Next-Generation
Advertising Sales
Moving Fast in a Rapidly Evolving
Advertising Sales Market
But media’s pace of change has sped up enormously, leaving the industry’s ad reps struggling to catch up with new distribution channels. To remain competitive, ad sales reps need to have the right digital playbook to capitalize on industry growth.
McKinsey projects that by 2019, digital will account for more than 50% of overall media spending, accelerating the industry’s transformation. As ad sales teams work to manage an increasing sales product portfolio, they are also subject to new pressures from industry trends like ad viewability, campaign performance, and the proliferation of the channels where ads are sold. Winners in this changing marketplace will need to focus on providing sales teams with easy access to information, deep customer insights, and the tools they need to close deals quickly.
Learn firsthand what media organizations can do to stay ahead of channel proliferation and maximize ad sales through the coming decade.
Google and Facebook each have more ad revenue than all United States magazines combined, and they show no signs of slowing down. Video and mobile platforms, in particular, are growing more rapidly than other channels. A small number of players are gobbling up available ad spend, making it easier for ad buyers to transact and connect with customers exclusively on those platforms.
According to PwC, internet advertising will exceed global TV advertising revenue for the first time in 2016. This gap will only widen, with internet ad revenue expected to grow at 11.1% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to reach over a quarter of a trillion, $260.4 billion, by 2020. And mobile advertising is projected to grow even faster, at 19.6% CAGR, to reach $84.8 billion by 2020.
As new media companies like Google and Facebook, and fast-rising upstarts like Snapchat, gain momentum, their unyielding focus on mobile is a key driver behind their astronomical growth.
While internet access will increase significantly across the globe, the majority of that growth will come from internet-connected mobile devices.
By 2020, more than half of mobile devices will have high-speed broadband connections.
In her widely-respected “Internet Trends” report, Mary Meeker identified a $22 billion imbalance in the amount of time users spend on mobile (25% of total time spent in media) versus with the amount of ad dollars spent on mobile (12% of total ad dollars). With an imbalance this large, media companies can anticipate a drastic increase in mobile ad spend in the coming years.
Leading companies in this space are using enhanced consumer data to differentiate themselves. New media behemoths like Google and Facebook are leveraging their deep consumer insights to show ad buyers exactly how they can reach their desired audience segments. To stay ahead of these disruptors, legacy media companies must build a complete view of their customers to show ad buyers that they too can target the right audiences.
Watching shifting consumer behavior over the last few decades, media companies have sought growth through mergers and acquisitions, which has produced multi-channel content distribution companies with complex legacy technology stacks. To ensure account executives have the information they need to sell smarter and executives have the information they need to drive their businesses forward, media companies need an agile system of engagement to share information across silos.
This digital transformation is making ad sales much more difficult, as organizations struggle to sell products they’re less familiar with and compete against deep-pocketed internet media companies for a share of consumer attention.
But, all is not lost. A number of competitive advantages strongly position media companies to win against these digital-first competitors: large customer bases built on strong existing brand reputations, expertise in content creation and delivery, and large sets of proprietary customer data. But media companies must have the right tools in place to take full advantage of these strengths.
While directory companies used to exclusively sell ad space in the Yellow Pages, that’s now the smallest piece of their product portfolio. To stay successful against these pressures, keeping up with audience and format changes is crucial.
Today’s ad sales companies must position themselves as agencies serving SMB customers—offering website design, SEO, SEM, and other marketing tactics as part of their portfolio of services. Others have also heavily invested in event businesses to drive margin and revenue growth.
We see the complexity that results from this change most clearly in the newspaper publishing industry. Once among the dominant recipient of advertising dollars, newspapers’ advertising revenues continue to erode. In fact, PwC projects that 2016 will be the first year where circulation revenue will exceed ad revenue globally.
Many advertising businesses generate a large percentage of their revenue from agency spend directed to them on behalf of companies and brands. Unfortunately, agency spend is often a dwindling part of their business, which makes media sales organizations more dependent on their direct sales channel.
