October is one of my favorite months of the year. The weather starts to get a little cooler, giving a much-needed reprieve from the heat here in Texas. It’s the perfect time to grab a cup of steaming tea and settle down on the couch to watch my favorite classic Halloween movies or check out the newest releases (Hocus Pocus 2, anyone?). Yards start transforming into something out of this world as people start decorating their homes with spider webs, skeletons, and carved pumpkins. Adults and children alike get to dress up as their favorite characters – be it a Marvel superhero, a Disney princess, or creepy creatures that you’d find in a horror movie.
While the ghouls, zombies, and werewolves we see during the month of October may not be real, there are plenty of spooky things that we can come face-to-face with in our daily lives. For those who deal with ad sales, having the right tools and processes can be the difference between dealing with Casper the Friendly Ghost who wants to help you or the Sanderson Sisters, who might be there to steal your soul.
In this blog post, we share some of the spooky situations you’ll want to avoid when dealing with ad sales – so you don’t have to deal with anyone trying to take your soul from you.
Isolated tools that don’t speak to each other
When businesses have isolated tools that don’t speak to each other, it leads to inefficiency, unaccountability, and wasted time. In a best-case scenario, it increases the probability of duplicating efforts and human error. In the worst-case scenarios, it prevents your team from having full visibility into your sales tunnel and pipeline – leading to lost opportunities.
By adopting an integrated platform, you can bring everything together from tracking leads to order management to job costing to reporting. Getting this 360-view of the sales cycle from start to finish gets all the necessary departments on the same page and allows information to effortlessly flow between them.
> Learn How Farm Journal identified a funnel of 531 known sales opportunities when launching Naviga Ad
A lack of buy-in from the sales team in using your CRM the right way
One of the big steps to streamlining ad sales is implementing an order management system to help track orders and opportunities. But if you don’t have full buy-in from your sales team to use it the right way, then you’ll lose full insights into available opportunities.
In fact, a study by CSO Insights in 2018 shared that more formalized CRM processes lead to bigger returns. Out of companies with 75% adoption, those with formal sales processes saw win rates of 61% on deals they were forecast to close and met their quota 70% of the time compared to 47% and 48% for those without formalized processes.
No complete view to help improve customer personalization when selling
If you can’t see what your clients are doing, then it makes it hard to personalize their sales journey and provide them with what they need at the time they need it. Have they increased or decreased spending? Did someone new join their team? What product would be of the most interest to them at this exact moment in time?
The best way to improve the sales journey is to fuel your tech stack and adopt a platform that allows you to focus on your customer relationships with quality data and reports. With that information, you can provide a better experience to offer your customers the right products and opportunities that they would want to invest in – ultimately enabling your sales teams to close better deals.
Lack of confidence from sales leaders in their forecasts
According to a 2020 report by Gartner, only 45% of sales leaders and sellers have high confidence in their organization’s forecasting accuracy. With those numbers, it’s more important than ever to adopt a solution that provides accurate forecasting insights and reality checks.
As with adopting CRM processes, the more formal your forecasting approach, the better opportunity you have to improve your sales win rates. Changing your forecasting approach from subjective & casual to formal & structured can raise win rates from 50% to 63%.
No strategy to deal with the loss of 3rd party data (cookies)
One of the biggest changes in digital advertising is the demise of 3rd party data, or cookies. The change is understandable – privacy is important. But this does have a big effect on targeted ad campaigns. Just like the ghosts in a haunted house, you’ll know traffic is there but you won’t be able to get any insights into their behavior or demographics. This takes away from personalizing ad experiences.
In order to make the most of this shift, you’ll want to ensure that your team has a strategy to gather first party data. One way to do this is to adopt cookieless targeting strategies that allow you to reach users in the right frame of mind. Without insights into third party data, direct engagement will be the most valuable for your business.
Avoid these five spooky situations and everything will fall right into place as you optimize your business for success. In a way, it kind of makes you like Scooby-Doo and those meddling kids. You’ve unmasked the scary creature that was terrorizing the town, and found it is something much more manageable that won’t get in the way of your success.
Interested in learning more? Contact us today to learn how Naviga can help you avoid haunting situations like these.