Sales Thoughts For A Tough Economy

There was an interesting article in the August 4th issue of Ad Age that reminded me about selling during a market slump. No question that today, we are selling in a market that is extremely volatile with many clients cutting way back on ad budgets. This is certainly nothing new to many old timers who sold during difficult times, but most of you have never had to sell in this kind of environment before and the article spoke to some examples of ad budget cuts that bought the client some time, but eventually resulted in client products or services no longer being top of mind among target audiences.

If you are working to become that market resource for clients, you need to remind them that research has clearly shown the importance of maintaining or increasing advertising and marketing budgets when times get tough. Remind your clients that these budgets are “investments” not expenses and the investment will generate better returns when the market returns. Someone once said: “Stopping advertising to save money is like stopping your watch to save time. How true that is.

Read the article from Ad Age (8/4/08): “Ad Cutbacks Backfired For Bankruptcy Victims.” Send it to clients or use excerpts from it during a sales call. Use research that clearly shows the importance of keeping ad budgets intact. McGraw-Hill did research many years ago that helps support the need for clients to keep ad schedules. I would like to think some of our publications have done research that supports this topic as well.

Today’s economic conditions demand that each of us dedicate more of our time to prospecting. Sticking your head in the sand, waiting for good times to return is not the answer. You have to make it happen. You have to make more calls on current clients and certainly more calls to prospective clients. Those calls should support reasons to advertise to your audience, especially during these tough times. We have multiple products that provide ample opportunities for advertisers to interact with our audience. Now more than ever before we must go back to the basics of selling and do our part to help make things happen. Certainly, it will take a whole lot more work to get through this, but in the end, it will be a whole lot more fun and rewarding.

Go outside the nine dots and keep making the calls,



Tony