When you see a nice truck wrap around town, always snap a picture. - It gives you a great icebreaker and a reason to call/message: “Hey, I saw your truck, it looks great!…”. - You know they are investing money to promote their business. Always remember, “Advertisers advertise.”. Keep your eyes open out there!

If you’re selling local advertising and you expect to walk into a business, give your pitch, and hear “Where do I sign?” every time, you’re going to have a pretty miserable week. That’s not how local advertising sales usually works. A lot of perfectly good prospects are going to say things like: “Let me think about it.” “Send me some information.” “I need to talk to my partner.” “Maybe next month.” “We already spend a lot on advertising.” Or my personal favorite: “Yeah, I’m definitely interested. Call me next week.” Then next week comes. You call. Voicemail. Welcome to sales. Here’s the mistake a lot of people make. They assume silence means no. It doesn’t. Most of the time, silence means the business owner is running a business. The roofer you talked to might have three crews calling him because somebody ordered the wrong shingles. The restaurant owner might have an employee who didn’t show up. The chiropractor might have patients stacked up all afternoon. The HVAC guy might be standing in somebody’s basement when your text comes through. Your postcard is important to you. It is probably somewhere around #37 on their list of things they’re thinking about today. That is why follow-up matters so much. The Fortune Is Literally in the Follow-Up Let’s say you’re selling a 9x12 postcard going to 2,500 homes. You walk into a local landscaping company and show them the card. They like the idea. The owner asks a few questions. You explain that they can lock up the landscaping category so another landscaper isn’t sitting right next to them. The spot is $200. He says: “Looks interesting. Leave this with me and I’ll think about it.” A beginner hears: “No.” An experienced salesperson hears: “Not yet.” So you follow up two days later. “Hey Mike, just checking back on that neighborhood postcard I showed you. I still have the landscaping category open.” Maybe he doesn’t respond. You follow up again. “Mike, I’m finalizing the card this week. Wanted to give you first shot at landscaping before I offer it to somebody else.”

One thing I want to do with this Building in Public series is show you the actual offers I'm putting into the market, not just talk about City Games in theory. Right now I'm selling two very different promotions in Grand Rapids: The GRIT Games and Art in the City. They're useful examples because they show two very different ways a Town Publisher can package the same basic asset. The asset is the audience and the game. The offer is what changes. The GRIT Games The GRIT Games is my football-season promotion aimed primarily at local bars. The pitch is pretty simple: For $195 for the entire 18-week football season, a bar gets included in a football-themed City Games experience. I'm building an NFL-themed mini-game specifically for each participating bar, featuring them inside City Games, and making them a Venue of the Week twice during the season. I'm also including a $25 prize voucher from the bar. What I like about this offer is that it is ridiculously easy to understand. This is not: "Would you like to buy digital advertising?" It's: "Want your bar to be part of a football game people play all season?" That is a much more interesting conversation. And at $195, I'm deliberately keeping the initial commitment low. Could I charge more? Probably. But right now I care more about getting bars into the ecosystem, proving the concept, building relationships and creating something that looks much bigger once several venues are participating. If I get eight bars participating, suddenly I don't just have eight advertisers. I have a legitimate citywide football promotion. That distinction matters. Art in the City The second promotion is tied to ArtPrize, which is a huge annual art competition and festival here in Grand Rapids. For several weeks, artwork is installed all over downtown in galleries, restaurants, hotels, storefronts, public spaces and outdoor locations. Hundreds of thousands of people come downtown to explore the art, vote, attend events and generally wander around the city.

Here’s what nobody should lie to you about. ㅤ The hard part of the shared postcard business isn’t making the postcard. ㅤ Printing is easy. EDDM is learnable. Design can be outsourced. There are templates, printers, mailing services and tools that can handle almost every technical part of getting a postcard from your laptop into 5,000 mailboxes. ㅤ That stuff might seem intimidating when you’re starting, but it’s really just process. Do it once or twice and you’ll figure it out. ㅤ The hard part is getting somebody to give you money. ㅤ More specifically, getting a local business owner who doesn’t know you very well to look at your postcard, understand the opportunity and say: ㅤ “Yeah. I’ll give you $250 for that.” ㅤ That’s the business. ㅤ And strangely enough, that’s also the best news I can give you. ㅤ Stop Hiding Behind the Easy Stuff There is a very seductive form of procrastination that happens when you start a local advertising business. ㅤ You work on the logo. ㅤ Then you tweak the website. ㅤ Then you redesign your rate sheet. ㅤ Then you spend two hours comparing printers because one of them might save you eleven cents per postcard. ㅤ Then you decide your prospect spreadsheet needs another column. ㅤ Suddenly you’ve spent three weeks “working on the business” without asking a single human being to buy anything. ㅤ I understand why. ㅤ All that other stuff is comfortable. Nobody can reject you while you’re adjusting a Canva template. ㅤ Selling requires you to put the offer in front of somebody and let them make a decision. ㅤ That’s uncomfortable. ㅤ But if you want to become a Town Publisher, that is the skill you need to develop more than any other. ㅤ You Don’t Have a Postcard Problem. You Have a Sales Problem. Let’s say you create a shared postcard going to 5,000 homes. ㅤ You’ve got an advertising spot priced at $250. ㅤ Your job is now incredibly simple. ㅤ Find a local business that could benefit from reaching those 5,000 households and explain why spending $250 to do it makes sense.

Everybody wants a sales system that doesn’t require them to actually talk to anybody. They want the perfect cold email. The automated Facebook message. The magical funnel that brings local business owners running to them, credit card in hand, while they sit at home drinking coffee. And listen, I get it. That sounds great. Unfortunately, local advertising usually doesn’t work that way. At some point, you are probably going to have to pick up the phone, walk into the business, introduce yourself, and ask somebody to buy something. I know. Terrible news. But here’s the good news: almost nobody else wants to do it either. The “Easy” Sales Channels Are the Crowded Ones People talk about cold calling and door-to-door prospecting like they are horribly crowded, outdated sales methods. Are they really? When was the last time a local business owner had five different local publishers walk through the door in one afternoon? Probably never. Now ask that same owner how many emails, Facebook messages, texts, SEO pitches, website offers, and “quick questions” they received this week. Their inbox is a landfill. Half the messages start with some version of: “Hey, I came across your business and absolutely love what you’re doing…” No, you didn’t. You found them on Google three minutes ago and pasted their business name into the same message you sent to 75 other people. Business owners know this. They can smell a bulk message immediately. Cold email feels less crowded because you don’t have to witness yourself being ignored. You press send, close the laptop, and tell yourself you prospected. Technically, you did. But nobody talked to you. Call Reluctance Is Usually Procrastination Wearing a Nice Shirt Nobody likes rejection. I’ve been doing local advertising for 30 years, and I still don’t wake up excited about interrupting a stranger and asking for money. Anybody who claims they love every second of cold calling is either lying or a little strange. The goal is not to love it. The goal is to stop letting the discomfort run your business.