Growing Ad Sales Through Technology with John Donnelly

Ad Sales for Media Cloud Video Series

Q&A Transcript

Join V2 for a conversation with Mansueto’s Chief Revenue Officer, John Donnelly, as he shares what it’s like to lead change within their portfolio of brands (Inc. and Fast Company) during and after the pandemic. We discuss the effects of leveraging technology and Salesforce Media Cloud to drive Mansueto’s ad sales business. John also shares a bit of what the future holds for the business.

Below is the transcript from Growing Ad Sales Through Technology video interview from our Ad Sales for Media Cloud Series. Please note we have slightly edited this transcript to reduce the length and make it more reader-friendly. 

Jill Dignan: Welcome to the first video in our Ad Sales Management series. I’m Jill Dignan CGO, Chief Growth Officer here at V2 Strategic Advisors. I’m here today with John Donnelly, Chief Revenue Officer for Inc. and FastCompany. John, tell us a little bit about your history with the company and your role.  

John Donnelly: Hi Jill. Thank you for letting me join you today. I’ve been at Inc. and FastCompany for about 8 years now and I’m serving as you mentioned as CRO, Chief Revenue Officer and I’m in charge of all sales and marketing. And my job is to grow revenues.

Jill Dignan: I know there’s been a ton of change. We talk about industry evolving and certainly in the past couple years with Covid. How have things changed for you in the business?

John Donnelly: It’s more a question of what hasn’t changed. You know the industry is in a perpetual state of change when you think about all of the things impacting us. From the death of the cookie, first party data, ad blockers, hackers, invalid traffic, tech titans changing their algorithms, security and privacy issues, paywalls, programmatic marketplace, bitcoin, and there’s the Covid – 19. So you name it, things have been evolving rapidly and it absolutely affects our business in a significant way.

Jill Dignan: How has Mansueto been able to sort of weather the storm so to speak? What role has technology played? What role have you played in navigating throughout this period?

John Donnelly: As everything has been changing on a monthly basis, we’ve had to pivot. One great example is our live event business which I happen to have our passes behind me. The live event business we pivoted to virtual and we’re one of the few businesses that did it successfully. We decided early on when covid hit in March of 2020, we were going to go all in on virtual. We did hundreds of webinars, took our pillar signature events, and went virtual with them. That was probably the single biggest thing that impacted us as everybody transitioned from being in an office environment to working out of their home.

Jill Dignan: Absolutely. I know we have a ton of customers who were looking to try to make that same transition over the last year in going from sort of live events and even challenges on the print digital space and trying to figure out how to move to a more virtual model and a more heavy subscriber and membership model. What were some of the challenges that you faced in getting up and running with virtual events, both from a people and process perspective as well as a technology perspective? Where did you net out?

John Donnelly: One of the things that impacted us, was our pillar events generated significant dollars in gate revenue. With virtual, people just weren’t willing to pay that. One of the things we had to adapt was that we were going to be more sponsorship reliant than normal because of the lack of gate. From a technology platform perspective, we had to figure out merging quite a few different platforms to optimize them to be able to do what we wanted to do. We had week long virtual events for both brands that were heavily sponsored and literally had 25,000 registrations each. Really significant big events. Our audience were clambering to attend but it just changed the dynamic in that all had to be virtual and we didn’t have these platforms pre-existing. We had to cobble together a bunch of different platforms to get it to work. It was time and labor intensive, in terms of getting something that worked, and we took some risks too. For Inc. we tried to have a virtual marketplace where you could interact with other attendees in a marketplace. I hadn’t seen anybody else even attempt something like that. We tried to be cutting edge.

Jill Dignan: Yeah you were definitely at the forefront in reaching a place where a lot of publishers and media organizations were trying to go. How that’s going to shape things moving forward for you now that we’re coming out of some of the pandemic, getting back to more in person? What role is virtual going to play for you moving forward?

John Donnelly: The term we’ve been using internally is hybrid. We definitely have plans to go live starting with South by Southwest our two events we have in March. We’re using the term hybrid because what we’ve learned with our virtual streaming of all of these sessions, there’s still huge demand for that. We don’t want to lose that. We’re going to capitalize on that actually to ascertain higher audiences than before and continue to leverage something that’s worked out really well for both brands.

