8 Ways To Improve Ad Sales with Salesforce & Slack

by | Oct 28, 2022 | Ad Sales, Salesforce, Slack

Ad sales teams constantly face new challenges navigating hybrid and remote work environments. With reduced travel, “always on” expectations, and scrutinized overhead and budgets, there’s a greater need to innovate across all touchpoints to improve communication, collaboration, and productivity.

At V2, we’re constantly approaching new products or solutions from the viewpoint of “How will this benefit media companies?” With Slack now a part of Salesforce, we take a look at how these two powerhouses could be leveraged to drive efficiency for ad sales within media companies. 

If you’re new to Slack, the cloud-based messaging platform has become a world of virtual collaboration. Offering capabilities such as chat, messaging, and in-app video communication, as well as integrations with applications such as Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and Dropbox. Slack has proven its value as a tool for accelerating and improving sales collaboration and work processes. A study by Forrester Consulting found that Slack increased the number of sales deals closed by 13% and boosted sales productivity by 28%. Below are just a few of the benefits of using Salesforce and Slack to improve ad sales results. 

1. Centralize People, Tools, & Knowledge

Salesforce and Slack bring all of your ad sales team, tools, and the data they need together in one place, so you can keep media sales moving against a single strategy. With centralized knowledge, communication, and collaboration, you can act on and nurture deals more effectively. As each deal progresses, you can loop the right people in, whether it be an ad agency, creative, or brand partner, and access the most up-to-date information without worrying if you missed something. You can also streamline conversations, activities, and communication, all while having the confidence that these activities are being recorded in your CRM.

2. Build Stronger Ad Sales Relationships

According to Salesforce, sales teams reported 60% faster response times when working with customers in Slack. With Slack Connect, you can invite the extended sales team to communicate together in real-time within a lightweight collaborative environment similar to text messaging. Doing so adds informality and intimacy, making it easier to build and strengthen trusting relationships across the media ad sales ecosystem. With greater visibility into progress and blockers, you can increase your ad sales velocity and, as a result, likely boost profits.

3. Automate Media Processes

In Slack you can automate your ad sales tasks and processes such as onboarding and approval management. Automated workflows and integrations make it simple to organize and streamline various tasks related to your sales team and activities. Using Salesforce CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) and integrations, you can lean on Slack bots as personal assistants, and check off action items quickly to stay focused on selling more ad units. This automation will improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your inside team. It will also delight your external customers and partners because of the ease of use, and quick turn around time. This will help to maximize the given opportunity, and keep partners coming back because of how easily they can collaborate with your teams. 

4. Maintain Your Sales Focus

Because of the streamlined nature of the Slack interface, this allows you to monitor your ad sales priorities closely, while also keeping an eye on the big picture and other matters that might be important to your sales leaders. As an example, tagging team members or external partners helps bring their attention directly to where you need it, making sure that timely requests or decisions are made without losing costly hours in between these interactions, making your teams more efficient and productive. Slack can offer media teams the focus that sometimes can’t be found because ad sales teams are swivel chairing between multiple third party systems, keeping up with notifications and updates in each, but without any centralized location that brings them together. Until now.

5. Improve Your Ad Sales Pipeline

Accurate numbers and forecasting are critical to communicate across your media business, yet it can be challenging to keep everything updated in your CRM. Slack takes care of this for you with effortless sales pipeline management. With the Sales Cloud app for Slack, you can set up notifications to update records as conversations take place, or as accounts reach certain milestones or thresholds. As updates are made in Slack, those changes update automatically in Salesforce, improving ad sales pipeline analytics so your team can work together effectively.

6. Expedite New Hire Onboarding

Slack makes it possible to create a resource of information to help your new hires get up to speed rapidly while capturing knowledge and setting up reminders inside a central platform. Help new sales hires access information and updates in real time, without burdening your sales leaders where they could be closing deals. With Slack, information is readily available and searchable, rather than lost or fragmented when spread across different email chains, or across these various disconnected products.

7. Streamline & Shorten Ad Sales Cycles

Outdated information, waiting on answers, and cumbersome admin tasks can delay and derail your ad sales success. Slack and Salesforce simplify media ad sales by bringing everyone and everything together in one location. Not only are your reps able to engage with colleagues across your business, they can also collaborate with diverse stakeholders and customers. You can keep the momentum moving without having to move between different workflows or applications. You can surface vital information and context while cutting down on meetings and delays.

8. Celebrate Wins & Boost Morale

Ad sales wins are a significant team effort. Celebrating and tracking them helps your organization to boost morale while capturing important historical data and tactical lessons. With Slack you can automate and share information and ad sales success stories to better unlock future deals, while also creating a culture of recognition and collaboration.

 

Building Trust Starts With A Conversation.

Contact Us today to discuss how the expert team at V2 can help your team make the right vendor choice!

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Jill Dignan

Jill Dignan

Author

Jill Dignan has over 13+ years of strategic technology consulting experience, working with enterprise and global companies in media and other industries. During her tenure at V2, she has developed a passion for working with business and technology leaders to outline pragmatic transformation roadmaps as well as helping bring consulting and technology solutions to market. . Jill has helped clients in and outside of media devise winning strategies around process improvement, architecture, design, data, analytics, and integration. She currently serves as CGO of V2.