There is no doubt that the media sales industry is currently operating in one of the most dynamic environments of the 21st century. Media companies are challenged to manage more information than ever before due to ongoing digitization, the management of multiple media channels, and constantly evolving consumer demands. Therefore, keeping key data from across the business in a centralized location becomes critical for companies that want to stay ahead of the curve at all times.
Traditionally, media companies relied on a customer relationship management platform, such as Salesforce CRM, to merely manage their sales processes and data, but today’s media companies expect more from their CRM solutions. This is where the AppExchange from Salesforce becomes valuable. By offering a mix of both native and integrated applications that provide CRM enhancements specifically built for media ad sales, Salesforce AppExchange® allows publishers to maximize efficiency in their whole advertising processes through an all-in-one platform.
Salesforce for Media Sales
Salesforce strives to offer an integrated platform that provides all departments within an organization a single view of their customer base. What this ultimately means is that any media company can use this data and leverage artificial intelligence to personalize the customer experience, increase productivity through automation, and keep information secure within a trusted platform.
Companies of all types and sizes in the media sales industry have leveraged Salesforce to drive growth, improve overall efficiency, and significantly streamline their advertising sales management. For instance, NBCUniversal has reinvented its fan experience ahead of the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games by providing data-driven personalized content to its audience across multiple platforms. NBC Universal can now establish stronger engagement with fans by making it easier for them to follow their favorite events and athletes, while also allowing advertisers to control their storylines through the use of data collected from numerous touchpoints.
Salesforce Native App Benefits
Because Salesforce apps are built right on Force.com®, they offer an ideal way to create a unique media environment tailored to your business needs. Salesforce native apps are apps that are built within the Force.com® ecosystem and integrate completely with Salesforce. On the other hand, integrated applications are developed separately and have integrations that work with Salesforce.
Native apps are typically the most secure and robust, as they provide opportunities within Salesforce rather than capabilities that can be labelled as Salesforce-adjacent. This makes them the ideal choice for seamless operations. Thanks to their increased stability and enhanced capabilities, they offer numerous advantages that are hard to find elsewhere.
Below, we look at 7 key benefits of a Salesforce native app for media sales.
1. Unlimited access to Salesforce’s Core Capabilities
Salesforce’s CRM platform provides a lot more than basic customer relationship management functionality, as it allows you to keep track of millions of connections with just the click of a button. This is a valuable resource for most media companies, like FoxSports, for example, who were able to streamline their event production operations through a single source of event data.
Salesforce’s ability to offer simplified contact management at your fingertips is undoubtedly one of its key advantages. Account and contract management, visual workflows and approvals, sales data and forecasting, seamless file syncing, and intuitive dashboards for a holistic view of the entire business are just a few of its most popular integrated features that native apps can leverage by building additional customer-focused functionality on top of the foundation established by Salesforce.
2. Smooth User Experience
Native apps developed within the Lightning design system are able to use the same user interface (UI) as Salesforce. Because they are familiar and more efficient, they do not require adaptation to new user interfaces, which significantly reduces training time and costs while smoothing the organization’s transition into the new platform.
3. Building Trust Through Salesforce Security
Salesforce mitigates ever-present risks with some of the most complex security mechanisms in cloud computing, which is crucial for companies that manage key customer relationship data. Salesforce is also governed by extensive compliance certifications too, evidence of its adherence to the highest industry standards and protocols.
Because native apps are driven by Salesforce’s best practices as well as the rules and security configurations the user sets within the platform, the trustworthiness, stability, and security you get from Salesforce are incorporated directly into their solution. Hence, users can be confident that sensitive data is safeguarded when media data, such as advertising sales channels, is stored in a native application.
4. Upgrades in Real-Time
With three major seasonal updates a year, Salesforce automatically updates its platform for ongoing optimization and additional functionality. Native apps can also benefit from these releases as the shared platform automatically ensures full compatibility. When Salesforce is updated, native applications are also instantly updated, ensuring customers will always have the latest software at their disposal for maximum efficiency. This prevents media users from facing version control issues or temporarily inaccessible data due to potential integration issues that native apps eliminate.
5. Native App Integrations for Advanced Data Insights
Salesforce CRM provides real-time data at any time, either through CRM interfaces or custom dashboards. Native applications can extend data sets or provide business-specific dashboards. These intelligent data visualization and reporting capabilities deliver immediate actionable insights into a wide range of data, from accounts and advertising campaigns to revenue and sales rep performance.
Additionally, native applications can be used to extend the information that is already available, so that all relevant relationship management data, such as ongoing advertising deal negotiations, is easily accessed from any operating system or device.
6. Leading AI Technologies At Your Fingertips
As customer expectations grow, organizations need to innovate with best-in-class technology to meet the evolving consumer demands. Salesforce is well aware of this challenge and, as a result, is leading the fourth industrial revolution with its artificial intelligence engine, Einstein, and Salesforce IoT.
Salesforce Einstein Analytics offers media companies the opportunity to significantly reduce the time spent on repetitive ad sales processes through intelligent automation. Einstein Analytics has already proven beneficial for many publishers, helping them to significantly streamline campaign planning by being able to quickly process consumer behavioural data and provide actionable insights for relevant ad content creation. Einstein is a native Salesforce feature that enables you to optimize all of your cross-organizational data to promote collaboration and transparency across all business divisions. Implementing intelligent data analytics in your organization allows you to improve processes such as targeted advertising, customer acquisition, media scheduling, and audience prediction.
7. Benefit From a Single End-to-End Platform
360-degree visibility into customer data and interactions is critical to delivering the personalized and seamless experience customers expect. As an application that effectively lives within Salesforce rather than operating in parallel, native apps can effectively help achieve these goals. Since native apps do not require a separate access point, they can give 360-degree insight into all client data and interactions from a single, end-to-end platform.
With native applications that extend Salesforce’s core capabilities, media companies can house all of the important information related to advertising and customer relationships while incorporating valuable details from ad servers and ad exchanges, bypassing the challenges of using disconnected systems.
Ultimately, with all data and functionality easily available in one place, customers have access to the single platform they need to stay competitive by significantly reducing the time and cost of operational processes across all departments, increasing the accuracy of tracking insights, and improving the overall customer experience.
Conclusion
When considering the current pace of digitalization combined with challenges such as consumer demand for real-time responses from media companies, it is clear that the ad sales industry demands innovative tools to keep up with the latest media trends. Fortunately, with the right improvements, any media company may overcome these ad sales management challenges while remaining competitive in the industry.
For media companies looking to improve communication with customers and build long-term relationships, investing in a powerful and widely recognized CRM system with world-class capabilities opens a wide range of opportunities. Salesforce, in particular, is designed to help companies stay ahead of the digital curve. Native media-specific applications, such as ADvendio, offer solutions that leverage Salesforce’s advanced media advertising sales capabilities by allowing media companies to gain better insights through comprehensive analytics, streamlined end-to-end ad sales management, and transparent ad sales relationships.
