By Mark Hanzlik, Executive Director

Near the end of our recent sales webinar, Sarah Billingsley, AWN Communications Director introduced the idea of initiating a national ad seller incentive.  The AWN Board of Directors voted to approve this new sales incentive program effective immediately.

In Sarah’s words, the pitch for the program went something like this:

AWN recognizes the act of selling national advertising is a marathon, not a sprint, and sometimes it’s hard to see the finish line.   When one gets there, it’s natural to seek a return on the investment of time and effort.   Therefore, we are excited to offer AWN’s first sales incentive to be paid directly to the national advertising salespersons as a result of ad buys sold into AWN network publications.

The sales incentive, in the form of a cash bonus, will be paid to AWN sellers based on new sales sold into the network based on several sales levels and corresponding cash bonuses.    A new sale qualifies if the advertiser has run in any AWN publication other than the salesperson’s publication.   Also, a new sales qualifies if the advertiser has not run during the past 9 months.   There’s a real incentive for bringing back previous advertisers who are familiar with alternative weekly advertising products.

More details of the program are available upon request.

Let’s be clear, this program would pay an individual directly a bonus, not the publication or publisher that he/she works for.?    We had not attempted to launch an incentive program like this previously because some publishers weren’t supportive of the idea for non-local ad sales, particularly because of employment sales objective conflicts.    I’m assuming the loss of national print ad revenue which has been substantial over the past few years has finally out-weighed the downsides of such a program.   Another idea on the table is to institute some sales incentive contests with exciting prizes and other rewards.    We’ll evaluate the progress of the new sales incentives and report back to the group regularly.

On a separate but somewhat related note, network sales for the first two months of the year have been very slow.  I’m not going to make any assumptions about the remainder of the year

yet, but clearly the first quarter is not going as well as expected.

After the first quarter has ended,  I’ll share with you the sales and revenue results from that period and the corresponding comparison periods that will allow us to get a better perspective on AWN’s financial picture.  ?In the meantime, we are moving forward with as much energy and enthusiasm as we can muster to get sales moving through the network, and we believe the best way to accomplish that is by re-energizing the cooperative sales force that seems to have vanished.

All hands on deck!