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This U.S. home improvement company (“The Company”) serves millions of customers a week. Its retail media network runs in-store and online advertising with a variety of companies to drive product sales, ranging from aisle displays to CCTV ads to search optimization on their website.
Needing a robust CRM to expand retail media network
As The Company expanded its footprint in the retail media space, they realized their need for a dedicated CRM that would allow them to manage growing relationships with advertisers and agencies and help them understand their pipeline in detail. They were in the process of implementing Placements.io’s digital advertising platform and had begun exploring Salesforce’s Media Cloud’s robust capabilities, which could be supercharged with Placements.io integration and Mphasis Silverline’s accelerators.
Mphasis Silverline was brought in through Salesforce Professional Services to replicate the success of a previous retail media project, where we implemented Media Cloud Advanced to support all aspects of sales and media planning in a centralized platform. We worked with the same Salesforce engagement manager on both of those projects, who saw the value of our industry expertise and Media Cloud product knowledge, and collaborated with the Salesforce team to help qualify the deal, scope it, draft the SOW, and close on a new standalone instance of Salesforce spun up on Media Cloud Growth for The Company’s retail media network team.
A smooth implementation of an integrated system
The project began with standard iterative build sprints where our team developed all of the ad sales functionality that The Company was looking for within Media Cloud. We leveraged the Placements.io Salesforce connector, as well as custom integration Flows between a data lake that housed Placements.io campaign delivery data and Salesforce. This was done in conjunction with the Placements.io professional services team because parts of the integration needed development work on their end.
Salesforce ran the data migration stream in parallel in the latter half of the project, and the Salesforce training team conducted training around the same time as our user acceptance testing for the org. The Company had a unique fiscal calendar we needed to adhere to for aggregating and grouping delivery data, so we built custom Flows to support aspects of the implementation that were not a part of what the standard out-of-box connector would do.
The Company’s team had great participation and executive buy-in, with fantastic attendance and feedback throughout all parts of the engagement. One of the big things that made this project successful from the client side was that they had eyes on MVP and they stuck to what is truly MVP. There were things that we identified throughout the discovery and build process that would be nice to have, but the product owner made smart decisions to keep everything on track and on time.
Mphasis Silverline accelerators help users do more
The Company implemented three of our accelerators to optimize their platform:
- Projections Accelerator: A Lightning Web Component embedded onto the opportunity screen that allows a user to to quickly associate high-level pockets of revenue that they want to forecast against in Salesforce. As opposed to building out an entire media plan in Placements.io early on in the sales cycle, users can do initial forecasting with the projections that they build in Salesforce.
At the beginning of a sales cycle, you often don’t have enough information to build a full media plan, and it can take between 20-30 minutes to build out a media plan depending on the complexity. If you’re just trying to get high-level revenue forecasting done, you can use the accelerator to complete projections in under a minute and gain visibility into your early-stage pipeline.
- Revenue Scheduling Accelerator: Once an opportunity gets to a 25% qualified stage, the accelerator pushes that opportunity detail into Placements.io to generate corresponding media plans and ad placements. As the sale moves forward, the sellers and ad operations teams continue building out media plans in Placements.io, syncing back the media plan line items — all the ad products that are being sold as part of the deal — and pulling schedules of revenue to reflect how that campaign delivers once it goes live.
- Relationship Manager Accelerator: Enables The Company’s team to better manage every agency, advertiser, and brand relationship in one easy-to-use component. They can configure and define relationship types the way they want, easily define the agency of record, and gain insight into complex relationships to understand key contacts by agency, advertiser, and brand.
