NATIONAL BOOKSELLER SOLVES E-READER RIGHTS MANAGEMENT CHALLENGE USING SALESFORCE

The Challenge

A well-known e-book reader platform was struggling to find a good-fit solution to support its rights management process flows. The company’s Content Acquisition and Publisher Relations team felt as though it was outgrowing the existing homegrown solution which felt outdated and inflexible. Through initial research, the team determined that off-the-shelf solutions on the market were too cumbersome, missing key features, or lacking the right levels of customization. While the rights management team was relatively small within the organization, the volume of publisher relationships to track was significant. In an attempt to effectively manage the high volume of publisher relationships, the rights management team had resorted to tracking Account, Contact, and rights-related data in spreadsheets which were scattered, disconnected, and out-of-date as soon as they were created or updated.

The Results

The V2 team performed a lite management consulting engagement and after assessing the client’s needs and marketplace options, determined that the Salesforce platform could support the rapid-build of a custom, scalable rights management solution. V2 combined key features of Salesforce’s Sales Cloud with custom Force.com solutions to manage key rights-related data which included territory terms, amendments and aggregator/distributor relationships. V2 designed the solution to manage global relationships where terms could vary by territory. V2 also designed and deployed Leads and Opportunities to enable the rights management team to track early and late-stage publisher contracts. V2 helped place special emphasis on the potential for greater organizational collaboration when rights-related data was properly tracked from Opportunity creation, to negotiation, and through to final contracted terms.

V2 completed a significant data cleansing and data restructuring effort to bring a clean and accurate set of rights-related data into Salesforce. Working with the client, V2 carefully analyzed territory definitions and created the proper customizations to support territory-related functionality. V2 designed, built, and tested custom Reports and Dashboards, providing the executive and management team with an easy-to-use, drill down reporting suite where the nature of global relationships could easily be surfaced. V2 finished the program strong providing customized training for the client.