1. Provide better service to retain advertisers. Visit and
call more often. Consider value-added programs. Form sales teams to follow customers from
sales through production and billing.
2. Find new prospects by using research and revisiting
those who have stopped advertising.
3. Don’t let reps panic or get discouraged. Ad
directors must counsel them, especially younger ones, to maintain staff morale. Review rep
incentives regularly.
4. Listen to more reps, because the best creative ideas
often come from those with the most customer contact.
5. Emphasize rep training, even if you have to design
cost-free programs depending on the in-house expertise of senior sales staff and
management.
6. Emphasize newspapers’ ability to make the cash
register ring, a pitch with added appeal when advertisers’ sales lag.
7. Before calls or visits, do homework, using on-hand
research or obtaining new information about prospects. Know the most promising calls to
make, what prospects spend on advertising, and who else they use.
8. Keep your advertisers informed about the state of the
local economy to ensure they have realistic expectations about what they will get from
their ad spending.
9. Consider switching some of your best reps to
classified, given the growing importance of, and steep plunge in, that sector.
10. Ad directors should exchange ideas with peers to find
out what is working in other markets. In addition, they should calculate their success by
comparing their efforts and results with those of similar newspapers in similar markets.