My Career in Advertising Sales
May 24, 2008
Long ago I used to sell advertising space and it’s not something I would hurry back to. It wasn’t arduous work but I found it endlessly repetitious and boring. Once you’ve sold one advert, you’ve pretty much sold them all. It’s a grind, only broken by walks to the coffee machine and a hurried sandwich at lunchtime. The most difficult aspect about advertising sales was trying to motivate myself on a Monday morning. The Boomtown Rats made that record for me. Then Friday afternoon would arrive and it was hard to stay awake. Everyone in the office would dash out of the office when the shift ended like a bunch of school kids allowed out to play.
My advertising specialty was hotel and holiday accommodations. My clientele was huge hotel corporations and one-owner bed and breakfast set- ups. I preferred to deal with the private owners of small establishments than with the big hotels. Private owner establishments were very proud of their businesses! Advertising selling was more bearable when you actually made someone happy. I built up a good relationship with some of the owners who liked to renew their adverts every year.
My job description was a combination of finding new business and trying to persuade existing clients to renew. There was a sales quota attached to each advertising team and each of us was under a lot of pressure to make sales. I specialized in holiday accommodations that offered amenities for the disabled. This could get very complicated because facility descriptions had to be precise. A small bed and breakfast may have grab rails in the bathrooms and so on but not the facilities to cater for someone who was wheelchair bound. It was also important for establishments to accurately detail the distance from the accommodation to local amenities.
Establishment descriptions in general could be a bit of a nightmare. Occasionally an owner or manager would exaggerate their facilities or mislead us in some way. The trouble was, if a holiday maker complained that something did not match the advertisement copy, it was us that were held responsible. Our advertising selling company was held to account because we were responsible for the accuracy of the content.
I usually called fifty or so potential clients each day and I had a database containing four hundred existing clients. I would have loved the company to pay me to visit each and every establishment on the books, but they never were inclined to. Advertising selling is behind me now and I don’t miss it!
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David Johnson
Stop spending your money and start getting paid to generate fresh responsive home based business leads for your business.
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