Valerie Salembier Delivers a Knock-Out Selling Punch

A big fan of the fight game, Valerie Salembier (pronounced sa-LOM-be-AY) has often drawn analogies between sparring in the ring and selling at a prospect’s office. Currently publisher of The New York Times Company’s Family Circle magazine, Salembier has advanced through the management ranks by successfully applying hard-earned selling lessons and management skills. She can be tough or gentle, understanding or demanding, critical or kind — it all depends on how the round is going.

In a career that took off like a shot and stumbled more than once, Salembier always kept one goal in mind –selling. Convinced that great sales would eventually land her a top executive spot, Salembier began her career in 1964 as a receptionist at Time Inc., taking one bus and two subways to get from her home in New Jersey to her New York City office. The job paid $80 a week and, although at the time she thought it was glamorous, she “kept asking for that next step.”

By accepting challenges that came along and looking for others, she worked her way up to merchandising manager for Life International, then looked for an advertising sales position but found that door closed to women. In 1991 that may seem like old news but a lot has changed in 20 years because of smart and determined saleswomen like Salembier who refused to give up. Moving to Newsweek as a merchandising copywriter, she convinced management that she could sell and became the magazine’s first female salesperson. A subsequent move to the fledgling Ms. magazine put her in charge of the advertising team — a complete revolution in the male dominated world of big-time, consumer magazine advertising sales.

The experience led to more responsibilities with other publishing firms until Salembier took her current position as publisher with Family Circle . In this exclusive interview conducted by PSP publisher Gerhard Gschwandtner at Salembier’s New York office, she shares lessons and experiences that shaped this super successful sales career.

Can you describe The New York Times Company’s corporate culture?

Salembier: It is incredibly supportive. It’s a culture that constantly encourages you to get your job done right. To perform, to produce — at all levels. This company takes care of its employees in a way that I have never seen before. So people want to work here. When a corporation treats its employees well the word gets out and the company benefits in dedicated performance and a reliable, well-trained workforce.

Tell me about Family Circle.

Salembier: It’s a magazine for the way women really live, not full of some glamorous out-of-reach ideals. It has a big staff — advertising, circulation, operations, manufacturing, and a big editorial staff — hundreds of people, literally.

How many are in advertising sales?

Salembier: Maybe 30. The circulation is five million. The cover price is $1.25 every three weeks and the total sales are equally divided between subscriptions and newsstand. A page of advertising costs $89,000. We’re the most efficient magazine in the field. Our total audience is 26 million people and three million of those are men. We have the biggest magazine circulation in the world for women. Of the 17 magazines that the New York Times Company owns and operates, Family Circle is the biggest.

Your fascination with boxing intrigues me. Where did you get this?

Salembier: My father was a fight fan. And when I was growing up I remember conversations about heavyweight fighters. They interested me. Now it is a real passion of mine but it is indefensible. When people say, “Oh, that is so disgusting. How can you even care about this? It’s so barbaric. ” I say, “Fine. ” They wouldn’t admit it, but boxing is elegant and beautiful.

Can you make an analogy between boxing and selling?

Salembier: Well, you are constantly jockeying for position. That’s clear. The objective, of course, is to win. But the real objective is a knockout — not a TKO. The same knockout, it can be said, is making a sale. Not being told that you might be on the schedule next year. That it’s going to take awhile to sell this account. What you want is to walk away with the order. So the goal is the same — a knockout. And how you get there is to be successful consistently. This does not apply for a fight here and a fight there. But boxers have to be in stellar condition. They have to be absolutely at the top of their games — physically. In sales, if you are not keeping track of your competition — it is so ferociously competitive in our field — if you are not at the top of your game, somebody is going to beat you. And you will not get what you want — the sale.

The analogy limps a little when you get the upper hand in boxing and you have the opportunity to deliver the knockout punch. Do you think the knockout punch is the close?

Salembier: You’re watching the fight and you see one opponent really beating another boxer. You look at the boxer and you think, “If this guy doesn’t go down, it’s going to be a miracle. “And then the guy being pummeled comes back with a knockout punch. So there are no sure things. None.

And sometimes when the prospect or customer makes the loudest noises about not buying, it’s the right time to really go for the close. Let’s say in a fight you have less weight than your opponent. Many times in selling you think that the opponent has more weight than you have. What do you do?

Salembier: It’s mental. When there is a mismatch — which happens from time to time, if not in weight, maybe in reach — that’s when you use your mental powers and your manipulation skills. Manipulation is not meant to be a bad word.

Your flexibility.

Salembier: Right. It’s called faking out your opponent. I remember being in Las Vegas at the Hagler-Leonard fight. Leonard was so obnoxious, I wanted to jump into the ring myself….. because he was so brilliant at psyching Hagler out. Hagler was, in my opinion, the better fighter and will always be. Nonetheless, Sugar Ray Leonard won that fight. It wasn’t a knockout punch that won it. He psyched Hagler out.

How did he psyche him out?

Salembier: Leonard just humiliated Hagler with wind ups and by rolling his eyes at him the way that boxers do. Muhammed Ali was famous for that. You’re in the middle of the ring and you’ve just delivered five jabs, and you turn your back on your opponent and walk away. Ali did all of that.