Jill Dignan: That’s great to hear. When you mentioned audiences, I know we’ve had a number of customers in media who have been looking for ways to optimize technology, optimize processes with their business to better understand audiences thinking about first party data and monetizing first party data. Where are you at in terms of getting a more mature handle on audience management?

John Donnelly: We have spent a lot of time evaluating all of the different vendors that are available to help us with this. The truth is you need to have third party vendor helping you. Because we want to try to establish high standards in terms of the quality of the data that we’re going to provide to our advertisers. Until we get that right, we’re going to continue to spend time optimizing all of the resources that we have. And we’re going to use three or four different vendors to provide the best information possible on who our audience actually is. Since we’re probably a top 1% for both brands it’s really important because we believe that we’ll actually be able to command price increases when we get through with this process. So mid year next year we’ll be beyond just testing it.

Jill Dignan: That’s great to hear. We have a lot customer stories of moving towards this. More audience based, leveraging audience data, supplementing and being able to pull in third party marketplace data to supplement audience information. Would love to talk about where you are at with your ad sales platforms and the underlying technology. I know there’s been a ton of work that’s been done to get where you are today. Would you tell us where you guys are at with ad sales technology?

John Donnelly: We’re a boutique brand, in terms of the revenues coming in right now we’re predominantly direct. Programmatic is not a meaningful percentage of our revenue. That places an extra burden on our technology to get this right. We really need to be able to go to the market place with enough volume behind our C suite audiences to gain traction to continue to maintain the revenue that we’ve achieved this year. 

Jill Dignan: Do you anticipate any movement or growth into programmatic in the next 2 to 3 years?

John Donnelly: For us, programmatic is really a game of scale. You have to have a very large capacity of an audience before the trading desk will acquire your audience and give you meaningful dollars. For us we haven’t been in that in a big way, and that is not one of our ambitions with first-party data.

Jill Dignan: One thing that I would love to dig into is the role that that your technologies played and how your media and ad sales business and technology has evolved over the last three years. We talked a little bit about the more recent transition from live events to more virtual events and focus on audiences. Programmatic maybe not as much of a goal in the next few years. How have you guys been evolving and what are what are your goals going forward?

John Donnelly: One of the biggest goals that we have for our organization is to grow scale. The reason we want that isn’t to be able to play in the programmatic space. It’s just because we want to continue to be able to deliver and optimize buys for clients in a meaningful way. We grew so much this year that we got pretty darn close to being sold out. You know that’s not a position that a boutique publisher wants to be in. For us it’s important to leverage all the technology that’s out there to enable us to grow our audience. We’ve got quite a bit of knowledge. In terms of Inc. has a contributor network we’ve been optimizing and evaluating every single post that goes up on the site to try to maximize it. We leverage social media as necessary, and even the look and feel of the sites, we spend a lot of time evaluating all that. As we continue to target growth going forward, we need to be bigger overall to enable us to continue to leverage the money that currently is coming in the door at a pretty swift rate.

Jill Dignan: What role do you believe that technology plays in supporting that growth? And do you feel like you’re at a point now where your technology can keep up?

John Donnelly: It can definitely keep up. It’s just a question of us having enough people in the right positions to optimize it. There’s several ways you can use technology. We haven’t really talked about one of the things that I use in my role is, I’m a huge fan of our CRM system. I use that religiously, daily, to enable me to keep my eye on where all the revenues are. That absolutely gives me an edge because I know how we can cover in a little bit. I’ve got a lot of information that I know a lot of other people don’t have at my fingertips.

Jill Dignan: I love hearing about how you are using CRM and and Salesforce. I know when we talked to a lot of other leaders and executives in the media space, CRM is not the first solution that comes to mind when thinking about that 30000 foot view of the business and where executives are spending their time. We think of CRM as being the traditional leads accounts, contact opportunities, but really it’s become much more of a platform. Also it’s that place to derive analytics with a lot of the ways that CRM technology has evolved and certainly Salesforce over the last decade. I would love to hear a little bit more about how you’re using CRM and analytics and maximizing your technology investment to drive revenue.