But direct sales teams need to be in the field, building their book of business to win new customers and building relationships to retain existing customers. More than ever, these teams need a mobile-first sales tool that enables them to sell from anywhere, whether on-the-go or behind their desks.
CEOs believe “technological advances” will most transform their wider stakeholder expectations over the next five years
The media industry relies heavily on technology to assess/deliver on wider stakeholder expectations.
As media sales organizations’ businesses become more complex and faster-paced than ever before, Salesforce is empowering some of the world’s largest and most innovative media companies with a next-generation solution to help ad sales teams do business more efficiently and effectively on the go—selling faster and engaging with customers more deeply.
of media executives think customer relationship management systems are the technology with the greatest ROI.
Enable sales teams to sell from anywhere.
Sell smarter with deep customer insights.
Leverage technology to help teams sell faster.
With reps constantly on the go, sales leaders must empower them to run their sales business from anywhere.
Mobile sales apps allow reps to get the right insights they need quickly. Reps can manage their leads and opportunities and share and collaborate on ideas with their teams—especially those with even more complex sales processes that may require custom apps specifically tailored to the products they’re selling.
With a customizable mobile platform, media sales organizations can easily build and deploy digital sales aids that match a single customer view with supporting sales collateral, so they can sell effectively from anywhere. Mobile access to valuable assets like rate cards, inventory, order information, and key customer data drives sales effectiveness—making media sellers more like trusted advisors to their end customers.
To grow their ad sales businesses during a time of tremendous industry transformation, media companies must understand the confluence of social, mobile, cloud, intelligence, and the internet of things. Salesforce gives media companies a single view of their customers, helping them to better understand advertisers across all channels and interactions and to ultimately sell more.
To close more deals, sales reps need a complete understanding of brand, agency, and media company information at their fingertips. They need to combine that information with consumer data in order to differentiate their properties from other advertisers.
Sales reps can leverage targeted content and marketing automation tools to connect with prospects earlier in the sales process. With analytics, reps get a more nuanced view of customers’ motivations and how to proactively address their pain points through data-driven selling.
These powerful tools provide automated insights that help reps focus on the right opportunities at the right time—improving productivity. For example, imagine a rep on their way to a meeting with a prospective customer. Based on new information gathered by the sales team, that rep receives a push notification to their mobile device informing them of the latest ad products that customer has a high propensity to buy. These tools also connect sales teams in more intelligent ways—facilitating collaborative sales with detailed interactions on any given account. Finally, they can surface audience information so that sales reps can focus on selling the value of a targeted audience, rather than solely relying on value of the media property itself.
In an industry where business is done faster than ever before, sales reps need access to real-time data to drive quick decision-making. Custom-built apps tailored to a company’s specific needs can help solve issues relevant to media organizations, such as ad order management, commissions, contracts, and document generation.
Salesforce’s next-generation ad sales solution is flexible and extensible, allowing media companies to tailor the platform to their specific needs. It includes a complete CRM integrated with other downstream processes such as ad operations, ad management, and ad inventory management. These applications, and many more on the Salesforce AppExchange, help solve media companies’ most relevant problems. With the fully customizable Salesforce next-generation ad sales solution, companies can keep all of the information reps need right at their fingertips—so they can close deals faster.
By leveraging the Salesforce platform, media companies can now deploy the key tactics above to best compete in this new world of shifting advertising spend.
In an industry where business is done faster than ever before, sales reps need access to real-time data to drive quick decision-making. Custom-built apps tailored to a company’s specific needs can help solve issues relevant to media organizations, such as ad order management, commissions, contracts, and document generation.
Salesforce’s next-generation ad sales solution is flexible and extensible, allowing media companies to tailor the platform to their specific needs. It includes a complete CRM integrated with other downstream processes such as ad operations, ad management, and ad inventory management. With the fully customizable Salesforce next-generation ad sales solution, companies can keep all of the information reps need right at their fingertips—so they can close deals faster.
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