Bill Mitchell wrote an interesting piece on PoynterOnline about how sales-reps for newspapers can get more “local” online advertisers. Here’s the first step he provides:

“1. Help advertisers with their digital lives. Jeff Jarvis uttered this line within the first few minutes of his keynote kicking off the conference, and it set a theme for pretty much everything that followed. News organizations “have always told advertisers, ‘We want to help you with your business,’ and now we gotta mean it,” Jarvis told a crowd of 400 conference-goers seeking local routes through the digital ad terrain. The new approach, he said, requires a transition “from selling space to selling service.”

We agree with this, it’s selling “Service”.

At the end of the day, if newspaper advertisers (in either print or online) don’t recieve ROI (Return on Investment) they simply won’t return. It’s the same old adage of advertising. Put yourself in your advertisers shoes, and ask yourself. “If I commit $$$ for this amount of ad space to move this (product), will I make back the money I invested?”

One of the best rules to follow for the online sales reps reading this, is that if you can grow your advertisers BUSINESS, you (the Sales Rep) shall be rewarded for it with more ad-dollars in the future, or at least be in a justifiable position to recieve those ad dollars. Sadly, the Newspaper industry never had to worry about such a practice in the past, since ad-space was always in high demand by the public. It’s time to wake up and smell the ROI coffee folks. If you can’t provide an ROI for your advertisers, you have zero right to be soliciting ad-dollars in the first place.