Budgets. Targets. Quotas. Goals. Regardless of the nomenclature, you use they all mean the same thing; As a salesperson, how much revenue am I accountable for closing?

The Media industry brings additional complexity to this process in the way that these budgets are set, assigned and subsequently managed. While most people will be familiar with the concept of holding a general sales quota (e.g. my March budget is $50,000), when it comes to media these budgets are often defined at a more granular level. An example of this would be; I hold a March budget for a specific combination of Advertiser, Agency, Ad Type, Network and Property, alongside dozens of other budgets covering different combinations of the above. 

As can be imagined, this leads to challenges around goal management and goal pacing. A common complaint heard from Sellers is “I spend my whole day speaking to clients and working towards closing deals but at the end of the day I have no way to see how close I am to hitting my targets.”

Managing the complexity and nuance of this process is a challenge faced throughout Media Sales and is often dedicated to a specific team who coordinates all of this in a complex spreadsheet of rules, data aggregations and manual intervention. The amount of time spent managing this process increases further as revenue data needs to be aggregated across multiple order delivery systems and then “matched” to each budget. This is a time-consuming process and is highly dependent on human intervention to ensure everything runs “smoothly”.

At Silverline, we’ve heard our Clients express frustration with these challenges and the lack of an automated and unified solution to manage this process. In response, we’ve developed the Budget Management Accelerator which is a key pillar of the Silverline Media Sales Solution. It allows users to track and manage budgets for the entire business from a single dashboard. Quickly review a seller, manager or team’s current pacing against budgets and identify potential gaps so your team can focus on what drives revenue for your business. Core functionality of this accelerator includes:

• The ability to support complex budget models that can be configured for your needs (i.e. budgets by advertiser/agency relationship)
• View & manage budgets by individual seller, team, department, client, product or your entire business
• Gain insight into upfront and scatter pacing by product category or other key values
• Automatically connects your scheduled revenue to associated budgets
• Flexibility to support different budget models as your business grows

The result of this is that Salesforce will become your one source of truth for all information related to Budgets and sales pacing. Media Sellers no longer have to request reports, run manual calculations or reach out to other members of the organization to see how they are tracking toward their budgets.