I Don't Advertise
If this person is telling the truth, then they might not be the best prospect for you. But, as we discussed earlier, you found their ad in another paper, then simply say, "well, call me if you ever want to. By the way, this is a really nice business. What do you sell most of?" and launch into your question and answer part of the sales call as we described earlier. I'd do that whether they were being truthful or not in the hopes I'd turn them around.

You Don't Have Enough Circulation
You could say "I guess that depends on how much is enough. Sure, we might not have the circulation of the other newspaper, but our advertisers have found that we have plenty of circulation to get them a dramatic response.

I think you get the idea of where we're going with these first sales call objections. On the second sales call, you might run into others, such as:

The Ad is too Big
First agree that you can shrink it down if he wants, to lower resistance, then calmly explain your reasoning, most likely that his competitors were running bigger, that his average sale will pay for the ad with only a few responses, that its got to be big enough to fit in all the information people need to respond, or that not enough people will see the ad if its too small to make money on the ad.

I can't run this more than once
Explain that the market turns over every week or less, so people who needed the product last week might be gone, but new people will be in the market next week, and he has to be in there when they're ready to buy. You can also point out that his competitors are in the paper each week, so he should as well. You can also mention that not everybody reads a newspaper every day or week, some might have missed it for various reasons so he might need to run it multiple times to get complete saturation. You can also point out how much he'll save with contract rates.

It's not the right time to advertise
There are major Christmas tree decoration shops that stay open and advertise year round, so it's unlikely that your advertiser's business is so seasonal that there isn't a few people about to buy his products at any point in time. Sure, there are peaks and valleys, but if business is slow, that only means he has to work harder to bring in business by advertising. There are other objections as well, but many of them are simply common sense. If you run into others, e-mail us and let us know about them.