Not sure you’re looking at the best numbers or struggling to get the pulse of the weekly forecast? Is your ad sales team only looking at lagging indicators like fluctuations in delivery data? Or maybe you’re rebooting the weekly forecast and looking for best practices. Take a look at these 5 recommendations and see where new insights will help make your quarterly number. 1 – Week over Week (WoW) – try this metric with two dimensions – pipeline and revenue.
- Pipeline changes – this is a great metric for eyeballing sales activity by seller – are deals progressing, changing in value? As media deals move towards more in-quarter buying, deal cycle times are decreasing, making this metric invaluable in spotting potential upside (increasing velocity) or downside (stalled/pushed deals). And use this to measure the progress expected for next week.
- Revenue changes – this is a helpful indicator of weekly revenue progress – are new insertion orders delivering as expected, is programmatic revenue building into a nice run rate? Where’s the the revenue not delivering as expected so the team can dive in and get it back on track? This is a great metric to drive accountability for sold business across the organization.
2 – Year over Year (YoY) – does this sound familiar, it’s month three in the quarter and most teams are on pace to land somewhere between 95% – 99% to quota. Looking at quota achievement alone, while is important, doesn’t tell the whole story. While everyone wants to be over quota, setting quotas still has a lot of art along with the science, so how do you see trends in the business? By looking at the YoY growth it’s easy to see teams are performing well or not compared to last year. And as you dive deeper into this metric, it will spark fascinating questions uncovering opportunities in the business.3 – Campaign Start Dates – many media companies have unseen revenue leakage because client campaigns don’t start on time. Delays come from many sources whether it’s late creative, delays in signing IO’s, flighting the ads, etc. By knowing your average “time to launch” a campaign, you can reduce lost revenue by getting deals closed on time. Each week look at all the deals with upcoming start dates closing in on your “time to launch” window and discuss what it takes to get that deal in the door. Be watchful for early stage deals in the pipeline that are rapidly approaching the start date – either the CRM isn’t correct or revenue may be at risk.4 – Number of Deals Needed – knowing each seller or team’s gap to quota is table stakes, but does everyone know how many new pitches or deals will get them to their number? And which advertisers or agencies should we target? The sales team should be looking at this metric every week, discussing plans then assessing progress the following week. Two best practices with the metric are make it specific to each seller as not all books of business are the same and calcuate it every week given the dynamic nature of the business.5 – Next Quarter Pipeline Multiple – as you’re thinking about next quarter, do you wonder who does and doesn’t have enough pipeline to get to the number? Often next quarter’s pipeline is full of 10-25%er’s so its hard to tell. Enter the pipeline multiple metric – it’s a forward indicator of healthy pipeline size looking at the unweighted amount compared to the gap to quota. One company found their pipeline multiple was 2X and sellers with that multiple had a 70% chance of making the number historically. Surprisingly, slightly smaller multiples such as 1.5X and 1.75X had significantly lower chances of making the number. Why, they just couldn’t find as much in quarter business as those entering the quarter with the right sized pipeline.These metrics should give you a good starting list to discuss recommendations at the next sales leadership meeting. Some are easy, some are advanced. All require the right tools to automate and scale across the organization. Try a few and let us know how it goes. If you want help implementing these please contact us.
