The Traffic Directors’ Guild of America (TDGA) has asked radio and television traffic personnel nationwide to submit questions and issues for providers in the space to respond on behalf of RBR-TVBR. This series includes a question from TDGA CEO Larry Keene, along with a couple sent anonymously from his annual survey. This time, we looked at demands of traffic personnel vs. management; the systems’ political capabilities and contextual advertising placement. Today, we’ve also got a sidebar from DJ Cavanaugh, CEO and Partner at Matrix Solutions: The 6 Essentials of an Effective Sales Management System.
The participants:
Tricia Patterson, Ann Edmondson: Directors of Sales Engineering at WideOrbit
Jeff London: SVP of Marketing, Marketron
Jinny Laderer: vCreative – President
Dave Scott: CEO: RadioTraffic.com
Arthur Drevnig: Broadview Software Director of Sales
Shane Harris: Director of Sales, SDS (Specialty Data Systems)
RCS/Aquira team
Harris’ OSi Traffic and Billing Systems team
What demands are you getting from prospects at the station management levels? How do they line up with questions your support teams are getting from the traffic pros at the stations?
Patterson/Edmonson: When we’re working with prospective clients, many questions we get from Station Management are centered on their reporting needs: reporting for individual markets or stations, as well as consolidated reporting across multiple properties. They want to know how they can get detailed information that will help them optimize their inventory and increase revenue across their stations. We’re always happy to show prospects WO Traffic’s reporting capabilities, which are incredibly robust, flexible and easily customizable. Reports can be pulled across an organization, or drilled down to look at individual stations. Many of our clients use our consolidated reporting to leverage advertisers across stations and markets, and will pull inventory reports every day so they can positively impact revenue on a daily basis.
Traffic pros at our client stations are often looking for new shortcuts that will help them streamline their workday or they want to know how to pull a new report that management has recently requested. So we’re often helping users with little tips and tricks for saving time and helping them fine tune reports and create new reports for management.
London: Station management has been requesting functionality that allows them to increase their efficiencies and insight across platforms. We have been receiving requests for enhanced data management solutions to help normalize data across all applications to streamline and provide greater reporting capabilities across all of the different types of media that their sales teams are currently offering as well as those that are quickly coming online such as mobile. In response to these requests we have developed and offered our Mediascape Program, which provides the essential technology platform, data management and reporting solutions stations need to meet the demands of a rapidly changing environment.
Our traffic operators at the stations are faced with many of the same challenges at an operational level and are required to work within a number of disparate systems that create overhead and additional work. Traffic systems such as ours continue to live at the center of the revenue management world but progressively need connectivity and integration with additional systems performing very specific functions at the station in order to ensure that the traffic and billing system is the single source of truth for revenue and reporting at the station and the hub for ordering, scheduling and billing any type of media. With an open ecosystem facilitating connectivity with third-party systems such as CRMs, Ratings/Proposal writers, Streaming/Display/Mobile Ad Servers, social media tools, production systems and much more, data management and cross-platform reporting solutions are the key to unlocking the potential of our stations .
Laderer: Station Managers and Traffic Managers are asking us to integrate with their traffic software. For those who don’t know, vCreative PPO is a paperless production order management system. Though we are not traffic software, we currently have over 1400 traffic/continuity directors who rely on PPO daily to manage their continuity. Our current clients and prospective clients are demanding that our PPO software integrate with their traffic software to help reduce data entry time and possible clerical mistakes, as well as maintain consistency across the separate software systems. Because of this demand, we are currently in communication with the top traffic software companies and in the beginning processes of making integration a reality.
Scott: Every Station is different but the trend in demands is toward flexibility, saving time and future proofing against smart phones and Internet tablet computers. Traffic people are forced to put up with archaic software and computers, then work long hours. The lousy economy forces station downsizing, so turf wars between ownership, management, programming, sales and traffic pros are far less frequent.
When RadioTraffic.com introduced order entry by sales people over the Internet years before the iPad, the feature cost us a lot of business. When traffic managers learned we offered that option, they would refuse to let us demonstrate or even talk with managers. Several told us sales involvement in order entry “would ruin the station.” Many traffic managers said order entry by sales people would only happen “over their dead body.” Other traffic vendors made up horror stories about us that never really happened. Many traffic managers still fear sales people entering orders, so it’s a RadioTraffic option that some account reps get but others don’t.
