Challenge

Prior to implementing Salesforce, this global broadcaster struggled with data issues and visibility. Dealing with siloed order management, customer, and finance systems, as well as one vendor (Operative) and four custom ad sales solutions, it was near impossible for them to consolidate and report on weighted scheduled pipelines, work in progress, and delivered campaigns, which lead to multiple missed forecasts and a glaring need for a system to hold the team accountable and provide accurate forecasting. After five failed attempts to implement various CRM systems, the EVP was tasked with finding a CRM that would serve their business needs now but also be flexible enough to adapt to future requirements. At the beginning of their search for a CRM solution, 75% of the company’s ad revenue was from linear. As digital came into the picture and the landscape became more competitive, reporting and pipeline needed to be much more accurate. Because of the shift in their revenue, a new sales methodology was also necessary, and Silverline was tasked with attaining buy-in from legacy sales representatives who were set in their ways.

Previous CRM implementations had failed due to their inability to meet the business’ needs. In addition to sales and delivery hurdles, this company also had a noncentralized sales support process, with requests coming through siloed systems and lacking background information, which caused frustrations at multiple customer and employee touchpoints.

Solution

Silverline configured Salesforce to give each account executive a 360-degree view of their book of business, empowering them to close more business, wherever they are. When prospecting, users can easily identify relationships between advertisers, brands, and agencies to get a better picture of their account landscape. Once an opportunity is identified, users can quickly generate a projection of their expected booked revenue based on either linear or digital lines of business. The system also provides tools for sellers to bring supporting contributions from various internal teams into an opportunity to drive business to closure. After a campaign launches, delivery details automatically flow back to Salesforce from multiple data sources and exposed in reports and dashboards that are available on desktop and mobile. This enables the business to compare booked business to what has been delivered, and how this compares to their overall budgets.

Results

Salesforce has empowered the executive team with all of the tools they need to be able to accurately report on their sales pipeline and identify where and when it makes sense to step in to help an opportunity to closure.

The new sales process, built in Salesforce, gave users the ability to project early stage revenue across linear networks and digital properties and gave salespeople and management greater visibility into weighted scheduled pipeline, work in progress, and delivered campaigns.

Centralizing the submission of support requests gave support teams visibility into account histories and where requests were coming from, providing a 360-degree view into each account.

The final result of the engagement was the transition from an unstructured and poorly forecast selling environment to a highly structured process in which Salesforce hygiene is being included in performance reviews.