MAJOR MAGAZINE PUBLISHER DEFINES PRINT MEDIA TRENDS

The Challenge

Amidst declines in the print industry, a well-established magazine publisher with a growing digital presence engaged V2 to help lead a transformation effort critical to survive and thrive in a more digital and event-heavy environment. The C-suite believed that investing more significantly in a Salesforce-centric Cloud architecture and paring back extraneous non-Salesforce platform solutions over the next couple of years could help build a sustained competitive advantage, as well as redeploy existing IT resources to spend time in a more strategic manner.

At the time, the publisher leveraged a tech stack comprised of 20+ different solutions to support B2B sales and audience-focused activities. As a critical component of their Cloud architecture, Salesforce was identified as a key solution requiring a major upgrade after about 10 years of neglect since the original deployment.

The Results

Initial Phase: V2 Executes Initial Management Consulting Program

V2 first led an 8-week D(3P) Management Consulting program and presented findings to the publisher’s CEO, CRO, CMO, and CIO. While V2’s finding summary included recommendations around process improvement and change management, greater emphasis was placed on how to improve sales and marketing ROI and execute on a Salesforce-centric Cloud architecture strategy. Both parties agreed that the optimization program would focus on upgrading from Salesforce Classic to Lightning, restructuring Opportunity and revenue data structures, deploying Einstein Analytics for enhanced reporting, and replacing a legacy marketing automation solution with Salesforce Pardot.

Salesforce Program Phase 1: Migrating from Salesforce Classic to Salesforce Lightning

Following the D(3P) program, V2 sprinted into a multi-phase Salesforce program aimed at providing consistent and cumulative value to sales and marketing team members. The initial phase focused on ensuring a dramatically improved end user experience by migrating to the Salesforce Lightning interface, restructuring and cleaning key Account data, and deploying a solution for efficient capture of meeting notes. In addition, the first phase also included a high-impact launch of Einstein Analytics to enhance reporting around marketing and sales data, allowing the C-suite, managers, and sellers to interact with easy-to-use dynamic dashboards.

Salesforce Program Phase 2: Implementation of Einstein Analytics for Pipeline & Revenue Forecasting

The next phase of the program shifted to optimize Opportunity pipeline management and revenue reporting. Opportunity data could then be passed automatically into Einstein Analytics, where near-real-time reporting on key business information was available, including complex calculation of sales rep commissions, cross-team visibility into marketing metrics, and highly dynamic forecasting data to be leveraged by the company?s C-suite as the source-of-truth for tracking progress towards financial goals.

Salesforce Program Phase 3: Migration from Marketo to Salesforce Pardot for Marketing Automation

Once Opportunity management, forecasting, and revenue modeling had been addressed, V2 worked with the client’s team to migrate from Marketo to Pardot, taking advantage of the latter’s seamless integration with Salesforce. Salesforce Engage was also deployed to improve seller productivity and provide proactive notifications around key client interaction events.

From a broader Cloud architecture standpoint, V2 helped deprecate some unnecessary IT solutions to simplify the Cloud architecture and worked with the magazine?s OMS solution vendor to improve the connection between order management and Sales Cloud. Actualized delivery data was now available to report on through Einstein Analytics.