What your sales team needs to know before they start selling ads.

By William Dunkerley

There are techniques that work well for selling advertising space. And there are others that are, well, suboptimal. This article and its follow-up parts will help you to equip your sales force with highly effective techniques for selling lots of ads.

Before launching into sales presentational techniques, there are several essential prerequisites your sales agents will need to be able to deploy highly successful selling technique. (Of course, if you're satisfied with your current level of sales, you may not need them.)

Essential Prerequisite 1

Your publication must be effective at generating sales or other benefits for its advertisers. Achieving that requires careful cross-departmental coordination of strategies.

To start with, the ad department will have to articulate the audience attributes that advertisers in your field are looking for. The audience development department will have to target readers that possess those attributes. And the editorial department will have to supply content especially targeted at those readers.

Is that kind of strategy coordination happening at your publication? If not, you're not alone; a lot of publications don't. And for some of them their level of ad sales success is adequate and satisfactory. But it is not optimal.

Often a publication will see its mission as simply to provide content in a certain subject area. It might be an industry or profession, a specific geographic area, or a certain interest of the general public such as news, general business, or fashion.

With this as a starting point, the publication sets out to produce content consistent with that mission. It seeks readers based only on their interest in the content. Finally, the ad department is asked simply to sell ads.

If that's all you want, there's nothing wrong with it. However, that alone is not a formula for maximizing your publication’s business performance. If that is your goal, please consider some additional prerequisites.

Essential Prerequisite 2

You need to have expert knowledge of the marketplace you’re selling in. Your editorial staff undoubtedly possesses expertise in the content area they are writing about. Sometimes, though, the ad salespeople have only a superficial understanding of the subject matter. That may be acceptable if they sell only to ad buyers who likewise only have surface-level knowledge. However, in specialized areas of publishing, the buyer may be deeply immersed in the subject. Your sales agent will be more respected if he or she can match the buyer’s knowledge and understanding.

Beyond subject matter knowledge, there is other subject expertise that will help your sales agents. Knowing market trends is of particular importance. Understanding the challenges faced by the companies that place ads is important too. We'll discuss ways for achieving that later.

Essential Prerequisite 3

Within your market, you need to know what the various product or services categories are and the relative amount of ad dollars being spent in each. You also must know what categories are of greatest interest to your readers.

There is a way to acquire insight into this that I've found useful: Analyze what your competition is advertising. This was relatively easier in the print era because your competitors were primarily other print publications. Now, however, you are competing online with other publishers. In addition, publishers face massive competition from social media platforms, large and small. There are also blogs that carry advertising.

For simplicity, I'll illustrate the analytical practice only with print magazines. In this hypothetical example there are five competing publications. The analysis is being done on behalf of "Competitor A."

I've looked through three representative issues of each publication and made a list of categories in which the advertisements fall. There are 16. Then I counted up the advertising space devoted to each category. The count includes fractional pages, full pages, everything. The total indicates how many full pages all the advertising is equivalent to. I divided that by three to get the average per issue. The illustration below presents the information in tabular form.

Comparing several magazines by ad category.

You can see that the data is totaled both horizontally and vertically. The vertical column totals tell you how your volume of advertising compares with the competitors'. The horizontal row totals give you an indication of the categories in which advertisers are spending their ad dollars.

Comparing ad page counts translates meaningfully into dollars only if the various publications have similar prices per page. Ultimately, the most accurate assessment can be made if you convert the page counts into dollars based on the relevant ad rates. And when you bring digital ads into the comparison, there may be no good alternative to converting measurements into dollars. With digital comparisons you also may not have neatly defined periodic issues to compare. In that case, use a specified time frame, say, one month, for measurement. And for giants like Facebook you can't even stop there. The amount of ad content is too massive. In such instances just use a sampling technique for measurement.

The horizontal row totals are especially interesting because they can inform your publication's editorial plans. For instance, there is much more interest in the "auto" category than in "culture and entertainment." That means it is more beneficial to attract readers interested in autos than those with interests in culture and entertainment. That will make your audience more responsive to the advertisers that are spending larger sums of money. This emphasis should also be reflected in audience development efforts. More readers in that category will translate into more good prospects for those advertisers.

There are additional considerations when it comes to attracting new readers. We’ll pick up on that topic next time and look further into other prerequisites.

William Dunkerley is principal of William Dunkerley Publishing Consultants, www.publishinghelp.com.

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