The Best & Worst Ad Sales Advice Ever

👋 Today, it’s some great (and terrible) ad sales advice.

Tips and Tricks aside, let’s dive in! 🚀

✅ Great Advice ✅

🫡 Over-deliver

It’s tempting to focus all your resources on closing deals, and that’s not a terrible thing to do tbh. BUT, make sure you allocate real time/resources to planning a great campaign.

If you have the resources you should always try to overdeliver on what you’ve sold. This’ll increase trust, real value and perceived value. Here are some ideas:

• Slightly lowball metrics in the sales process (i.e. quote open rate as 45% if it varies from 45-53%).

• Throw in some low-impact placements for free. Let’s say you’ve sold 3x primary placements, you could add in 1 or 2 single-sentence placements. Here’s examples of all different types of newsletter placements, the ones I’m talking about are called ‘Quick hits’

• If you’ve sold hosted content, link to the article in a newsletter unprompted, or do you partnership announcement post on socials. Get more eyeballs on it without spending any money.

Partner retention rate is THE most important metric when building a long-term advertising business (or a business that keeps you sane at least).

🎯 Research Every Prospect

Before you reply to any lead, make sure you go to their website, LinkedIn, and recent news. EVERY sales interaction should be speaking their language, so refresh your memory on who their customers are, what their goals/problems are and check any sales notes you already have.

You’re busy, you have a million different initiatives going on. So take a few minutes to get your brain back into this particular universe before you rush that email.

Same goes for sales calls, obviously. Come to the call with a great understanding of what they do, and ideally some specific questions around their marketing.

This helps you plan a great campaign and will build trust. Don’t just do these things to check a box. Get in the mindset of a campaign planner.

When you’re on a sales call, you’re not a salesperson. You are a CAMPAIGN PLANNER, coming up with a goal-relevant campaign, together with the marketer.

Failure to prepare, prepare to fail.

Prep like you mean it. Because you do.

If it’s not clear how to use this, you can reply to this and ask me 🙂 

👎 Terrible Advice 👎

Top tips for those who want to crash and burn with maximum pain.

🥱 Don’t Follow Up

Someone is interested, no point in wasting your time following up. They’ll buy if they want to, and won’t if they don’t.

You don’t want to damage your reputation by annoying them.

Never follow up in sales, that’s how you close deals!

📊 Just Focus on Growth and Ignore Quality

You’re much better off with a million subscribers who don’t care about you, versus 100k adoring advocates.

Focusing on quality content and engagement is for suckers. Just ramp up vanity metrics at all costs. You can always increase your content quality later down the line.

Use the cheapest AI model possible to create content. Focus on the lowest CAC channel only. Then count your money when you land on the moon in 4 months.

While you’re there, go all in on Dogecoin and rent a lambo.

…

P.S. Need help selling more sponsorships? My agency Ad Sales as a Service helps media companies do just that.