Source: Cespedes, Frank V. and Weinfuter, Daniel. 2015. “The best ways to hire salespeople.” Harvard Business Review. Used with permission.
Hunters are salespeople who have the personality, motivation, experience, and preference to do missionary selling which involves developing new business – finding new partners to a medium (television, online, for example) and to a media outlet (a station or a website, for example) – and typically involves calling on customers, including local retailers, and not calling on advertising agencies. Missionary selling is also commonly referred to as direct selling.
Farmers are salespeople who have the personality, motivation, experience, and preference to do service selling, which includes calling on, servicing, and getting increased business from current customers. Service selling typically involves calling on advertising agencies.
Both types of selling require the ability to build trusting relationships with different types of customers and partners.
Two types of customers
In their Harvard Business Review article “Make sure your customers keep coming back,” F. Stewart DeBruicker and Gregory Summe identify two types of customers: inexperienced generalists and experienced specialists.29 In media selling, examples of inexperienced generalists are smaller customers, often retailers and others called on direct (those who do not have an advertising agency), who are new to advertising in a medium. Examples of experienced specialists are advertising agency media buyers. DeBruicker and Summe point out that selling and creating value strategies to these two types of customers must be different.
Inexperienced generalists typically do many jobs in their businesses. For example, a small, owner‐run retailer might keep the books, set up displays, and do personal selling as well as place advertising. If this retailer, who we will call John, is unfamiliar with radio, for instance, he wants to know how to buy it, how to schedule it, how to write copy, and how to best position his store to appeal to his target customers. John is more interested in expert marketing and advertising advice and in results (selling more goods) than in price; therefore, a salesperson must provide expert advice in those areas in which John needs help.
Experienced specialists typically specialize in one activity. For example, an agency media buyer does only one thing – place media buys – and is an expert in that activity. If this buyer, who we will call Jane, is making a television buy in a market, she is primarily interested in price and service – fast, responsive service. Jane is not interested in marketing or advertising advice or in advice about writing effective copy; she is interested in a different type of results – ratings, circulation, cost‐per‐points, cost‐per‐thousands, cost‐per‐clicks, reach, and frequency, all of which you will learn about in Chapter 18: Measuring Advertising.
As inexperienced direct accounts gain experience, their needs shift from asking for marketing and advertising advice to asking for responsive service and competitive prices. However, one thing direct accounts, especially retailers, will always focus on is results, which will always be more important to them than ratings, circulation, or research data. In the following sections of this chapter, you will learn more about strategies for calling on direct accounts and on agencies.
Missionary selling
Missionary selling most often involves calling on the principle owner, the CEO, or director of marketing or advertising of an account. Calling directly on an account and not on the account’s advertising agency, if the account has one, is referred to as direct selling. Often, direct selling, particularly in local media, entails calling on retail businesses. The information that follows is for calling on retail businesses, but it also applies to most direct selling.
The retail business
Retailers are the middlemen between manufacturers and consumers, and advertising plays an important role because retailers sell their goods in a highly competitive environment. Few businesses that start up survive; two out of every three new retail businesses will fail within one year. Changes in the nation’s demographics, lifestyles, and buying habits have caused many of the more traditional retailers to rethink their strategies, especially because of Amazon’s dominance in online shopping. Single‐brand loyalty has declined, and mass‐marketing techniques have been developed to accommodate the proliferation of new products. Consumer groups that used to share homogeneous tastes have now splintered into many groups, all demanding different products to meet their different and changing needs.
Amazon’s incredible growth, customer focus, ease of use, and fast home delivery policies have decimated large and small retail businesses, as have the proliferation of direct‐to‐consumer marketed products such as Harry’s shaving products, Quip toothbrushes, and Blue Apron’s meal kit service.
Retailers have had to change their ways of doing business to satisfy and attract consumers who are generally better educated, more cynical of product claims, and more demanding of quality. To entice these consumers, advertising and promotion have become more important than ever before, and most retailers now use digital advertising, especially search advertising on Google, to reach consumers who are looking for a product online because they are in the market to buy the product. When someone is in the market to buy a product, they are referred to as intenders. If retailers want to reach intenders, they will almost certainly buy self‐serve search advertising in a Google Ads auction.
If retailers want to buy demographically – for consumers who are in the precise targeted demographic – they will almost certainly buy ads on Facebook. Therefore, salespeople who sell for other media such as local radio, local television, or newspapers must be prepared to help their customers buy Google and Facebook ads and be able to show how their medium complements ads on these two giant online platforms.
Selling to retailers
Retail is a broad category for which there is no standard definition; stores (hard goods, soft goods, food), services (insurance companies, banks, dry cleaning), entertainment (theaters, clubs, bars), and restaurants all normally come under the general classification of retail. In this book, all types of retail establishments and sellers of services are referred to as stores. For example, those businesses that are results‐oriented should be designated as retail clients, or retail accounts, and have missionary salespeople calling on them. A retailer may have an advertising agency that buys according to the dictates of a store owner who cares only about results and who directs the agency to buy in a particular pattern that has proven to be successful in the past. These types of agency and direct accounts should be called on by a retail specialist. A retail specialist is a salesperson who thoroughly understands the retail business and who might have had experience working in retail.
A retail salesperson must be patient and not always seek a fast sale or a quick close. It may take much longer to sell to a retailer who is trying to fit advertising into a complex marketing and merchandising mix than to an advertising agency that is merely trying to make an efficient media buy.
Service selling
Service selling entails calling on existing customers and partners, and most often involves calling on advertising agencies.
The advertising agency business
Advertising
