Sunday, October 7, 2012

How refusing the sale on the first sales call led to a six-month weekly contract for a 4 x 10!

This small ad was what the
restaurant was running in
the competition and they weren't
interested in running with our client.
A couple of days ago, an ad rep at a New York daily newspaper sent me details of a huge sale he made recently to a Japanese restaurant using our Response Oriented Selling system.

It all began just before before his newspaper hired me. He saw the ad on the left running in a competitive publication and decided to stop in. "We're already doing a lot of advertising elsewhere and we don't want to do anymore," they said.

After learning our techniques, the salesperson decided to re-approach them and ended up getting them on a six-month contract for a 4 col. x 10" ad, once every week: a huge increase and they're getting a great response.

The most interesting thing about this sale isn't the size or even how well the ad worked, but how much larger it became by the ad rep's refusal to close it on the very first Response Oriented Selling meeting, even though the prospective advertiser quickly began showing interest in running.

After first succeeding in stopping the prospect from thinking about how to get rid of him, the ad rep moved on to converting the upfront stalls and objections over to what really mattered to the restaurant owner – response. He quickly drew the new response approach out of the prospect, and the prospect was so won over that he was ready to start running something.

Our techniques not only helped the ad rep sell the restaurant into his
publication, but taught the ad rep to wait until the second meeting, when
the prospect was able to understand why the right strategy would
work better, before talking size and frequency. Both the approach
and the ad worked, generating revenue for the paper and the prospect.
But instead of proceeding to quote rates and talk sizes, the ad rep stuck to our approach, understanding that more significant money was waiting, as well as a more successful, long-term advertiser, if he came up with an effective ad using our system.

The ad rep followed our proven techniques and gathered information about the restaurant's business, competition, and target customers, returned to the office, applied our step-by-step logical process to creating an effective ad strategy, handed it off to a designer to make it look better (that's all you should be asking of them, as we say), and returned with a bigger, better ad, ready to explain the logic behind it and show why the ad would work.

By the end of the presentation, the restaurant owner understood the significant revenue that could come in from the ad and the newspaper and why it needed to be the larger size and frequency. Because the ad rep had, in effect, proven that spending serious money would not be a risk, the restaurant owner signed the six-month contract for the 4 col. x 10" ad (at right).

The first day the ad ran, the ad rep called to check on how things were going. "I can't talk now," the owner said. "I've already had three calls."

Contact us for a demo of these techniques and the various ways we could help your newspaper start using our ad sales selling system to drive some serious ad revenue.