An effective sales process is not needed during the nascent years of a company and all the energies are directed towards the achievement of sales rather than establishing an effective sales process. With the advent of a company’s growth and increase in sales managing of the same ceases to be a straightforward process.As more resources are hired, opportunities become harder to monitor and some might even fall off the team’s reach entirely. With no standardized process in place, the buying experience varies drastically depending on which resource is working on a given lead. Advertising and Media professionals love to innovate and ideate.
However, it can be a challenge to implement the creativity to daily business operations like sales management. In order to balance the creative and business aspects of a company, creatives need to keep the sales funnel moving and projects on track to meet deadlines which is easier said than done. The biggest challenge is how to achieve the goals of improving client satisfaction, sales and revenues apart from applying their creative skills to fulfil the client’s requirements.
Biggest Challenges for Media and Advertising Agencies
Sales Professional in media Industry need to be organized to get a clear picture as to what needs to get done to keep the sales funnel strong by keeping track of every interaction, recording details of communications, maintaining customer’s history, assigning follow-up tasks and much more. The major kind of problems sales professional faces to maintain a healthy sales funnel are :
- Difficulty managing customers
- Difficulty managing sales cycle time
- Difficulty identifying buying behavior
- Difficulty collaborating with sales team members
- Difficulty in Lead management.
- Difficulty in managing number of deals, close ratio and sales velocity
- Effectively reaching target audiences
- Difficulty in training resources
- Lack of centralized data availability.
So then how can a company overcome these challenges?
The centralized solution is, An Efficient CRM Solutions-
Rather than using a dozen different tools and services to manage the day-to-day operations of running a business, professionals can overcome project management and sales challenges with a CRM (customer relationship management) tool. Companies with a fully utilized CRM solution can increase sales by 29 percent, according to Salesforce.com Companies who implement a CRM, reports improvements in collaboration across department, improved customer responsiveness etc. These increases are a direct result of a CRM’s ability to consolidate contact information and project details into a single platform, giving users a comprehensive and complete picture of a business. Customer history and interactions can be accessed with a quick search, and projects run more smoothly since clear deadlines can keep everything on track.
Why CRM for Media & Advertising Industry–
Customer Relationship Management deals with handling and managing relationships with customers but if you’re wondering what is a media crm, let’s shed some light on this. CRM for media & advertising or media CRM basically is a crm solution software which helps collate and store big-data while providing intelligent data regarding the sales and revenue generation activities that is carried on in a media and advertising industry business. In simple words, a media crm simplifies all the complex activities and addresses to all the pain-points that a media and advertising company would experience i.e from storing data and providing insights on sales and revenue generation performance to streamlining all the sales driven processes.
The Benefits of Implementing a CRM–
Reduce Time Spent on Admin Tasks : Time is wasted when users have to manually enter contact information into a system or dig through an email inbox for specific account details. When a new lead is entered into a CRM, it can trigger the assignment of a series of tasks automatically like scheduling a follow-up call, reviewing the website, sending newsletters etc.
How CRM Improving efficieny of MEdia & advertising industry!
Improves Productivity : A CRM tool makes manual tasks obsolete, which helps to improve resources productivity. Rather than spending time manually adding each tasks, team members can use their time to execute on their assignments and they would rather focus their energy on client activities than on administrative tasks.
Identify Buying Motives of Customer : A CRM can frame a lead’s needs and pain points through its inception point’s behaviors. Once you identify the buying behavior of customers, you can then concentrate on matching your offerings/product’s benefits which matches to your buyer’s true motive. For example you can pinpoint to your prospect’s problems through content marketing solutions, like blogs, articles, Online surveys, questionnaire or downloadable resources and by analysing their surfing trends later. This enables the marketing team to understand where to focus future strategy and the sales team to create follow-up strategies to those pain points and ultimately win more business.
In-depth Prospect & Client Profiling : Information needs to be shared and accessible across an organization because silos can create gaps that result in lost information. So anyone that interacts with a prospect needs to be able to quickly reference a complete profile of who that person is, his history with the organization and what others from the team have already discussed with him from a centralized location. A CRM gives a single information source, in which changes and updates are reflected immediately and used effectively.
Nurture Leads & Boosting Sales Pipeline : Not every lead is going to be ready to convert and start a project when they first visit a website but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be converted into clients. Using client information that is housed in a CRM, sales professionals can create a plan to strategically communicate with a potential client, slowly building a relationship based on trust. This lead nurturing and management will make for a continuous flow of business.
Track Team performance : Using in-built capabilities to monitor team activities, set targets, ensure accountability, track achievements, and reward high performers one can easily track the team performance and map the right resources with right competency for the right task.
Integration of Social Media Data : Every action people take online creates data. Each interaction, email signup, survey question and social engagement helps you learn more about your target audience and create customized online experiences that can influence sales pipeline. By integrating CRM data with social data, you can enhance your ad targeting to reach your audience more effectively.
Effective Documentation of Business processes : Any business strategy be it marketing, Advertising or Sales first starts as a thought in a professional’s mind, and later find its way on a piece of paper. But scaling the sales strategy through word of mouth is not exactly effective. To be the most useful, all that information has to be built into a system that documents the stages, the activities, and when you’re supposed to do them. Implementing a CRM helps you in defining the sales stages which not only helps to firm up the process for the current team working on any project, but also for future resources and forecasting.
Automates and Reduces Data Entry : CRM systems help streamline and reduce the amount of data entry that sales professional have to perform on a daily basis. With syncing and auto-population features CRM lessens or eliminate enormous amount of typing, copying, and pasting around the burden of spreadsheet data entry.
Improved Forecasting : By implementing a CRM software organizations can dramatically increase the accuracy of their reporting and forecasting. Instead of using Excel formulas or manual calculations, a CRM system automatically assigns the proper value to a deal based on what stage it’s in.
To achieve above mentioned benefits and to be in the market in this competitive era of business an efficient, effective and smart CRM solution is required by every Media/Advertising Industry. But what are the features of a good CRM which can compete with all the necessary challenges of market and Industry trends ?
A good CRM can be the backbone of any business to manage opportunities and deliver consistent business value and results to the end customers. It also gives the ability to track, engage and report on opportunities to the team to have a clear picture of the business. Our Clients & Professionals using our CRM implementation services witnessed an overall increase in sales after implementation. CRM implementation makes it possible to manage the sales pipeline more efficiently and effectively, from opportunity to prospect then to customer ultimately leading to more sales, more upsells, and better long-term customer retention. Plus, when sales is integrated with day-to-day business, you get a better picture of the overall health of your business.
If you are a Media/Advertising company that would like to integrate an efficient CRM solution into your Marketing & Sales processes a good suggestion is to take professional advice from a CRM Expert who can explain you which kind of CRM Solution is most suitable to your business. You may avail consulting services from Advanz101 Business Systems. Alternatively, if you want a professional to work with you one-on-one, Advanz101 Consulting is what you need to hire a consultant to get the job done.