However, many station managers and owners like our capability for a sales person to sell last minute avails, enter the order from across town over the Internet for the additional spots via laptop, iPad or smart phone, attach the copy and have the spots on the air within the hour.
Of course, RadioTraffic.com requires several levels of approval before any order goes on the air. Without approval by copy, credit, rate, management and traffic directors, sloppy orders virtually never get on the air without cleanup. Many legacy traffic systems have arcane entry systems only Einstein would love, but RadioTraffic.com simplifies the order entry process and prevents errors by using calendars that range check start/end dates of orders and copy, TAP plans, Spots Per Week and making it so easy and self-checking that “even a caveman can do it.”
RadioTraffic.com approvals are typically handled by text messages or emails to a smart phone, iPad or laptop, but they also happen when managers are at their desktop computer.
In today’s economy, more managers demand less paperwork and more efficiency. Two years ago, only 10% of our stations let sales people enter orders. Now, about 45% do so but the uptrend is huge. With few exceptions due to a paperwork-challenged sales person here and there, once stations try sales person order entry, every station so far has stayed with it. A different request came from the traffic side that management wasn’t asking for. Typical stations print and mail hundreds of bills every month. Many require signing the affidavit and stamping and signing the notary. RadioTraffic.com now prints electronic signature facsimiles and notary seals. Stations sign and notary stamp a blank page, scan it and we print signed affidavits from now on. One 11 station group tells us we save them one business day every month. Some of those are PDFs that go out by email. We also handle electronic invoicing through four service bureaus.
Another management request that traffic also likes has grown since release of the iPad. RadioTraffic.com allows sales people to see and reprint advertiser invoices, statements, payment histories, copy and co-op. This works with any computer or mobile device with Internet access. An advantage to our electronic signatures is that these affidavit reprints are already signed.
The next difference in outlook between management and traffic is in reports. Management loves RadioTraffic.com’s user customized dashboards, charts and graphs because pacing, rates, avails and revenue shows at a glance. RadioTraffic.com delivers all the reports that both traffic and management have relied on forever, but busy managers often feel those are like wanting a drink when the only option is a gushing fire hose. RadioTraffic.com’s charts and graphs simplify management and our actual reports can be viewed on iPads.
We’ll deal more with RadioTraffic.com’s user customizable reports in the next question about political lowest unit rate, but the short version is that traffic tends to be satisfied with traditional accounting. Management today is finding revenue in new places. Our modern software adapts and encourages that. Radio is adding FCC fees, taxes on tax, talent, late payment and music licensing fees and all sorts of creative ways to bring in new revenue. Phone companies have done this with half a dozen creative tax-like fees that add to the real taxes. Airlines have also gone from ticket prices that used to include meals and luggage but now add fuel surcharges, day-of-week and seat selection premiums, baggage, pillow/blanket and airport fees. Radio stations are adding all sorts of new charges to their advertising bills and RadioTraffic.com accommodates them.
All these off-air creative revenue enhancements place new demands on reports. RadioTraffic.com has added virtually complete user report customization. Each user can add/drop columns, put items into groups, total and subtotal any and everything. Reports can be saved as named templates with variables like this month, last month, this month vs. same month last year, etc. Managers can compare stations by formats, such as the country, rock or talk stations across all markets to see the best and worst performers from RadioTraffic.com reports.
Drevnig: Station managers, general managers and traffic managers alike are continually looking for better reports and ways to provide insight to grow the business. One of the things we hear over and over again is how people love the fact that they can use BroadView to customize their own key reports (e.g. John’s Favorite Sales Report, Joan’s Favorite Avails Report, business change reports, pacing etc.). They can then have these reports automatically emailed out as often as needed. For example, a GM could schedule his or her favorite sales report to simply appear via email each morning. Emailed reports mean that the right people have access to the information they need at all times.
Scheduling emailed reports with Broadview
Shane Harris: The “demands” we are getting from station management continue to revolve around centralized deployments with all stations consolidated regardless of market size or location. Station management continues to push for efficiency gains while decreasing costs. SDS Symphony meets this need because all applications from CRM all the way through to A/R reside in one database with a natural flow of data from all departments and locations. This lines up with what our support teams are experiencing from Traffic Managers. SDS support personnel are constantly helping TM’s to build macro level reports to provide their upper management. In January 2012, SDS will be launching our unified CRM and Corporate Dashboard products to provide right-now Account information to reps and rolled up data to upper management. We are excited to unveil this module as a natural extension of our unified system.
