Neil Bell on Selling Out of Home

New South Outdoor’s Neil Bell had quite a bit to say about selling out of home on yesterday’s Billboard Insider podcast.  Here’s a selection of his comments.

Neil Bell, Owner, New South Outdoor

How to sell billboard advertising.

One thing we always have to remember in this business is our success is tied to our customer’s success.  If the campaign doesn’t work they’re not going to renew…We have to do everything we can to help market their business…One thing I learned early on in pitching customers was that ideas and art sell…Hey, what if we run a promotion for this…Copy will help sell things…It’s a visual medium that we’re working with…It we can come in there with an idea on paper – look at how your business is going to be seen in the community – that to me is always sold…

But don’t you need to ask good questions first to come up with good creative?

Tommy Teepel was very influential to me and the training at Lamar…How can we pitch stuff without knowing all about a business?…You have to peel the onion and ask all those questions…

  • What motivates this customer?
  • What are they trying to accomplish?
  • What are their competitors doing?
  • What other promotions have they done that worked or didn’t work?

Ask all these things so that you can do in their and propose something that fits their needs…

What is the out of home sale you’re the proudest of?

There’s a bunch of them.  One in particular – I had a check cashing place.  This is one of the first people I ever sold.  When I got in the business I was 22…I hadn’t every seen a customer have success with it.  I called on this check cashing place for two months.  Every two weeks I’d go in there…finally he decided to do a little poster showing with me.  I came in 2 or 3 weeks after the posters went up and he wanted to buy another 1 or 2.  He said, “I’m having all this success.”  After that I was able to sell outdoor so much better because I had seen results…Another that I can think of since digital has been out…I’d never had real estate on any of my boards.  I was able to go to a broker and say, look you’ve got all these listings, we can change these things on a regular basis…the realtor said we didn’t sell that many more houses, but we picked up so many more listings.  The reason was when a homeowner sees a realtor is going outside the box to sell their house on a busy road on a billboard they say I want that realtor to represent me…I’ve had a lot more success with realtors.

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