“If you sell one more advert you can have a go at the penalty shoot out!” yelled the advertising manager to her team of sales reps dressed in football kits.

This would not have been the scene in the newspaper sales offices 150 years ago, when the Surrey Comet was first launched.

But these days sales reps find themselves in such a high-pressured environment it is important to keep things fun, according to today’s sales manager Katharine Glass.

To motivate staff, she makes sure there are fun days with different themes. While the team were selling adverts for a special Euro 2004 supplement, they were encouraged to come to work dressed up in football kits.

For every advert sold, they could take a penalty shoot out and the winner at the end of the day got a prize.

Katharine said: “Being in sales is a demanding job. There are lots of deadlines and targets to meet and there is a tremendous amount of pressure.

“At the end of the day you have to raise a certain amount of revenue. People are hired for their ability to make money and they are rewarded with monthly bonuses. But we need to relieve that pressure sometimes and having theme days is the perfect way to do it.”

The sales team, which also sells adverts into the South London Guardian series, includes 48 people who take care of classified adverts, and 25 who are in field sales.

Those that work with classified take down adverts over the telephone and send them to design and production, who work out how the advert will appear on the page.

Field sales reps go out to meet clients and sell adverts face to face. They need to discuss ideas with customers and take briefs from them back to the designers.

Katharine said: “Because more people have desktop publishing now they tend to come to us with their own adverts already laid out.

“But we also have a design studio for those that don’t have the technology. We lay the advert out, with any artwork the client wants to include, and show it to them before it goes in the paper.”

Field sales reps will be out of the office about 70 per cent of their time, meeting clients. Katharine said the jobs tend to attract different types of people. Reps who make more of their personality face to face take field sales opportunities and those with a good telephone manner go for classified jobs.

The team has to work to strict deadlines, which are usually 48 hours before the paper is published. The adverts are placed on the pages first and articles are set around them.

One of the biggest changes to sales is the variety of choice our reps can now offer customers who want to advertise.

With free and paid-for papers covering the area, advertisers can be sure they will target all types of people.

Readers who buy a paper are less likely to read free newspapers and vice versa so with the right package, advertisers can make sure they reach all audiences.

Reps can also offer space on the internet, because each newspaper in the Surrey Comet series has its own website.

Katharine said: “This means there is more work for sales reps, because choices are far greater now. We have so many different titles, as well as the websites, that it makes the job even more exciting.

“We sell a lot of digital media online. It’s an area that keeps growing, because so many people use the internet now.”

With so many adverts out there, it is even more important that the team’s designs stand out and are eye-catching.

When the Surrey Comet launched, advertisers would have been restricted to black and white. But now the paper is almost all in colour.
Katharine said: “We have an even harder job now because adverts have to compete for attention, simply because there are so many of them.

“Someone reading the paper isn’t necessarily going to be looking for adverts so we have to think carefully how to draw their eyes to our ads.”

One of the ways the team does this is through advertorials – adverts which are written in the style of an article.

The message is more subliminal than big, bold adverts and is often used for clients who want to lend credence to their product or service.

“The whole point of an advert is to persuade someone to buy the product,” said Katharine. “They may not have thought they wanted or needed it when they started reading, but if they do by the end, we’ve done our job.”