John Donnelly: We had a leadership meeting in August in our offices. I went to the meeting prepared with an executive meeting dashboard that I created in Einstein that enabled me to show the last six years, cause we started our Salesforce system about 6 years ago. It enabled me to show trends from the past six years. We could look at every media element. We could look at trends in terms of whether it was growing or whether it wasn’t growing. You could see where the money is going. It enabled us to have a much better conversation with the editors about, “here’s where the business is”, and then “here’s where we think it’s going”. No surprise, for us our web offerings are now contributing over 60% of our revenues for the company and we expect those to continue to grow. To be able to use dashboards, which instantly change. You touch the dashboard and it reconfigures and shows you. For us we have four different main media elements. I could tap one of them and show you what’s going on with print. I can tap what’s going on with digital, or what’s going on with events. And using the information like that is really helpful. I can tell you that we have a very sophisticated pipeline management program. We call it the three X pipeline. We have the sales team putting in all of their estimates. Then whatever you’re short of goal, you’re required to have 3x those revenues in your pipeline to have any shot. When we put this system in place in Salesforce in March we tripled the number of proposals that the company sent out in the marketplace. I’m going to tell you, with an average closing percentage of over 33% nothing but good things are going to happen when we did that. We’re up significantly this year, and I think this was a big part of it. I’m able to measure RFP velocity. I have closing rates by every single sales person by title. I’ve got revenue by media element. I’ve got historical booked in pending numbers for the past six years. I can compare by week where we were in 2018 which was a really good year so that I could tell you at any point in time where we are versus where we were previously. Knowledge is power. When it comes to being in charge of a business like this, you have to have all this information at your fingertips. We have attrition rates. I’ve got new business versus existing business. I’ve got real time quota dashboards for my sales team, and then CPM analytics and traffic management. All of these systems, and it’s all technology, all CRM based. All of that’s at my fingertips to enable me to optimize everything that we’re doing organizationally to try to get the best returns possible out of every impression for both brands.

Jill Dignan: Yeah and I know there’s many executives that are maybe listening and are wondering how you can get to that kind of end state with analytics. Especially on some of the front end stuff that you talked about in terms of the data that sellers are entering kind of the up front estimates and forecasting. That’s an area where we typically hear there’s a lot of challenge where especially in media the forecast is starting when an order is getting entered. There’s a lot of curiosity that others in media have about how do we actually get you know sellers putting in estimates more upfront, entering RFP data, doing better account based forecasting, kind of pre-order. Any kind of words of wisdom or any insights you can share in terms of how you’ve been able to not just take advantage of a technology solution in terms of the the analytics offerings and build that out. But all of the the work up front to get the organization thinking about the importance of data capture, data entry, and making sure that it’s adopted. How has that journey been and any advice to offer?

John Donnelly: I’ve got plenty of advice on this topic and it’s one of my most favorite subjects. The first thing that we did when we were implementing Salesforce was we picked the right systems integrator. That happened to be V2. I met with John Tanner and we talked about keeping it simple. I had been involved at my previous company for 4 years on a task force that was supposed to be implementing Salesforce and we failed miserably. We managed to spend millions of dollars. It was wonderful. It did not work. It never worked. And this is a big company, my previous company. When I joined Mansueto Ventures in 2014, I had a system fully functional in about eight months. The reason is because we kept the system simple and John Tanner was absolutely crucial in setting it up in a way that we knew we were going to put the sales people’s priority first. Understanding that if they get value out of the system, they’re going to use it. I believe we’re in the 98 or 99th quintile in the United States in terms of usage on my sales teams. There was originally Inc. only, now there’s FastCompany too, and both sales teams use them religiously. The trick is in our business, you got to get your estimates right and the system that was built took splits into account perfectly. That meant that I could get reports that would report revenue by sales person no matter where they were geographically that are accurate to the penny. Because we actually go in for the digital stuff afterwards and correct it so on a month-by-month basis. So we’re about a month behind on the actuals. When a seller sells something, they put it through in their estimate first and it’s not hard. It’s really simple. With contacts and meeting summaries, that was the original kind of build out that we did.

