There are many customization options available on Salesforce implementation. Making it work for your unique business needs is critical to realizing its magic. In this blog, we’re going to narrow down the top three customizations that are essential to media companies.
The ever-changing landscape of Media Relationships:
Buying media is a collaborative process with multiple players involved. Typically, you’ll have the publisher who holds the inventory, the Advertiser who’s looking to drive revenue through a new product launch campaign, or the Agency coming up with new campaigns.
Managing the relationships between each of these entities is critical to ensure insertion orders are getting signed on time, the right people are being brought into pitches and possible competitive conflicts are avoided.
The Silverline Relationship Management accelerator gives users the ability to map out these relationships and consolidate this data to a single source. The accelerator can also be extended to automatically keep these relationships up to date based on order data from your order management systems or other sources.
Forecasting Early-Stage Pipeline:
Let’s face it, media plans are complex and they take a lot of time to plan, design, and build in your order management systems. Time your sales team could be spending meeting with clients and closing more deals. These plans also require a significant amount of information to be shared by a prospective client, which is often not received until well into, or near the end, of the sales cycle.
Media sellers want a simple, intuitive user interface for easily forecasting high-level revenue categories related to a specific deal. The Silverline Projections accelerator allows users to quickly define these revenue categories, associate campaign flight dates, and an overall revenue value to their Opportunities.
By making this process as simple as possible the organization gains a much clearer picture of your early-stage sales pipeline leading to greater forecast accuracy and reducing the frantic push to get everything organized at the end of sale.
Recognizing revenue over time:
Congratulations! You just received the final signature on a large 7-figure 8-month long campaign. So what does this mean from a revenue reporting perspective? Booking an Opportunity worth $1M with a close date of today doesn’t provide a lot of reporting value for media organizations. What we want to see is this revenue scheduled out over the 8 months of the campaign, and we want to see this broken out across three buckets; Weighted scheduled pipeline (my forecast), Booked business (the closed campaigns that we need to deliver) and last (but not least) our delivered revenue.
Generating this all-encompassing revenue schedule is critical to reporting in the Media space. At Silverline, we’ve developed the Revenue Scheduling accelerator to automate this process and support your reporting needs. This can also be extended to incorporate revenue splits by Salesperson with the Revenue Scheduling + Splits accelerator.
These are just three of the most common examples of Salesforce customization we see in the Media Industry. As with any technology implementation, it’s important to leverage standard functionality where it fits your needs but the true power of the platform lies in its infinite customizability.
