The Basic Sales Call: Introduction
Unless you're an inside sales rep who sells primarily over the telephone, you'll find that the term "sales call" has nothing to do with making a telephone call. "Calling on your accounts" almost always means going out to their place of business to try to sell them an ad. So let's talk about how to conduct a sales call.

Once you've done some prospecting and found businesses you think would be good to call on, first you have to determine if you should just show up at their door or call on the telephone first to make an appointment. The rule of thumb I always followed successfully was that if the person you'll be calling on sits behind a desk in an office building, then make an appointment. If they are working in some sort of shop where customers are invited to just walk in unannounced, like I'd guess most of your territory is, then you do the same.

Now this is not to say that they'll be happy to see you. Let's be honest, nobody likes to be sold, and you're going to have to accept that fact that for many places you walk into you'll be greeted with a cringe or a blanket excuse or "objection" as it's called in the sales business. But before we get into the specifics of the sales call, let's talk generally about the philosophy of selling anything.

In the early days of selling a typical salesperson would be considered pushy, launching into his sales pitch shortly after meeting the prospect and hammering away at the potential customer until they'd give in. This worked somewhat, but would create ill will, raise a tremendous amount of resistance in the customer, and the presentations were never all that customized to meet the needs of the prospect. Still, this type of sales call is practiced by too many salespeople, even ad salespeople.

I, for one, never liked those pushy salespeople and certainly didn't want to become one. Not only did it make me and the prospect uncomfortable and my job stressful, but the approach failed most of the time. Luckily, there was an alternative approach available, one that was created way back in the 50's. That's when someone came up with the concept of consultative, needs based selling. IBM and Xerox first embraced this style of selling and became huge successes with it. Now almost every sales training program out there, and almost all books written on sales uses the consultative selling approach as the framework.