Carrier sales: Incentives for long-term orders

The carrier sales channel is seeing resurgence in recent years. Carrier sales were once a main part of the circulation mix. When telemarketing became dominant, and when adult carriers took over much of the distribution, carrier sales decreased as a ratio of the overall mix.

You can expect that to change in the years to come. Why? Because who better than carriers to have the incentive and actionable information with which to sell!

But the game has changed. In days gone by when we had a largely youth carrier force, we could motivate youngsters with trips to theme parks, prizes, etc. Those tactics still are effective with youth carriers today. But many newspapers use a largely adult carrier force. How can these carriers be expected to sell? After all, many of these people take on the role of being a carrier because of the hours. They do it because they can deliver papers early in the day and then go on to their family or their other job and be done with that responsibility. They are not particularly interested in investing additional hours on sales.

So the strategy is to combine adult carrier sales with other tactics such as sampling.  If you can motivate a carrier by telling them how much their profits will increase if their route increases, they will listen.  After all, they may be passing houses now everyday where they could drop a paper and increase their profit. So the newspaper company has to provide these adult carriers with the tools to sell, tools that don’t require much additional time on the part of the carrier.

This can include sampling with a response flier that urges customers to either call the office, or call the carrier. The carrier’s role, then, is to deliver the samples to the houses where there is a likelihood of a sale. Carriers may know which houses are worthy of the sampling effort. They have a level of route intelligence unmatched by any database programming you could set up. So have the carrier sample the route with a freestanding insert as a response mechanism.

It is important that you urge your carriers not to make unsolicited phone calls to people on their routes. This could violate terms of the federal telemarketing restrictions. So it must be done by means of mail, sampling, door hangers, etc.

It’s also possible to recruit sales reps among adult carriers who may have children of the right age to sell on their route. They may have sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, friends, who would be interested in earning extra money by either sampling or going door to door to increase route sales.

The other key point about carrier sales, whether they are done by adults, youth carriers or children of adult carriers, is that you get what you pay for so pay for what you want. That means not allowing carriers to sell short term “bill me” orders. Instead, raise the minimum standard of a new order to what you really want. This means perhaps a three to six-month EZ Pay order, for example. Carrier sales can have high retention because of the human contact that was involved at the point of sale. If you get the relationship started on the right track, you can significantly increase the output of your carrier sales channel using the techniques.