Then when I took on Fast Company in 2018 we added them. At that same time John Tanner told me “You know, JD you’re one of the most number loving guys that I’ve ever met. You’re going to love these analytics. You should give it a try”. And we built it. At first I was a little skeptical but then when I saw what we could do. It was absolutely amazing. That’s why we’ve actually taken it multi steps up and it wasn’t that hard to be honest. When I talk about RFP velocity and 3x pipeline things we’re putting everything into Salesforce now and it’s not taking up too much time for the sales people. It’s actually enabling them to be strategic about their business as well so they know where they stand. They know what they have to do. We know on an effectiveness basis what type of closing rate we have in the proposals that we’re creating for our team. So operating efficiently and effectively. Honestly I can’t see operating a business like this without an outstanding system. I don’t know how anybody could do it. One thing that’s worth noting is my alma mata company had 200 MBA’s in the business office trying to provide reports. I’ve not only replicated that I’ve got better information. I’ve got better numbers cause I have more that I can analyze and look at. You can tell I love it. It’s amazing how great the system is, and that’s really been a key driver for our success.

Jill Dignan: Great to hear about where you guys are at with Tableau CRM and all of the great analytics that you’re getting out of the system. What’s been done kind of upfront to lay the groundwork for that just to make sure that you are getting accurate rich reliable data? I know there was a ton of work done on the CRM side but could you talk a little bit more about that?

John Donnelly: Thank you for asking. Originally when we implemented Salesforce when I start at the company in 2014, V2, your team did a spectacular job implementing Salesforce for us. In 2018, when I was handed the responsibility of running FastCompany, we add a second team to our instance and at the same time we added Tableau CRM and analytics capabilities. I have to say that at first when I was approached to do that I was a little skeptical about you know “Oh how important is it going to be able to visualize our data and is that important”. Right now I can’t live without it. We’re able to get unbelievably key metrics and information about every aspect of the business side of the operation through Tableau CRM and analytics. Right now we’ve got it at such a high level that it works perfectly on my mobile phone. Doesn’t matter if I’m on a tablet, a mobile phone, or at the desktop, I can get all of those things that I was describing before at the touch of a button and it pops up in seconds. I just don’t see how anybody could be in a role like mine and not be so knowledgeable about all of these vitally important pieces of information that help us to achieve results. I do credit it with why we’ve been consistently able to grow revenue and or profits for our owner every year since I joined the company.

Jill Dignan: You mentioned earlier that you’re sharing how you’re interpreting those analytics with other departments like editorial content. Are there other leaders executives that are tapping into the same or similar dashboards and deriving value from Salesforce Analytics?

John Donnelly: We have our direct to consumer team which is generating consumer revenue and is also leveraging Salesforce extensively. Then believe it or not we’ve been using it for our contributor network. There is information on there. I’m not that well versed in what they have but they’re using it too. It’s kind of filtered it’s way throughout the entire operation.

Jill Dignan: What about your sales users, your end users, are they leveraging Salesforce analytics for their day to day?

John Donnelly: No. The analytics is just being used by leadership. So our two SVP’s of sales, and then our CFO, our CEO, you know have access to it, and our chief product officer as well.

Jill Dignan: Gotcha. I’d love to go back to what you mentioned earlier. How Salesforce has been implemented for sales and your ad sellers and that it’s become more of a strategic platform for them. I think often times when we’re hearing about goals going back to Salesforce implementation for ad sales organizations, a lot of it goes back to how do we get them to be more productive. How do we make sure that they are entering data upfront. How do you make sure there’s tools in place to minimize how much swivel chairing their doing. That there’s a clean process from opportunity to order as an example. We don’t hear as as much around kind of the strategic aspect and how technology can be truly a strategic tool versus just a tactical tool for those sellers. Can you talk a little bit about the experience at Mansueto and how sellers are leveraging Salesforce to be more strategic in their planning and their day to day.

