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...