AMERICAN BROADCAST COMPANY RIDES THE SALESFORCE WAVE WITH ANALYTICS

The Challenge

A large, national broadcast radio company was struggling with an inadequate CRM solution provided by its traffic solution vendor. There was little uniformity in processes, data capture, and seller best practices across 25 markets. In addition, an inside sales team was having challenges adequately reporting on its activities and results and finding that handoffs to field sellers were inefficient at best. Account data from the traffic CRM solution was poorly structured to a point where it limited sellers ability to identify proper accounts to which attribute key activities and opportunities.

The Results

V2 leveraged its D(3P) Managing Consulting framework within the technical blueprinting process to identify process and change management challenges which could be discussed and optimized as part of the Salesforce launch. Working with a key Sales executive who was committed to rigor across the prospect-to-cash flow, V2 first began mapping out the inside sales process flow and MQL to SQL handoff from a procedural, data flow and technology perspective. Salesforce Leads and Activities were leveraged as were early stage Opportunities. Next, the joint V2-client team focused on a major restructuring of Account data from an order management format into a CRM seller friendly format. It was critical that each market could see only its respective view of an Account and related Activities and Opportunities while still providing corporate a global view of Accounts underneath an ultimate. This new structure opened the doors for improved end user sentiment and proper pipeline and forecasting.

V2 also focused significant time designing and building an Opportunities design optimized to capture revenue by product family groupings such as spot, digital, non-spot, play-by-play, and other media types by market. This new design was a breath of fresh air to sellers who previously had been asked to enter very detailed order data into CRM, causing major adoption issues. This new design was both easy to use and provided a clean data set to visualize in the client’s existing Tableau deployment.

In addition, V2 saw an opportunity to leverage the Salesforce platform to track events and the sponsorships pitched for each. This custom solution provided a centralized location to manage each event like a project and avoid overbooking of a single category’s sponsorship per event.

Given the organization’s poor adoption of CRM historically, V2 focused much attention on devising an effective go-live and training strategy. V2 provided training across three pilot markets and equipped end users with quick reference guides as well as identified superusers in each market who could provide further in-market support to local end users. Once the pilot markets were successfully launched, V2 organized a train-the-trainer summit where a group of 20+ other super-user representatives came together in-person to learn the platform get trained and help deploy the solution to their respective markets. V2 provided extensive train-the-trainer documentation and provided as was ongoing support to such superusers to traverse the training period. This measured approach worked well and drove high user adoption immediately coming out of the gate.

To close out the project strong, V2 worked with the radio organization’s BI team to ensure Salesforce data could be joined with existing traffic data in Tableau in a reporting format optimized for sales executives and managers to leverage during weekly one-on-one sessions. Through intelligent Account ID mappings, this was achieved and the Tableau report joining both systems data became the new source of truth.