Week 3 - Sales

This week was the beginning of our group rotations - which mine was sales to start with. On Monday we met as a group with Paul and went over a powerpoint presentation in regards to their sales approaches, tactics and techniques and how to understand the needs of your client and sway your conversation to meet their specific needs. At the end of our meeting, Paul said he wanted to team us up with some of the sales people so we could shadow them and see what a day in the life of a sales team member was like.

Today was the day I went to shadow the sales team and it was nothing like I expected, in fact, it was far more appealing and fun than I ever would have thought! I figured we would be sitting in the office or listening to our mentor make sales calls all day long; however, I was pleasantly surprised when the account manager Jeff Rankin said we would be going with him down to Little Italy for the afternoon. The purpose of our adventure was to pass out flyers to businesses (mainly restaurants and other small businesses) in hopes of encouraging them to purchase Advertising space in the UT for the upcoming Art Walk that is taking place in Little Italy in April. They wanted to target the local Little Italy local businesses as the Art Walk is expected to bring in a good amount of people and they are hoping that many of the surrounding businesses will want to advertise and get the word out about their company or restaurant so tourists and attendees will drive in attendance and revenue for them. Anchal and I were assigned to shadow and walk around with new account manager, Brooke Lindsay. We talked to managers and some employees about the great offer UT is offering for this advertising space and all of the businesses we visited were very receptive to the idea and said they would definitely look over it and contact Jeff if interested. Anchal, Brooke and I mostly passed these flyers out to restaurants along India Street. We then had lunch as a team with Jeff, Emily and Kevin (another sales representative who deals with much of the online media). After lunch, Anchal Emily and I were left with Kevin where we discussed "Sales 101" as Kevin called it. He gave us helpful advice and tips on sales and assured us that it's okay if we weren't sure exactly what we wanted to do after college. He also answered questions we all had about interviewing, resumes, cover letters, etc. He was very insightful in terms of both the UT and just professional work life in general.

All in all, I feel that we learned a lot from meeting with all the Sales account managers today and we were able to get an idea of the work they do with their "territorial clients" in terms of selling ad space in the newspaper and for the online banner they run on the UT website as well. I'm excited to continue in sales and see where it takes us next week!

-Sarah