David Dunn-Rankin
David Dunn-Rankin | D-R Media
Most of us want to take home two or three solid ideas we can put to work immediately. Here’s your opportunity to get more than two or three solid ideas.
It’s David Dunn-Rankin here. I have been asked to run the print revenue idea roundtable at this year’s Mega-Conference. There are four sessions of 20 minutes each. We can’t hear all the ideas from all the participants from all four sessions because most of us will want to attend other sessions. This means you might potentially miss out on great ideas to go home with.
Here’s my suggestion. There are more than 150 newspaper people attending this conference. I am asking each one of you to email me ahead of time and bring to the roundtable just one good idea for print advertising to share.
If you do the homework, and send me your idea ahead of time, I will include you with ALL the great revenue ideas we get, whether you attend the roundtable session or not. If you don’t send me the print revenue idea ahead of time, you miss out on the compilation of the best print revenue ideas from the best minds in the business. Make sure I send you a confirmation email that I received your great print revenue idea.
This year we are going to do something a little different. I am asking that we not share special sections, events, etc. that are shiny new toys and which we hear about at every conference.
I am asking that you contribute one good idea that is related to the basics of increasing print revenue, AND which you have used for more than 90 days, AND which you are confident you can demonstrate increases in print revenue from.
Here are some examples: Territory management, compensation changes, recruitment of new salespeople, reducing churn of salespeople, sales training, how you onboard, incentives, quantity of salespeople or types of verticals that are working, adding sales assistants or creating pods. Using direct mail or email or newsletters to create print advertising leads. Growth in obituaries, help wanted, directories.
To make this easy for all 150 newspaper attendees to follow along, I am suggesting the following format:
- The Problem
- The Solution
- Why — based on revenue — you think it works
- Contact information for your peers
Here is what I am submitting for mine:
The Problem: During COVID I was a bad leader. Grumpy. My attitude with salespeople was I don’t care if your prospects or clients are suffering — get your butt out there and sell something — now. That attitude was not very helpful for team morale or driving new revenue.
The Solution: We created a President’s Club and sales trip for anyone who was up $25,000 in revenue in 2021 over 2020. It was not expensive. It cost us $1,500 per person and they could bring a guest. We all drove to Charleston for a long weekend where the company paid mileage, hotel rooms and fancy dinners. This allowed me to say to a rep, “You are a winner — you are going to Charleston with us this year — aren’t you?” The extended conversation about how to get my “winner” to Charleston covered the same ground as before: “Why aren’t you getting out and calling on new prospects” but in a positive way, plus it created peer pressure even for the highest and lowest volume reps not to be left out of the club.
Why I think it helped: We rallied to be solidly up over 2020 in print advertising dollars, even with the loss of additional preprints. So far in 2022 we are up strongly over 2021 in print-only advertising dollars and are chasing down 2019 total print advertising revenue as our goal to beat in 2022.
Contact Info:
