CRM meet ABM – Best Practices for Integrating your Sales Management and Ad Business Management Systems
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
1 like•933 views
Operative and Alloy Digital’s Director of Ad Ops, Michael Goefron, illustrate why a CRM system is not enough when it comes to managing your advertising business. This deck shares Michael’s experience integrating a CRM solution, Salesforce.com, with an ad business management system. He reviews why Alloy decided to integrate versus customization of the CRM, what the vendor selection process was like, and what benefits they will achieve through the CRM and ABM integration.
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Featured
Featured (20)
CRM meet ABM – Best Practices for Integrating your Sales Management and Ad Business Management Systems
- 1. CRM Meets ABM: Best Practices for Integrating Your Sales Management & Ad Business Management Systems 10.20.2011 Michael Goefron, Senior Director, Ad Operations, Alloy Digital Geoff Petkus, Senior Director of Product Management, Operative
- 2. © Alloy Media + Marketing, Confidential and Proprietary. All Rights Reserved. AGENDA • Challenges We Were Facing • Our Approach to Solving Them • Why CRM + ABM Made Long-Term Business Sense • Q&A
- 3. © Alloy Media + Marketing, Confidential and Proprietary. All Rights Reserved. What Do We Mean by CRM and ABM?
- 4. © Alloy Media + Marketing, Confidential and Proprietary. All Rights Reserved. We Didn’t Know Our Right From Left – AKA, Pain 1.0 • Everyone was working off multiple systems • There was no way to share information • Hard to develop and access key data to make business decisions
- 5. © Alloy Media + Marketing, Confidential and Proprietary. All Rights Reserved. Our Initial Solution for Pain 1.0
- 6. © Alloy Media + Marketing, Confidential and Proprietary. All Rights Reserved. Pain 2.0: CRM Can’t Solve All Our Problems Issues CRM Solved Issues We Still Faced Product/ Inventory • Ability to create products • Unable to standardize products so that it’s easier to manage inventory • Unable to keep track of reservations Sales • Track prospect and customer information • Track opportunities • Unable to show sales team accurate avails • Unable to provide rules and discipline around product inventory Ad Ops • First unified workflow • Unable to push campaigns to ad server(s) Finance • First unified workflow • Unable to determine what to bill for
- 7. © Alloy Media + Marketing, Confidential and Proprietary. All Rights Reserved. What We Needed All Along: A True End-to-End Platform • One place for all to work from • Easier access to information • Less paperwork • Less chance of discrepancies & errors • Ability to analyze data easier • Clean-up of workflow procedures • Easier way to integrate with our systems
- 8. © Alloy Media + Marketing, Confidential and Proprietary. All Rights Reserved. A CRM+ABM Integration Made Most Sense • One system that rules all • Updated shared information • Linear progress of a business function from start to finish • Easy access to data • Discrepancies reduced between systems • More bandwidth to analyze data • All of the above improved, consistent experience for the client
- 9. © Alloy Media + Marketing, Confidential and Proprietary. All Rights Reserved. The Solution: Operative.One • End-to-end (full lifecycle) Ad Business Management Platform • Able to access available inventory in real-time • Able to build RFPs quicker • Able to put controls in place for Sales • Able to push campaigns direct to ad server(s) • Able to bill accurately and in less time
- 10. © Alloy Media + Marketing, Confidential and Proprietary. All Rights Reserved. ABM – One Process. One Data Set.
- 11. © Alloy Media + Marketing, Confidential and Proprietary. All Rights Reserved. Leveraging the CRM Strengths
- 12. © Alloy Media + Marketing, Confidential and Proprietary. All Rights Reserved. ABM Seamlessly Continues the Workflow
- 13. © Alloy Media + Marketing, Confidential and Proprietary. All Rights Reserved. Revenue Schedule Integration
- 14. © Alloy Media + Marketing, Confidential and Proprietary. All Rights Reserved. Looking Back…Lessons Learned 1. Need to look at the BIG PICTURE • Be clear on long-term strategic goals and objectives and make sure your vendor(s) can deliver • Establish success criteria 2. Need a strong implementation team • Analyze and commit team resources • Garner executive sponsorship throughout the project • Non-stop training, training, training
- 15. © Alloy Media + Marketing, Confidential and Proprietary. All Rights Reserved. Conclusion • Data continues to grow as a revenue generator • Digital platforms will continue to multiply and diversify • Workflow process will become more important • The need for personnel with highly specialized skill-sets dealing with data analytics and operations will grow in demand • Need the right infrastructure to support current and future needs
- 16. © Alloy Media + Marketing, Confidential and Proprietary. All Rights Reserved. Q&A Questions?
- 17. © Alloy Media + Marketing, Confidential and Proprietary. All Rights Reserved. Thank You Michael Goefron Senior Director, Ad Operations, Alloy Digital Michael.Goefron@alloydigital.com Geoff Petkus Senior Director of Product Management, Operative gpetkus@operative.com
Editor's Notes
- 1 minute Hi Everyone. I am Geoff Petkus, Senior Director of Product Management for Operative. I’d like to first thank everyone for joining our webinar today entitled “CRM meet ABM. Best Practices for Integrating your Customer Relationship Management and Ad Business Management systems”, featuring Michael Goefron, senior director of Ad Ops with Alloy Digital. Alloy Digital Network reaches over 60 million young consumers every month through its network of premium, highly trafficked and monitored. websites. At Alloy, Michael oversees the Ops Team, which covers ad serving as well as revenue management, new technology platforms and inventory controls. He works closely with sales, account management, finance, editorial, marketing and creative production to build and maintain a high-performing advertising ecosystem. Michael has been working in digital advertising since 1997 and was one of the first users of a new ad serving system launching that year called Doubleclick DART. He has worked with some of the largest media companies in the industry including MTV Networks, Rodale, Conde Nast and the advertising agency, OMD. Before I had the call over to Michael, a few housekeeping items. If you would like to ask a question, please type your question into the question box and we will try our best to respond to each at the end of the presentation. If you would like to ask us a question off-line, we have included our email addresses at the end of the presentation. Please do not type questions into the chat box. OK, with that, I’d like to hand the call over to our guest speaker, Michael Goefron - Michael
- 1 minute Welcome everyone. On today’s presentation, we will be discussing considerations and best practices for selecting and then implementing an integrated CRM and Ad Business Management solution. To do so, I think it would be helpful to walk you through some of the challenges we were facing at Alloy, what our approach to solving them was and why we ultimately decided that an integrated solution made long-term business sense for us. We’ll wrap up the presentation with a Q&A session.
- 5 minutes. To begin, I think it would be helpful to define what we mean by CRM and ABM. I’m sure all of you are familiar with CRM - Customer Relationship Management It’s technology used to interact with an organization’s customers, clients, and sales force. Really focused on sales opportunity management and customer relationship management. Not great for product inventory management, pushing campaigns to the ad server, billing for campaigns, etc. But ABM, or Ad Business Management, may be a new term for some of you. ABM is a platform that integrates different technologies (e.g., ad serving, revenue management, sales recognition, billing, inventory management and analytics) into one system and supports the full life-cycle of an advertising business. It provides one holistic view of the business, a very powerful proposition in today’s highly fragmented digital advertising market.
- 3 minutes So what were some of the challenges we were facing at Alloy? To begin, I’d like to take you back to where we were pre-CRM, which I also refer to as PAIN 1.0 Impact from pains: Lack of easy access to data Took longer to do business had to collect information from multiple sources to get data Tasks of chasing information became a distracting part of day-to-day responsibilities prevented staff from strategic thinking/responsibilities and adding real value Uninformed decision making (from disrepancies in reports from different people/systems) Providing inconsistent experience for customer
- 3 minutes Our initital solution for these pains was a CRM solution, and specifically Salesforce. We selected Salesforce because… Leader in front-end Sales management Ease of use Robust reporting functionality Flexible customization But…. We soon came to realize we had greater pains that needed to be solved for, and the CRM was limited in their ability to solve them.
