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Building a Newsletter Ad Sales Team on Different Budgets
👋 Today, we’re looking at the different approaches you can take to building an ad sales org.
Differing ways to skin a cat aside, let’s dive in! 🚀
📰 Newsletter News
🤝 Morning Brew will hit $250m, here’s why the model still works
👂 An Apple bug may have disrupted your open rates
👏 How the Future party puts on events with the worlds largest brands
💥 How the AI solopreneur grew so quickly and made $250k with 1 course
🙋♂️ Substack launches a new feature as the ESP wars heat up
Building a Sales Team on Different Budgets
In my fortunately abundant conversation with newsletter operators, I've noticed that there are many different novel ways people are stitching together an ad sales team.
A fun segment of newsletters are at a critical juncture. They have enough revenue to justify building a team, but no sexy VC funding to start traditionally building out a sales team of Western-based rockstars.
So let’s look at a few ways I’ve seen people doing it.
👊
🤷♂️What goes into an ad sales Team?
Over-simplifying things, there are 3 core components to a sponsorships unit:
🧲 Lead Generation - Inbound & outbound, most people can’t/shouldn’t rely on inbound only. There are 2 parts to lead gen; finding prospects and outreach.
🤝 Closing - Engaging, pitching and closing leads until a contract is signed.
📦 Account Management - Ad operations, reselling, retention, etc.
We’re mainly focusing on the team-building aspect today. If you want a detailed breakdown of how to build your tech stack on different budgets check out this issue.
🏃 Very Low Budget
🧲 Lead Generation
Find leads manually by tracking similar newsletters, blogs and podcasts. Use the free/cheap version of Apollo to source emails. If you have the budget, Lead Gen is a good candidate to outsource first be the first thing you outsource. At this stage, it may be worth hiring a VA to find prospects to reach out to, or using some cheaper data providers.
If you want to hire a VA to do the actual outreach be careful. Make sure they have sales experience, make sure you’re jumping through Google’s deliverability hoops, keep a strict eye on messaging,
🤝 Closing
Unsurprisingly, founder-led sales is your best bet here. A good salesperson/closer is likely going to be the most expensive (and risky) hire.
Closing is also the most high-leverage part of the sales funnel.
Luckily for you, founder-led sales is often more effective. No one understands your audience like you, plus people just like talking to the founder.
📦 Account Management
In the early days, account management will not be a full-time job. I’d encourage you not to outsource the copywriting at a very early stage, keep your personality in your ads!
But the scheduling, inputting, and perhaps client comms could be done by your VA that you already have finding prospects.
🎯 Moderate Budget
🧲 Lead Generation
Personally, I’d definitely want to hire for the first half of the sales cycle. Start with buying one of the sponsorship data providers. You could hire a young & hungry Western grad, an experienced VA or outsource to a lead gen agency (hello ASaaS).
I’ve also seen the opposite work too. The newsletter co-founder did the outreach, with a very solid tech stack, and hired an experienced VA to be the closer.
🤝 Closing
The different scenarios I’ve seen for moderate budgets:
South African closer, native English speaking, UK time zone, well-priced
Founder retains the closing, many just jumping on the calls to pitch
Hire a young & hungry Western graduate to cover the full sales cycle, high-risk high-reward
📦 Account Management
Keep the account manager as a part-time role either covered by your VA or a founder.
Whilst account management does generally tend to take a back seat, don’t be tempted to neglect it and let it become an afterthought. Investing in good processes and a caring approach will pay dividends.
😎 BIG Budget
🧲 Lead Generation
Hire someone to optimise your inbound funnel. That rusty ‘advertise with us’ link has done you well. But having a sexy inbound funnel will get you more leads and qualify better.
Having a dedicated agency or internal SDR with the full tech stack is the most common. Alongside your growing team of Sales Managers/AE’s.
🤝 Closing
Hire Western closers, ideally in your local country, but that’s up for debate. They can also do their own outreach in their spare time to bulk up their pipeline.
📦 Account Management
Hire a full-time account manager and a great copywriter. Invest the time/people/resources into adding as much value to clients during account management.
🤑 Splashing the Cash
A few additional things you can do if you have the luxury of surplus cash:
Max out your tech stack to make life easier/more efficient
Integrate more complex/creative elements into campaign management (e.g. create custom lead magnets, images, etc.)
Just hire more. 50% of sales hires don’t work out. So if you have the buffer, simply hire more. Having too many salespeople is a great problem; they can always spend time generating MORE leads and selling NEW packages.
Similar to the above, you can never have too many leads. Don’t be afraid to spend time/money exploring other lead gen channels, such as SEO, socials, inbound forms, outbound, ASaaS (bias alert), other agencies, and so on.