Every salesperson’s nightmare is not able to reply to an RFP from an advertiser or an agency on time to close the deal. If your sales team is not operating at a higher efficiency, it is not the salesperson that is holding you back from increasing sales, it is the systems and the processes that are used in the organization that is holding you back from growing your revenue.
If you are still wondering how you can increase your ad sales revenue, look around your physical or digital workspace. Let us start with your laptop, How many spreadsheets and documents do you have open to respond to an RFP?. How many Google Sheets and Google Docs, do you actively collaborate on? How many sticky notes do you have on your desk or a list of To-Dos on your list? How many emails did you mark as unread in your Inbox?
With the increasing complexity in the ad sales process, none of the above processes will not prevent you from selling more and increasing your revenue but will impact the velocity of selling — preventing from selling more, increasing your revenue, and enabling your team to efficiently work. The amount of work involved in managing and updating spreadsheets, looking up multiple Google Sheets to track down the details of your updated rate cards or exclusions, searching for handwritten notes and sorting through emails quickly adds up and impact your overall productivity and your ability to close the deal. With more time you’re spending doing admin work to support your sales, the less time you have for selling!
Let’s talk about how setting up the right process, providing the right tools can help publishers increase ad sales revenue.
Increase Ad Sales by Killing Spreadsheets
Spreadsheets are a very useful tool that helps organize things in a single place and also allows you to manipulate the data based on some conditions. But a spreadsheet is a generic tool that soon takes over different aspects of your business adding significant overhead to maintain and update them. Following are some of the spreadsheets managed by publishers:
- Sales spreadsheets
- Campaign operations spreadsheets
- Billing spreadsheets
- Product Catalog and Price Spreadsheets
- Client Issues Spreadsheet
- New products spreadsheet
- Seasonality pricing spreadsheet
As these spreadsheets grow, they become complex, clunkier, and harder to search and maintain. Worse yet, comparing data from one spreadsheet with another requires even more time and energy!
There are numerous reasons why an advertising management system matters for publishers, but the big win is that all the data resides in one place, easily accessible, searchable, and manageable with necessary controls to avoid any business disruption. Proper ad sales software enables you to achieve some of the following:
- Focus your resources on the products with the most value,
- Increase your ad sales team’s efficiency
- Reduce the RFP turnaround time and increase sales
- Improve and optimize your yield
Inbox Zero by Reducing your emails
Almost all the communication with the external group happens via email, however unfortunately teams carry that forward to the internal teams as to where they don’t have a single system to manage the advertising business. First, you have sales emails, proposals, media plan, and IO approvals are mixed with discounts and offers. Next, you have delivery emails with ad creatives requests, proofing approvals, and production schedules. Finally, you have invoicing emails and payment emails that involve sending invoices and processing payments.
Imagine if all of these emails are centralized in one place. As a publisher or manager, you will have the ability to configure the platform according to your business process and sales process from prospecting to invoicing and reconciliation. You would also be able to configure custom workflow approval processes and manage your entire product catalog including rate cards. And the only way you’ll get to this point is with a platform that’s built to take control of your ad sales process and help you run a profitable advertising business.
About Symmetriq
Symmetriq is an Omni Channel Revenue Management platform allowing you to unify inventory, manage quote to cash, and maximize revenue across OTT, Digital, Linear, and Print in a Single Cloud-Based SaaS Advertising Revenue Management platform. Symmetriq was born out of the need to provide tools, technologies, and platforms to enable media companies to manage and run a profitable advertising business. Our omni channel revenue management platform is built natively on the cloud with the latest web technologies with the scale being the primary driver without compromising on security and compliance which has become paramount in the current privacy-first world.
We help leading publishers across the globe manage their complex advertising business in a single platform enabling them to run a profitable media business. For any queries, please reach out to info@symmetriq.io.
