As an industry-focused Salesforce partner, we could only dream of the tsunami of industry-focused solutions built on Salesforce that would be rolling out soon after the acquisition of Vlocity in 2020. After years of building custom solutions to meet challenges specific to the ad sales industry, we were thrilled to learn about the launch of Advertising Sales Management from Media Cloud. 

We are so happy to introduce our next employee in our employee spotlight series. 

Check out parts 1 and 2 of this series, Identify Your Key Stakeholders and Define Your Results. Once you have started the vendor evaluation, appropriate documentation keeps the process on track. While this may sound simple, the large volume of information you’ll be collecting can make it difficult to keep track of your priorities along the way.

Check out part 1 of this 3 part series, Identify Your Key Stakeholders. Now that you have identified your stakeholders and curated a set of their requirements, you’ll need to set the expectations of what the ideal vendor partner should provide. In short, before you make the first official contact with a potential vendor, you should also know the results you expect from your interactions with the vendors and how you will structure the evaluation to achieve them. Consider the following:

  The evaluation of a new vendor requires a great deal of planning to avoid getting lost in the process or bogged down in conflicting requirements and bureaucracy. A mismanaged evaluation or, worse, the selection of the wrong vendor, can have far-reaching and long-lasting consequences, potentially disrupting productivity, wasting time, resources, and money in an effort to make a bad solution better, and even resulting in political fallout for the team responsible for the decision.  So, how do you avoid making the wrong choice? Before you even begin to reach out to prospective vendors, you’ll want to make sure that you have identified all the key stakeholders within your organization who will be impacted by the addition of a new product or vendor and assessed all of their requirements and preferences. When building your evaluation team, include stakeholders who are directly impacted by a new product, like end users and their...

At V2, one common challenge that many of our clients face is how to navigate the complex landscape of their data. To strengthen our analytics consulting services and provide our clients with the simplest and most efficient way of managing their ad sales B2C and B2B data, we have recently partnered with Snowflake. In less than 500 words, we wanted to summarize for our readers the following: what is the Snowflake Data Cloud platform, why it’s different from other data warehouse platforms on the market, and why media companies should consider it as part of their tech stack.

We invite you to join us for the V2 Analytics for Ad Sales: 3 Ways to Get More From Your Analytics Investment Through the Power of Snowflake + Tableau CRM Webinar. 

It’s not news that sales organizations across most industries struggle to achieve the holy grail of an accurate forecast. There are many root causes for these challenges, ranging from overconfident sellers who inflate their pipelines to sellers who withhold bad deal data for fear of repercussions with management. Despite systems being in place, sellers oftentimes maintain two sources of truth between CRM and their own private spreadsheets. Exacerbating these issues, many organizations struggle to define and properly communicate any semblance of a true forecasting methodology, leaving sales managers and sellers reporting their numbers as they see fit. Typical forecast reports are consistently missing key data needed to roll-up a proper forecast across sellers and any data that makes its way into formal reporting is often riddled with inaccuracies, leaving sales managers second-guessing and spending hours adjusting numbers. To make...

As tenured consultants in the CRM for media space, we are all too familiar with technology indifference at the executive level. There are a range of reasons why this is all too prominent, particularly in ad sales. Five reasons why ad sales executives may be lax in optimizing CRM: Ad sales organizations typically have a history and culture of creative dominance where a more disciplined process and systems-based approach may not always be as valued.

Regardless of whether you’re a seasoned media executive who's lived through the heyday of print or you’re a relative newcomer whose focus has been primarily on digital, in one form or another, one fact should be clear: Google and Facebook, arguably, have captured an enormous portion of digital ad revenue, leaving a relatively small percentage of the remaining available ad spend for a vast ecosystem of media organizations to fight over. Fierce battles have played out at both the national and local levels where ad sales executives have found it increasingly challenging to meet their quotas. To make matters worse, the 2020 pandemic brought with it a significant disruption to the ad sales industry. And while “less down is the new up” was a concept we heard many companies using to describe even the pre-2020 pandemic market, “surviving the times and waiting to see the long-term, industry-wide impacts” has been the more recent point of...