Everyone knows that time is money. With the media landscape becoming ever-more complex for both Publishers and Ad Tech companies, this problem has never been more relevant. And with this complexity comes the potential for teams to get distracted with non-core activities. Let’s say you have 50 sellers generating $100M a year - every hour of your sellers is worth $1,000 in revenue. If you could get them more time how much incremental revenue could you get?
A study by the Alexander Group found that media sellers spend 40% less time on Engaged Selling activities than peers across other industries. These activities include prospecting, presenting, negotiating and closing (ie., things crucial to top line revenue). Sellers are too often consumed with internal issues, reporting, campaign delivery, etc. Studies on other roles like Planners, Account Managers and Ad Ops show they aren’t spending time on the highest value activities either. Everyone across the sales organization is bogged down with manual, tedious work. This lost time equals higher operational costs and lower revenues. So, how do you get this back on track?
You need to systematically attack this problem in a data driven way. These 5 steps have been proven in leading media organizations to make significant improvements. Follow them and start increasing team productivity today.
- Baseline - determine the baseline time spent by role. A “time motion” study is ideal, but most organizations don’t have the capabilities to do this. Therefore, a comprehensive survey across all roles and across all pre & post sales activities is the quickest way to find the big issues as well as insights into how people are spending their time. A lot of times, this will surface people spending too much time in unexpected places.
- Analyze Results - from the survey, analyze results for patterns by role, team, location, channel, etc. This will point you in the direction of the issues. Review the results with focus groups to verify the findings and dig deeper as to what’s causing people to spend their time doing non-core activities.
- Build a Plan - pick 1 or 2 areas per role that will have the biggest impact. A great tool for selecting these is a two-by-two grid comparing Benefit and Effort; this will show where to start – High Value and Low Effort is the magic quadrant. If this requires cross-functional support in your organization, shop this project with functional leaders to get buy-in on the proposal.
- Execute - once the initiative list is agreed, choose small teams to own the solutions - give them the required resources and authority to make changes. Make sure there’s a lead driving this across the organization who’s responsible to remove roadblocks.
- Measure - once the changes have been implemented re-survey the people again to measure if there was an improvement and how big it was. Follow up with focus groups to assess how much more improvement can be obtained, at what cost and lessons for change management. Or if the results aren’t achieved, dig in and adjust.
And don’t forget to celebrate the wins. It’s fun and motivating to retire old processes, spreadsheets and all other kinds of annoying activity. Plus the newly created capacity creates scale in a cost conscious environment. In a past life we ran this cadence annually as an input to annual planning for Sales & Revenue Ops Teams.
Every hour you save in each role can be reinvested in valuable revenue management activity. Contact us to get a copy of the survey. Boostr customers can reach out in app.