How can you do this in selling?

Salembier: Well, if you think your competitor has a better story than you do, therefore the mismatch, you go in with the biggest story that you have and it’s up to you. You make it larger than life. When times are bad — I certainly learned this at USA Today — when people say, “How’s business? ” you say, “Business is fabulous, it’s great, it’s never been better. ” If you tell enough people that enough times, they’ll start to believe you.

In tough times like these what do you tell your salespeople?

Salembier: Back to basics. The basics are person-to-person sales coverage and one of the areas that needed to be strengthened here were the basic selling skills. In fact, business has been so great over the past number of years, that there was too much attention paid to big deals. Let’s go sell five million dollar packages instead of the $250,000 schedule. So it is now back to basics which means more attention to our core business. Your bread and butter. Because in a tough competitive market when you start losing your core, the foundation begins to shake a little. It’s easy to get focused on a five million dollar deal but not in tough times. So, the emphasis now is back to Selling 101.

What are the top three basics of selling?

Salembier: One: more in-person sales calls — more activity. You don’t sell advertising pages sitting behind your desk. You sell them sitting in front of somebody else’s desk.

And you cut out the big-dream schemes.

Salembier: That’s right but not totally — if it’s appropriate, fine — but the days of the huge budgets are probably over. Two: basic selling skills. Follow-up letters, innovation. Innovation can be in the sales letter. Marketing partnerships. I’m not crazy about the buzz words we use these days, but they’re real. Any advertiser, any company can buy pages in your magazine, but what you want to offer is something that is going to be just a little bit beyond the selling schedule. Some kind of participation with the magazine. Some kind of program in the supermarket chain.

Extra value.

Salembier: Right. Three: enthusiasm, high energy, and the willingness to sacrifice, which is a very big part of success, in my opinion. That’s where boxing comes in. The ability to take the blows.

How do you get things done when you have so many people dependent on you and you have to do your own job as well?

Salembier: That’s always the biggest issue. I have not found a way to do this kind of job in a normal, eight-hour work day. Especially if you are in the midst of trying to change something or move business in a bad economy.

There are two jobs: one is structural, to create the structure of the future organization; the other is operational, to do the everyday business. How much time do you spend on structural activities and how much time on operational?

Salembier: I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time over the past four months on the structural side. The operational side, I am now up and running. I am making a lot of sales calls. I am really out there. It’s nice when the publisher of a magazine is talking to its clients and potential clients. And I depend on a computer. I couldn’t live without it.

What’s your management style?

Salembier: Most people would say I’m demanding, but fair and reasonable. I am willing to do the work myself. I am here at 9:00 at night and 6:30 in the morning writing sales letters.

What do you mean when you say, “I consider myself a professional manager “?

Salembier: A professional manager can really manage any business. You have to give your direct reports enough guidance. If you have the right people in the right jobs, it works. Give them ammunition and the guidance to get them to move the business forward. Whatever their part of the business is. So what you have is a frontline doing this. Some people will move out for three months and then move back. But then you’ve got your other frontline moving out. So you’ve got people operating…..it’s like one of those old player pianos where the keys go up and down at different times. But the goal is to drive people. It’s constant communication.

Do you send this by E-mail?

Salembier: Inter-office. I type it. I might do 100 of those a week. Moving the business forward.

When do you do your thinking and planning?

Salembier: Running around the reservoir in Central Park on average, three or four times a week. In the winter, three, and in the warmer weather, four. The goal is four loops around the reservoir which is 6.4 miles. Depending on time, I’d say I average 4.8, which is three loops. It’s very hard to think during the day when the phone is ringing and people are trying to see me or I’m out on appointments.

Are you very rigid about this? Very schedule oriented.

Salembier: Yes, because I hate being late. I think it’s obnoxious and bad form. Am I late for meetings? Of course, I’m late for meetings. But I always feel terrible and apologize profusely. If I’m late for a meeting, you know that something happened. I get angry when people are late.

How do you get other people to be the best they can be?

Salembier: By giving them total credit for their accomplishments.

You seem to give people independence and responsibility. How about accountability? How do you call them on the carpet when things don’t work?

Salembier: I expect the truth. I’ve made a good number of mistakes myself, so if something has gone wrong, don’t say, “I blew it. ” Don’t make me guess. Tell me straight out and then we can work on fixing it.

How do you define integrity?

Salembier: There’s only one way to define it — Family Circle is bigger than all of us. If you keep that in mind, you will do your job right — with integrity and honesty. The minute people begin to think that they are bigger than their jobs or they are bigger than the product that pays them their salary, that’s when people get into trouble. Always, time after time after time.

In more general terms, what is integrity to you?

Salembier: Honesty. A commitment, period. Commitment and loyalty go hand-in-hand. As an example, I had a boss whose boss would ask us how our boss was doing. It’s a technique that a certain type of manager uses and it’s bad form because it weakens your manager. That’s not loyalty. It weakens the foundation. It sends out a very bad message.

So you’d like things more predictable and more structured.