 John Donnelly:  When we created the implementation or when we launched the implementation I should say, we made sure that there were ample reports for the sales people so that they can go in and get value out of it. And again I think that’s really really important that they wanted to see you know, in terms of revenues, what they’re running, by account, by month, by media element, and we made sure that we had all of these reports. And then subsequently we added pipeline management you know, with RFP’s being added into the system. And now really when we ask them for a strategic plan for the next year, which by the way we’re doing right now for 2022, they start and almost can end with Salesforce cause all they have to do is go in and they have 5 to 6 years worth of data, down their territory, on their accounts, there’s notes in there, there’s meeting summaries in there, their contacts are all in there. So really all the key information that they need to know so that we can help them actually create proposals for clients on a priority basis meaning the most… the higher the revenue, the more important the potential client is. So all of that just makes that easy. You don’t have to think about it anymore. It’s just sitting in the system and it’s available at the touch of a button. So from a strategic standpoint the sellers get a lot of benefit out of it and we made sure that, that was the highest priority when we built it. Cause I can tell you that the most skeptical person that I had on staff was like “Oh my God this is going to be terrible.” Typical reaction of a salesperson. Big brother looking over my shoulder, I hate this, I don’t wanna do it. We didn’t make it that all. We made it a tool so that they understand, that we’re supporting them, and that we can see the information as well, and that we can help them and leverage our experience. Mine happens to be 32 years, been doing this a little while, to help them short cut their way to putting together better proposals for their clients. And you know, that’s why we monitor the closing rates so closely and I have it by sales person and they can see it. It’s on their dashboard you know when they login. 

Jill Dignan: That’s great. I know we’ve definitely heard of a lot of media organizations that are on Salesforce that are seeing the benefits of having data centralized, aggregated, clear views for their sellers on how campaigns are pacing as examples. Actuals, data that’s being pulled in, and being able to do more efficient account planning QBR’s things like that and really know where they’re at with their accounts at any given time. One of things that we’ve been hearing a lot about this year, in terms of challenges that ad sales organizations are facing is going back to things like churn. That’s been a really big topic and I’m just wondering if that’s something that’s come up for you guys, and if you solved in any way of being able to do any predictive or anticipated churn within you know the technology that you’ve built to better-equip sellers in and sort of you know, account nurturing and up sells and supporting renewal of revenue.

John Donnelly:  Just as Covid in 2020 was a nasty surprise, which kind of threw all prognostications out the window. Because not too many CRO’s could tell you how much they were going to be hit by that or affected and some even grew. We didn’t. Then when we hit 2021 our prognostications turned out to be quite conservative. We actually did not properly anticipate how many people would be coming back. The normal attrition analysis and planning, strategic planning for the next year it is kind of become a bit more volatile. I think most media executives will tell you that. It’s really hard to predict what’s going to be happening because Covid didn’t go away. We’re still working remotely but yet, we’re up over 30% as a company. I just would not have been able to look my CEO in the eye and tell him that “Oh yeah, we’re going to be up for the 30% guaranteed next year”. I didn’t. 

Jill Dignan: Great. Can you tell us a little bit just to shift topics a little bit. Can you tell us about where you see technology going for Inc. and FastCompany in the next, you know, 18 months? What are the big initiatives that you guys are, are focused on?

John Donnelly:  We do believe that our web offerings will continue to lead the way in terms of revenues. That’s both on the advertising side and the consumer side. We don’t see that changing anytime soon. We’re going to be pivoting back to live events which is going to bring our gate revenues back into the mix. Then one of our main revenue streams is custom and that’s where we’re creating content for our clients. And then we have technology platforms to amplify their content that are built on our sites. That gives us strategic advantage because we can guarantee page views and video views. That’s been growing every year, for the last five years. It’s been growing dynamically as well. That’s a trend that we anticipate continuing for sure. In a web offering is still going to be something that’s going to continue to grow.

Jill Dignan: Going back to some of those partnerships, There’s been a lot of curiosity in that this year. Is how do we create better sort of B2B partnerships through technology? What does that look like? Are you guys doing anything currently around that today or thinking ahead to technology initiatives on the horizon where you’re looking to optimize how you are collaborating from a systems perspective and data sharing perspective with your partners?

John Donnelly:  That’s the big question mark. Obviously integrating first-party data into our digital direct buys but also into our custom buys. We’re optimistic that in both cases, the more we provide high-quality information, the more potential growth. I can’t emphasize that enough. We are spending a lot of time working on the systems, to optimize them. When we bring them to market and release them, we’re very optimistic that it’s going to help us achieve growth.

Jill Dignan: Great and just to pivot a little bit here. Can you identify any roadblocks that other C-level executives might expect when they’re trying to restructure, you know, get into a major transformation program or implement something like analytics? Any roadblocks that you would be able to speak to that those executives should be aware of?

