Selling Special Sections
Special sections can throw a huge wrench into the efficient management of your territory. Within a few weeks of working at your newspaper, your manger will almost certainly hold a sales meeting where the manager reminds the staff that a special section's advertising deadline is fast approaching and there are hardly any ads sold yet.

Now as a salesperson, you'll not only get a goal that you have to reach each week and/or month, usually in the form of total inches or dollars, but you will most likely get separate goals for special sections. Now usually all goals are simply based on what happened the same month a year earlier plus a 10 or 20% increase. And many times the number of ads you've got to sell in any one special section is pretty low.

But even though you might not have a very high special section goal, if you miss it there's going to be problems, because special sections are so profitable for a newspaper and your managers have pressure from the publisher to make these goals. What usually happens after one of these sales meetings where everyone's reminded how soon the section closes and how much they have to sell, is that everyone panics, rightly so, and spends the next few days selling only special sections. No prospecting, no servicing existing customers. And when they finally finish that crisis, the manager has another meeting and reminds the staff that now there's another one due in a few days.

Most salespeople never figure out how to avoid these little crisis, and spend all of their time doing last minute selling. Which is the point of all this. If your selling special sections like many salespeople do, primarily on the day or two before the section is due, you can't sell as well. When we discuss how to conduct these sales call in a few minutes, you'll see that last minute selling doesn't allow you to sell properly, and results in a good amount of failures and a huge amount of stress.