Make selling a core competency

Why selling papers should be second nature for every newspaper organization

By Bob Davis

I was at the customer service center recently for a major metro newspaper. The center was working on a project designed to increase the number of saved cancellation requests. A few days earlier, the newspaper had sent out invoices to hundreds of new subscribers who had been brought in by an outside vendor. Call after call came in:

"I never ordered this paper."
"I wasn't told the paper would cost this much."
"I was told the paper was going to be free."
"The paper I ordered was supposed to be $20 for the whole year, and you are charging me $56 for 13 weeks."
"I order Sunday only and I am getting billed for seven days per week."

Unfortunately, this scene plays itself out daily in customer service centers across the country. What's more, this situation will persist so long as newspapers continue to outsource what should be the primary business of all companies-selling their own products!

New subscription telemarketing is not dead

Many newspapers have done themselves a great disservice by outsourcing the job of selling their product. Yet even when telemarketing is performed in-house, it is often executed poorly. I have urged many publishers and circulation directors to schedule an hour to listen to what their telemarketers are saying to their friends and neighbors in the community. The leaders usually emerge from this experience embarrassed by the low quality of the conversations they heard.

As a result of the prevailing culture of poor sales practices, many in the newspaper industry feel that telemarketing for new subscriptions is a dead practice. I disagree completely! Low sales volume does not mean that telemarketing is an ineffective sales channel. It simply means that the people doing the telemarketing are not doing so effectively.

The first step toward effective telemarketing is believing in the value of the product being offered. Reps must believe that having the daily newspaper delivered to one's home is, even at the standard price, the greatest bargain available in America today. It is clear to me that most reps are not taught to believe this.

Discover the value

Right now new subscriptions are being pushed on customers at deeply discounted prices. Reps are not discovering the unique value each subscriber would find in the paper. If we ask the right questions to uncover a prospective subscriber's wants, interests and needs, and we then explain how the newspaper can add value to the prospective subscriber's unique situation, there would no need to sell it at a discount!

Selling a newspaper based on its value also makes it much easier to sell the subscription on a paid-in-advanced basis. We pay our phone and cable bills in advance, why not do the same with our newspaper subscription? The common practice of signing up customers with merely a promise to pay generates unnecessary expense. If subscription sales were made based on value, customers would pay in advance just as they do for other products and services they value.

A similar argument holds when considering subscriber retention. According to the NAA, subscriptions generated through telemarketing are the least retained order source. This may be due to the fact that telemarketers often push subscriptions by using attractive introductory offers. When the offer expires and the subscriber is asked to renew at the standard rate, the typical subscriber is unwilling to do so because he or she has never had a quality conversation centered on the value of a standard subscription.

Sell value in every channel

Many in the newspaper industry are wringing their hands over declining circulation. Yet circulation could grow again if newspapers started selling the value of the paper through each of their sales channels. Companies must also use industry best practices for each sales channel. For example, there are newspaper-owned crewing operations around the country that consistently turn in two sales per hour per rep while other newspaper companies have been unable to make crewing work. The same is true for kiosk sales.

Selling the newspaper needs to be part of every employee's job. Each of your employees should take it personally if they have a neighbor who does not get home delivery. The cable industry is having great success with annual "Meet Your Neighbors" campaigns. These campaigns are a company-wide contest among employees to sign-up as many of their neighbors as possible for cable service. I know of one newspaper whose publisher had the same idea, and in just one week, the campaign generated an average of three subscriptions per newspaper employee. Imagine what would happen if you got the same results from each of your employees once or twice per year!

Envision higher circulation

My vision is for every newspaper in the country to have a circulation sales operation that is world-class. This includes telemarketing, kiosk, and crew sales channels that are producing more than enough paid-in-advance sales to grow circulation numbers month after month. This circulation sales group should also use strategically placed single copy inserts and marketing that actually grow circulation.

How does a newspaper achieve this vision? By going back to basics and product a core competency of the organization!