Second call
Once you've got your spec ad and newspaper information, now it's time to return to the account for your final presentation. Now, while the first sales call was very open ended and involved a general conversation about the account's business, the second sales call should be more controlled.

Step One: Review the Information from the Account
You might want to open up with something like "Thanks for meeting with me last week. I took all the information you gave me and came up with an ad for you, but before I show it to you, I'd like to make sure I based it on the correct information. Now last week you told me..." and get into the specifics.

Basically, anything that you found was important about his business, especially the information that you chose to put in his ad and the information he gave you about his target customers that you can prove you reach. This is a pretty easy step since you're just confirming what he said last week. However, it shows you care enough about his business to listen and remember as well as set him up for the next step.

Step 2: Matching his Target Customer's Demographics to your Newspaper's
Now you want to show him that you reach the exact people he just confirmed he was trying to reach by reviewing quickly any pertinent information about your newspaper. The key word is pertinent. Don't launch into pages and pages of benefits of your newspaper or you might lose him.

Instead, keep it short and sweet, like "You told me that you were trying to reach homeowners between the ages of 30 and 60 with an income above $40,000. Here's a recent survey that shows we reach 60% of these people in your immediate market area." When will you know if you've gone on too long and need to bail out if this step? Again, you'll see his eyes glaze over and can almost see him thinking "not another one of these boring newspaper presentations". If you start to see this, move on to the next step.

Step 3: Showing the spec ad
Take out the spec ad and say something like "and this is how I recommend using our newspapers". Now, in many cases you would have designed an ad that is much bigger than the account was expecting. If this is the case, most likely the account will say something right away like "Oh, this ad is much too big. I can't afford this. How much is this ad, anyway?" If these questions come up, don't get sidetracked. The account won't really be able to see the value of the ad, and therefore, if it's worth paying for, until after you go over the ad.

So to keep resistance down while you go over the ad, say something like "look, we can shrink it down if you want, let's just go over the different parts of the ad". Then proceed to explain each element, and just as importantly, what the target readers will do when they see or read each element--hopefully seeing, reading, and responding to the ad.

Once you go over the ad, you might want to try to get the account to buy the ad by summarizing with something like "Look, I'm convinced you'll get a response in our newspapers. We reach the right people you're looking for, and we have an ad we can run that is designed to capture the attention of the right people, get them reading, and responding. What do you say we give it a try?"

Now at this point, and only at this point, is where you deal with the objections. Not on the first sales call, not on the second sales call when you're talking about the newspaper or showing the ad (unless they're specific questions). Try to hold off addressing them until you've made your case completely.