Salembier: I’m much more comfortable in a structured environment. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for everyone to be innovative and bring fresh ideas. I love that. But I also believe that you support your boss and your boss supports you.

Loyalty works both ways.

Salembier: You bet. Loyalty can’t go one way. It just doesn’t work.

What’s your definition of success compared with five years ago?

Salembier: The formula is the same but the achievement changes and that is whatever mission you have been hired into and that you have accepted. If you have achieved that goal. My boss said, “Here’s what we need. And we want you to be the person to do this. ” So I clearly know what they expect from me. And the people I hire know exactly what I expect from them. It’s like a marriage. You can be the best presenter, the best circulation guru, but if you don’t move your business forward, you have not been successful.

Okay, where does the passion fit in?

Salembier: It’s the willingness to sacrifice. Those things go hand-in-hand. Because in order to get there, whatever it is, you have to leave other things behind.

What about leadership? Do you see yourself as a leader?

Salembier: Most definitely.

What is the definition?

Salembier: I think great leaders not only achieve the goals of what they’ve signed on to but great leaders also make people feel wonderful about themselves in business, about what their accomplishments are and about how they have performed. If you let your ego get in the way of the shared success, you ultimately are not a good leader at all.

Does it make a difference whether a good leader has a big ego, or is it necessary to have a big ego to be a good leader?

Salembier: No, I think we all have big egos in these related businesses. But if you become egocentric and have to have all the success for yourself and not share it, you create a bad feeling all the way down the line.

I remember at Gannett, when we hit two million dollars in ad revenue in one week, the president of the company came up and we were having champagne and he said, “I want to personally thank Valerie Salembier for this enormous effort that she’s put forward. ” It makes you feel great about yourself and what you’ve done there. At a subsequent meeting, it was easy for me to say, “Little did he know, it ain’t me, folks. It’s all of us.”

How do you deal with self-doubt? Do you have this occasionally?

Salembier: You bet. But when I make a decision, I’ve learned to break it down and look at it from all sides. Break it down to its core. Ask, “Why did you do this? ” It’s like layers of an onion. Get to the core, peel it apart until you come up with the answer. And sometimes, the answer is it’s a mistake. We all make mistakes. And sometimes you’ll affirm that you made the right decision. But you have to know one way or the other or you have no basis for decision making which is at the root of all management.

I have the distinct feeling that you talk to yourself a lot.

Salembier: Endlessly. In getting to the issue there’s only one rule. I say it a thousand times a week. “How do you really feel about this? “

What can you do to avoid compounding problems?

Salembier: As you go through your business day focus on a lot of positive things. Otherwise, you can’t get up the next day. Today, I’m focused on the fact that we had some very good news. Just great news. And a lot of things are just starting to see some movement.

What motivates you?

Salembier: You can motivate people but in terms of personal motivation, you either are a person with drive and ambition or you’re not. And there’s nothing wrong with either. My parents were competitive athletes. Growing up in that environment, it touched me. I saw my mother, 365 days a year on the golf course. She would come home with, “Well, this one beat me. I out-putted that one. ” From my birth my father was New Jersey state table tennis champion. They were always engaged in competition and in winning. And you can’t be untouched by that. Let us not kid ourselves, I love earning the money. But it’s beyond that.

Any regrets?

Salembier: The only major regret I have is that I was not skilled enough to become a professional athlete.

Do you want to leave a legacy?

Salembier: The only legacy, I think, that is possible for me to leave is the same one my father left to me. As I said after he died, “I’m so lucky because my father’s legacy is this heart overflowing with love. ” It sounds very corny, but my father let me know that he really loved me.

How does love fit into this business?

Salembier: You’ve got to love it otherwise you couldn’t do it successfully.

How do you deal with sleaze in business — with the negative?

Salembier: You don’t forget about it, you confront it.

Have you ever made a decision to say no to a sale?

Salembier: Oh, sure.

Give me an example.

Salembier: Bad ads. There’s a point at which you walk away from a negotiating table. Also any kind of sleaze, if it’s going to interfere with how you feel about yourself, your business, your company, you address it. It helps a lot to say “no”

In your career, has it ever happened that somebody harassed you sexually?

Salembier: One would think that in a long career, I would have had my share of these. The truth is the only thing that ever happened to me was early in my career at a sales meeting in Puerto Rico. A man from a branch office was drunk and he grabbed me. People, for some reason, choose sales meetings to behave badly, when they have the highest degree of visibility with their management. It’s like a crazy mentality. This was pre-feminism — 1972 or ’73. He was just being incredibly horrible and, without thinking, I smacked him. I didn’t think, “Well, Valerie, the right thing to do here is…. ” I was so horrified I just couldn’t believe it. He ultimately got fired.

What was your biggest success ever?

Salembier: This sounds ridiculous. Two things are of equal importance and they are so crazy that it probably doesn’t make sense. The first time I ran eight miles — I couldn’t believe it. My second success was that precious, wonderful man I recently married.

What was your most memorable sale?

Salembier: McDonnel-Douglas when I was at Ms. magazine. To sell them an image campaign — six ads for six months at a time when they were running only in Business Week and Forbes — in Ms . magazine in 1977 was a huge accomplishment.