John Donnelly:  There’s some roadblocks that were unanticipated this year. I could tell you that for sure. Societal issues that you know, get geopolitical you know. That has been something that now you have to take that into account in your company. You’re going to be held accountable for that. Supply chain issues that are impacting various businesses. These are roadblocks in that they are kind of out of our control. It does impact our business too. If you can’t go to the automobile manufacturing and go to a local dealer and buy a car because they don’t have any chances are that’s going to impact their advertising budget. We’ve seen that playing out all across the board in the travel sector, the auto category, things like that. I would call those big roadblocks. Then the other thing is we’ve actually written some articles on the big quit. Retaining employees has become more valuable than ever before. Especially the ones that you spent a lot of time and money training and getting up to speed so they have great knowledge. As the workforce demands have evolved, including remote workplaces, you know these are things that the C-level executives are going to have to take into account as they’re making their plans for keeping their companies on track and growing.

Jill Dignan: Yeah and it’s …it’s a big technology play in terms of technology to support you know analytics and insights into how those bigger kind of macro level events may impact the business and how you guys are going to be able to pivot quickly as you’re interpreting, as well as systems to support kind of, talent retainment, talent engagement, and really being able to make sure that you’ve got the right systems in place to support… to support those challenges.

John Donnelly:  We’ve made a big investment in HR, in technology systems and HR. Now that’s not true Salesforce but you know there are HR platforms out there that have all kinds of capabilities and we’ve invested there. And that one is really important.

Jill Dignan: We’ve been hearing a lot, a lot about that. In terms of how do we do people management better? What are the best systems for that? So that’s been a pretty consistent trend and how does that tie back to how folks are working in Salesforce and how can we do more? Tell us about, you know, top trends that you’re seeing on the horizon for the ad sales industry.

John Donnelly: Number one first and foremost, is diversifying your revenue streams. That’s not optional. You need to. You can’t be solely relying on ad revenue. You have to get consumer revenue as well. We’ve done a really good job of doing that and that’s applause to our direct-to-consumer team and our licensing teams. They’ve really grown revenues meaningfully, so that the percent of ad revenue to the total revenue stream has actually been in decline. By the way did I mention 30% growth? They’re doing really well. That’s really important. Then in terms of adaptability and flexibility are absolutely key. When live events get swept out from under you because of something like Covid, South by Southwest was cancelled, our big pillar events, we had contracts with JW Marriott on the Inc. side, you have to be able to quickly change and adapt. When we started in March talking about okay how are we going to salvage the Inc 5000 in the Fast Company Innovation Festival, those conversations were ongoing for months. Then for us very fortunately, we were basically able to sustain our full sponsorship goal, our revenue targets for the year, for both titles. We did really well on the sponsorship front considering that we weren’t live. Lastly, the third trend for publishing is that print is going to continue to need to be used strategically. It’s been in decline, it’s a secular decline, but we’ve been leveraging it strategically and we’ve been able to do, what we call it a 4 cylinder engine but we’ve got four different revenue streams that are being optimized for every kind of print issue that comes out with a big act today. You have to you have to be able to leverage that strategically and it is so important to our consumer base because the people that are fans of our brands, they don’t want magazines to go away. They love  receiving the physical copy of the issues but it’s just across the board you see declines in circulation you see declines in frequency but for us we actually went up in frequency this year in print.

Jill Dignan: Wow. When you talk about thinking about print more strategically, I’m curious what you mean both from a content perspective, a distribution perspective, and even from an ad sales perspective.

John Donnelly:  We have, I’ll give you two examples. We’ve got our Inc. 5000 list that comes out every year in September. Then we’ve got our most innovative companies list for FastCompany that comes out in March. Those are lists where we basically charge application fees to companies that want to make those lists. There’s a new, and by the way seven figure, revenue stream for both brands. We’re talking significant money. Then of course we can monetize it on the ad sales front. The other thing that we can do is we can create profiles for these companies that we sell them in addition to their normal run of magazine branding advertisements. We’ll create custom opportunities for them. Lastly the licensing rights that people buy when we create apps. We’ve been looking at a foot… that’s what we call the 4 cylinder engine. That’s what we’ve been optimizing at our brand and it’s worked really well for us.

Jill Dignan:  John, thanks so much for joining us again. For those listening in, be sure to check out the next video in our series to learn more. And be sure to contact V2 with any questions or comments going back to your ad sales organization.

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