RCS/Aquira: Station Management are looking for increased efficiency and better ways to optimize inventory and manage clients. They want to know what sales tools are available, and what enterprise reporting capabilities the software can provide. We are getting many requests for the ability to interface with other business systems.
Aquira Online is our web-based proposal booking system which offers dashboard reporting (i.e. KPI) as well as the ability to integrate with Microsoft Office Outlook to capture call information used in reporting and to share the company contacts with reps. Other features include an online proposal approval process, instant credit/avails/rate warnings, and up to the minute avails, commission and revenue reporting.
Aquira offers workflow management of a) clients from lead, through prospect and approved client status, and b) orders from a proposal state through an approval process on rates, avails, credit warnings etc. before it becomes an approved contract, and c) the workflow from scheduled spots to creating copy (scripts) and instructing the associated media (audio). Real time enterprise reporting capabilities with an inbuilt report builder allows users to design their own reports with user-definable attributes. There are many data export options including an E-Billing export, and the ability to export financial data to a third party finance system.
Station Management requests very closely align with the questions being asked when Traffic phone for support. In many instances when Traffic phone to ask for assistance in gathering new information or creating a new report they are acting on a request from Station Management. In addition to these type of requests, the Traffic staff are also looking for support on using Aquira’s flexible rate cards to their full potential, utilizing the up-to-date avails pivot grid and traditional reporting, accomplishing quick and accurate contract entry using our default codes and attributes, and copy and repeat functions, and also looking for ideas on how on Aquira can help to improve their log management.
Harris/OSi: Requests from prospective clients align with our long-term clients’ service requests. Businesses Across the nation are seeking ways to engineer processes that provide significant reduction in labor, and asking their staffs to do more with less headcount. They are asking their solution providers to create robust, smart integrations to produce reliable assured communications and produce high-quality transmission of content.
As a traffic software vendor, we are focusing our efforts on building tight integrations with our own products and third-party solutions. We are also building solutions that permit the integration of non-linear, VOD, print and other media into our consolidated reporting architecture to generate additional revenue streams.
The 6 Essentials of an Effective Sales Management System
DJ Cavanaugh
The concept of managing a sales force, products/services, and post-sale support is nothing new. Most media companies, in fact, have some sort of CRM system that purports to manage a part of the sales process. CRM, though, is not sales management. Although CRM provides a huge benefit to many media companies, it goes far beyond what sales management should accomplish for them.
A sales management system, by definition, should be an integral part of the company’s business workflows and systems. While not serving as a full CRM tool (from prospect identification to ongoing customer support post-sale), it should integrate to other IT platforms for data exchange and inventory management including: ad-sales, proposal, traffic, stewardship and financial systems. In this way, it can increase a salesperson’s and/or sales manager’s visibility into the opportunities and risks with any part of the sales process.
Many media companies rely on—or assume—that their sales proposal or traffic system does all of this. Not at all. The development of client proposals is critical, but definitely only one part of the overall sales cycle.
So what are the essential components of an effective sales management system?
In essence, an effective sales management system should:
1. Manage the sales funnel: including prospecting, sales follow-up and communication between sales and the advertisers
2. Enable an effective/educated sales organization: including sharing innovative sales packages, fostering cross-team collaboration for strategic selling, and increasing competitive instincts between team members to increase overall sales performance
3. Manage the sales team: including monitoring and measuring salesperson activities and efforts
4. Develop reliable measurement and analytics: including forecasting, progress against sales and business goals, profile and target characteristics
5. Enable rapid business decision-making: including pricing, portfolio management, and inventory assessment/management.
6. Enables account prioritization and distribution: Identify the accounts that will give you the greatest reward/revenue and those that you don’t want to waste your time on.
At Matrix Solutions, we have spent the last few years talking with media companies specifically about their challenges, workflows, and wish lists. It was through this research, coupled with our expertise, that we were able to identify the above criteria, as well as develop and launch a sales management system that incorporated both CRM and Sales Analytics, effectively. For more on how to implement an effective sales management system into your operation, visit www.matrixformedia.com
–DJ Cavanaugh is CEO and Partner at Matrix Solutions. Before joining the company in 2000, DJ spent many years in broadcast management, spanning both television and radio. At CBS owned and operated KDKA-TV, DJ developed sales strategies, directed the local sales team, managed special NTR projects like the nationally renowned For Kids Sake campaign, negotiated pre-season NFL broadcast rights, and experienced double digit growth each year.
