Like a customer management relationship system manages sales from lead to close, an advertising sales CRM helps publishers, advertiser owners and resellers better manage their ad campaigns from inventory and sales to ad operations and billing.
Having all of your information in a single system like this allows you to pull advanced analytics about your ad sales. How many banners did we sell? How many impressions did they receive? What kind of revenue did those bring for us? With ADvendio, all of that data is connected and available for all types of reporting and forecasting. But the benefits extend beyond that. Here are some important ways an advertising sales CRM improves your ad sales management process.
4 Ways an Advertising Sales CRM Simplifies Your Process
1. Manages your inventory
Digging through hundreds of pages of Excel spreadsheets is frustrating, especially if your ad operations people are the only ones who can edit them. In that case, you’re wasting a lot of time sending an email to ad ops and waiting for them to check the system then email you with what’s available. Creating highly targeted campaigns using spreadsheets quickly becomes too complicated. And what happens if someone breaks the formulas in your spreadsheets? You can’t do your job.
With an advertising sales CRM like ADvendio, you can easily view inventory and availability in real time. If you want to reserve certain ad spaces for a sales opportunity you’re working, the CRM will show that space as tentatively booked. You can then book it directly from your ad server once you have confirmation. Looking to target men over 40 who live in New York with an ad no more than once an hour? No problem. The system also allows you to get as granular as you’d like and automatically fetches available dates from the ad server. You can even view your full inventory in a calendar format.
2. Provides cross-media support for proposals and invoices
One of the most complicated parts of advertising sales is not being able to combine online and offline ad products into a single proposal. This slows down the order generation process. But the media database structure within an advertising sales CRM is designed to support all kinds of inventory, regardless of the channel or medium: print, TV, digital, video, mobile, out-of-home and more are supported simultaneously through cross-media campaigns.
Billing can also be difficult. If you sell a banner ad for a media campaign that runs from mid-September to mid-October, you have to split the invoice between those two months. It gets even more complicated if you, for example, start the campaign on the third of September and end it on the eighth of October. Then you have to calculate each campaign’s value on a daily basis. But an advertising sales CRM does all of this work for you in the background. It calculates the linear split of each product’s daily value, but also fetches important data from the server like impressions and clicks. Want to know how much of your sales have been discounted? ADvendio recently added a new formula field to media campaign items that calculates the percentage net “discounted” prices versus gross “base price.”
3. Automatically pushes information to an ad server
Speaking of connecting directly to an ad server, an advertising sales CRM does that, too! The typical ad sales process requires the sales rep to manually enter for orders and then send it over to an ad ops person, who has to manually enter the data again to push it out to an ad server. Double data entry is not a good use of your team’s time, and it creates room for potential errors.
A system like ADvendio integrates directly with ad servers, including ADTECH and DoubleClick for Publishers, with an API. Removing the need for double data entry saves a lot of time for you ad operations team. All the important information from an order is sent directly to the server, but the campaign won’t go live until someone from ad ops approves it.
4. Enables true campaign performance visibility
A major pain point for ad sales reps is losing visibility into the campaigns they’ve sold. This prevents reps from both updating customers on what’s happening with their campaigns and optimizing them to improve performance. But a system like ADvendio allows a salesperson to easily pull the clicks and impressions from the ad server if a customer calls them up to find out what’s happening with their campaign.
ADvendio’s new Publisher Payout feature provides details of delivery data and can pull DFP Clicks, Impression by Device Category or Country, as well as a breakdown by each AdUnit. Last but not least you can now also import the vast completion rate if you using the video module from DFP. Much more date for much more transparency and a better campaign reporting.
Reps can even set up alerts to be notified if and when a campaign is not delivering. ADvendio also allows you to implement your own permission rights in the event that you don’t want to share that data with the sales team. In addition, reps can get enhanced reporting by connecting ADvendio media campaigns to opportunities in Salesforce®.
These are the most prominent ways that an advertising sales CRM improves the way you do business. Want to learn more? Get a demo of ADvendio today.
