they were before.

And then the process repeats itself. Not only am I embarrassed to admit that this scenario has happened to me more than once as an ad salesperson, but it's happened to almost every salesperson I've ever worked along side.

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.