The selling personality: analytical plus

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Oct, 1985 by William Abbott

A salesperson doesn't need to be creative to be good at his job. Creativity, which is inborn and not learned, can be safely left in the hands of the editors and writers. What salespeople need to be effective is a combination of well-defined attitudes, or characteristics. Salespeople should be inquisitive, studious, analytical, retentive, inventive and opportunistic.

Let's take a look at these qualities and see how they apply to the daily job of marketing advertising in magazines.

Fostering the need to know

* Inquisitive: The best marketers and sellers are inquisitive. They have to be to discover the facts that will help them construct viable sales programs. The essential element of inquisitiveness is interest. Successful magazine ad marketers and sellers are people interested enough to put in the time and effort to learn what's going on around them.

* Studious: I've heard college students say they couln't wait to graduate because with graduation comes the end of study. Such people should never take up careers in the field of magazine ad sales and marketing. Without knowledge--which can only come from study--the best they could expect is to become journeymen salespeople, calling on media buyers and relating long, boring ineffectual columns of numbers already known by their targets who, for the most part, sit through the recitation just to be polite.

To be effective, the seller must first study the buyer. This includes the buyer's business, objectives, attitudes toward the competition and, most of all, what the seller has to sell that the buyer is most likely to buy. Obviously, the above requires that the magazine marketer spend time assessing what's happening in the advertiser's industry.

Thinking systematically

* Analytical: There is no doubt that some individuals have better analytical abilities than others, just as some people naturally have more aptitude in, say, mathematics. But there are steps in the process of analyzing a business situation that can be learned by anyone, whatever his degree of analytical ability.

The first step begins with the industry itself. The salesperson should read industry trade publications, from which he will develop a knowledge of what is selling and who is selling it. Understanding industry trends not only enables the salesperson to present a more relevant set of proposals, it also makes him sound intelligent, articulate and, most of all, in possession of an understanding of the advertiser's business. A buyer will tend to have confidence in a seller who demonstrates a knowledge of his (the buyer's) business.

Step two is to get specific in finding out what's going on with the company to whom the salesperson wants to sell advertising. A good place to start is with the company's annual report and/or 10K (the SEC version of the annual report). These documents will tell the salesperson if business is booming or bad and, in general, will draw a picture of the client's corporate health.

Next, visit a few retail outlets in which the product is sold. If it's a self-service environment, take note of the number of shelf-facings apportioned to the product vis-a-vis the competition. Unless unduly influenced, retailers tend to make life easy for themselves by packing out merchandise in proportion to sales.

In a customer-service situation, speak with a sales clerk. It's surprising how informed these people are about what is moving and why. I can assure you that the average sales clerk who sells a product day-in and day-out knows a lot more about its viability than the media buyer planning the advertising schedule.

Third, the seller must develop a relationship with people who work at the account, both agency and client; in fact, that's why lunch dates were both. He should find out their objectives, plans, strategy, frustrations. Is everything going is planned? Do they need help? If so, what kind and where and how?

Learning from the past

* Retentive: Now leths consider the adage that there is no such thing as a new idea. There really isn't, you know! Everything that is being done in our business today has been done before. What passes for creativity is simply retention and adaptation. After the seller has inquired, studied and analyzed, he should go back over similar situations and discover how they were handled. Within the framework of this procedure will be found the andwer to the current sales challenge.

If he must, the seller should keep a file on specific concepts that were especially effective. These concepts can be noted by category, industry, media, retail distribution or by overall marketing classification. The key is to remember and store them away for future use. Having these either in one's mind or in a file will enable the seller to draw upon them in sales situations.

* Inventive: However, it is not sufficient, in many cases, simply to have a backlog of prior experiences. Most plans do not lend themselves to exact duplication. Rather, they must be adapted--changed slightly in order to fit a new situation. This requires that the seller be somewhat inventive--and of all the learned selling skills, this one is probably the most difficult to acquire because it does contain an element of native instinct. Even so, inventive talents may be maximized by study.