- 5 minutes So we implemented Salesforce and then entered Pain 2.0. For all of it’s glory, we quickly learned our CRM – Salesforce – could not solve all of our business problems. For example… On the Product/Inventory side of the business – We were Unable to standardize products so that it’s easier to manage inventory. Unable to keep track of reservations. In Sales – Unable to provide rules and create discipline around product inventory for our sales team and show accurate avails. In Ad Ops – Unable to push campaigns to ad server(s). Now that we got campaigns in…how do we get it through the rest of the workflow? In Finance – Unable to determine what to bill for. Elaborate on some of the pains that still existed upon implementing the CRM – what turned into Pain 2.0 We kept trying to customize SFDC, but found that all the customization still couldn’t meet all our needs….
- 3 minutes. We learned from these pains, both Pain 1.0 (pre CRM) and Pain 2.0 (post CRM and CRM customization) that we needed a solution that could provide a broader, more holistic view of our business. Walk through bullets above.
- 5 minutes. So what we decided to do was to instigate discussions to optimize entire workflow cross-functionally; force to eliminate resourcing redundancies/inefficiencies; use specific examples for diff depts--allowed ppl to focus on what their core responsibilities should be And we defined what our CRM Role would be Marketing Front-end Sales management Account Management Customer Support management The decided we needed an ABM and what’s it role would be ABM Role End-to-end workflow Central hub for tech integration and data Finance & billing Partner management Reporting & data analysis (help performance data to identify/drive marketing/upsell decisions)
- 3 minutes The solution for Pain 2.0, was Operative.One. After evaluating vendors, it was the only ABM that provided a full, end-to-end view of the business. Operative.One would also provide and arm the sales team with available inventory, in real-time, putting much needed controls around what was available and could be sold by the team. It would also enable them to build their RFPs quicker (elaborate) In addition, the ABM platform integrates with various ad servers enabling campaigns to be pushed direct from within the system, and eliminating the need to manually re-key/enter data in numerous spreadsheets. And lastly, the platform provides a billing solution that enables finance teams to bill with higher accuracy rates, and in less time.
- 3 minutes Now we can relate opportunities to products in a media plan, which then relate to items that can be trafficked in the ad server and billed by finance. Sales can sell from the “menu” of products, and it’s something we can actually “cook”.
- 3 minutes This enabled us to leverage the CRM for what it’s best at – opportunity management.
- 3 minutes And ABM seamlessly continues the workflow with the CRM integration. <Talk to Sales Order benefits with ABM integration>
- 5 minutes So in looking back, what did we at Alloy learn. We learned we needed to look at the big picture. Implementing the CRM solved for specific pains within the sales organizations, and some in ad ops and finance, but it did not provide the transparency, visibility and scale we needed as a business. It did not enable us to bring all of our cross-functional teams and data together. I would advice other travels down this path to look across your business to see what other pains exist (in other departments) to assess whether or not a point solution, such as a CRM is needed, or if you have larger issues that need to be solved for. Remember that the CRM can be integrated with an ABM, with all data able to be accessed from all business functions in one place. While the CRM alone may not solve for all your pains, and customizing, as mentioned earlier, may cause further pains, an integration strategy is the way to go if you are experiencing pain throughout the organization. Make sure you have a strong implementation team in place. Meaning they are committed to the project, at all levels throughout the organization. Our CEO sponsored our CRM and ABM implementations and integrations because he knew the value he’d create by creating operational efficiencies throughout the entire organization. And lastly, ensure that all users are trained, and trained well. We are creatures of habit. As a leader of your CRM + ABM project, realize it will take time and training for your teams to adopt the new solution. But the rewards far outweigh the efforts in getting everyone trained and up-to-speed. This is something our industry has not been able to do up until now and I’m excited about all the possiblities an integrated CRM and ABM solution present for my company.
- 3 minutes So in conclusion… Data continues to grow as a revenue generator Digital platforms will continue to multiply and diversify Workflow process will become more important The need for personnel with highly specialized skill-sets dealing with data analytics and operations will grow in demand Need the right infrastructure to support current and future needs
- 10-15 minutes. With that, I’d like to open it up for questions. <Take questions – direct at Michael> <After last question, continue/wrap-up> Go to last slide.
- Thank you everyone for joining our webinar, and thank you Michael for being our guest speaker. We hope you found the information presented today informative and enlightening. This presentation has been recorded and will be made available to you tomorrow via email. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you again and enjoy the rest of your day.