Looking beyond economic conditions, sales managers cited staff concerns – not competitive pressures – as their biggest challenge in reaching 2010 goals. Fifty-one percent of managers cited “motivating salespeople outside their comfort zone” as their biggest challenge.

Sales Manager Challenges

Advertising account executives continue to view competition from other media in their market as their greatest challenge. Unfortunately, the number citing the challenge of internal processes and too many meetings is up over last year, and corporate budget cutting concerns remain unchanged.

While all media types are challenged by other media competition, television sales people are most likely to cite internal processes as a challenge, and newspaper AEs are most likely to be challenged by corporate budget cutting.

Account Executive Challenges

The AdMall Local Advertising Sales Outlook was conducted December 7 – 19, 2009. The sample size for this survey was 1,180 AdMall clients across the United States, including 203 advertising sales managers and 712 account executives.