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Journalism blog seeks stupidest sales team in Britain
At Love Media Sales
we're fairly non-partisan when it comes to departmental rivalry.
We love and respect our Editorial colleagues, and recognise that we need them just as they need us. So when FleetStreetBlues got a bit naughty and invited its contributors to "Shop your stupid sales team" we were quite relaxed about it. After all, it's healthy for people to be able to vent against their betters every now and again, and we know sales people can take the knocks.  It appears that FleetStreetBlues has had several complaints from journalists
forced to share open plan office space with their sales teams. "We've had
multiple outbreaks of bell-ringing every time an ad is sold" says the
article, and journalists from one newspaper complained of a "prize
giving" taking place on the sales floor every Friday - something that
seems to have shocked and surprised the writer. "Journalists across the
UK", we gather, "are facing an epidemic of intrusive inanity".I sympathise with journalists trying to stay focused amid the mayhem. I'm the first to wear a pair of headphones and a deep scowl when the office gets too noisy. Sharing an office with a sales team must be a nightmare for some people - especially the less experienced or highly strung who haven't learned to deal with it yet. The point about whooping and clapping whilst you are on the phone to "senior politicians or the recently bereaved" is well made (though politicians seem quite comfortable with rowdiness, and the recently bereaved might have preferred not to have had the call from a journalist in the first place). But our message to sales managers is this: Keep up the cheering, the clapping, the bell ringing and the prize giving. It may seem juvenile or stupid to others, but they're not being asked to pick up the phone 100 times a day knowing that in most cases the outcome will be rejection, and in some it will be outright hostility. A sales team will only succeed if they're projecting energy and positivity all day every day, despite what's thrown at them.  Sales is great career because we make it great. If we didn't work damned hard
at making it lively and fun, it would just be damned hard. At Love Media Sales our team
have an average of 12 years experience, but we still have our little rituals
when one of us makes a sale. It gives us all a buzz and keeps us hungry.
And as for the regional newspapers mentioned in the article, boy do those guys need every bit of ad revenue they can squeeze from the marketplace. People lose their livelihoods when newspapers, magazines and websites close, and ad revenue only needs to drop a little bit for that to be precisely the fate of thousands of people across hundreds of publications. Put your hands together, shake your maracas, hammer your desks and ring your bells for the media sales teams up and down Britain, who with raucus good humour are doing some seriously good work. Without them life for editorial teams would, indeed, be a lot quieter. |
