In the space of 20 years, customer relationship management (CRM) software has indeed become an indispensable part of sales teams and the media and advertising agencies have not been spared this trend. Of course, there is a plethora of CRM on the market: business CRM, generic CRM, …. Therefore, how do you know which one to choose when you are an advertising agency or a media company? What steps should be taken when setting up such a project? Discover our explanations in this article.
Media, identify your needs.
First of all, before committing to the choice of your CRM, it is necessary to frame your project. By defining your needs and asking yourself many questions, you will establish clear and concise specifications.
Define your business
- What is the size of your company? Indeed, between a multinational group with a hundred subsidiaries and managing many media and a medium-sized advertising agency, the need will be completely different.
- What is the annual turnover of your company?
- What is the size of your sales team?
- How many users are involved in the CRM project?
- Which teams should have access to it (finance, support, sales, management …)?
Indicate the specificities of the activity of your media.
- Do you need software that shares a common repository with your ad booking software?
- Who are your clients? How have you structured them? (adaptation of clients / advertisers / advertiser group, mandates to be published,…)
Specify your project
- Who will implement the project, who will supervise it, who should be consulted and who should be informed?
- How long does it take to go live?
- What is the budget you wish to allocate?
- What functionalities should it cover? (emailing, appointment follow-up, generation and sending of quotes,…)
- What benefits do you expect? (Increase in sales, better traceability of contacts, better follow-up of the sales team, etc.)
- Do you need a tool that connects to your other software? (Email, reservation and billing software, …). For this, we invite you to prioritize the software that must be connected to your CRM. Indeed, choosing a tool that connects to your advertising space reservation and invoicing tools is essential to reduce your sales cycles and facilitate your transactions because it will facilitate the daily work of your sales representatives.
Determine your objectives and KPIs
For a media, the CRM must fulfill certain objectives.
- Accelerate the sales process: with COVID, it is essential to accelerate sales. By equipping yourself with a CRM, you can better track your prospects and customers and you know who to call at what time. However, it is necessary to equip yourself with a CRM that can facilitate the customer relationship and adapt to its specificities.
- Simplify sales: Selling advertising is a unique business activity that requires, among other things, consulting your booking software quickly. This saves you time in creating your quotes based on your inventory, rates and discounts in your contracts.
- Secure sales: It is essential to have complete visibility on your campaigns from the request for quote to the invoicing because you will know exactly who you need to follow up and when to do it.
To measure the return on investment of the CRM implementation, you can track some key KPIs such as:
- The number of campaigns sold,
- The average length of your sales cycle,
- The number of leads generated,
- The turnover and its evolution since the implementation,
- The number of appointments booked by your sales representatives, …
Choosing your CRM
Once you have finalized your specifications, you can then contact providers and select a CRM.
Selection criteria
Once this first step has been completed, your selection criteria will be easy to establish. As an advertising agency, here is a non-exhaustive list of selection criteria that you can take into account:
- The price: you must do everything possible to respect your budget.
- Simplicity and efficiency of use
- The support and training offered
- Connection to your reservation software
- Time to set up
General CRM or Specialized CRM?
As a media company, is it better to use a generic CRM (Hubspot CRM, SalesForce, SugarCRM, ..) or a business CRM (MediaCRM, Aloha, ..)?
General CRM
Avantages:
- A multitude of features available.
Drawbacks:
- Sometimes you have so many features and possibilities that your CRM can become a gas factory, being under-used, or not used at all, by sales people.
- The integration budget can be higher because of the need to customize screens and develop interfaces with the rest of the client’s advertising IS
Specialized CRM
Avantages:
- You work with people who know your business and the issues specific to your industry.
- With a specialized CRM, you have a turnkey solution with an interface already configured for your specificities.
Drawbacks:
- It may be necessary to use the advertising space reservation software connected to the specialized CRM.
Mistakes to avoid when implementing a CRM
To conclude, we would like to share with you some best practices to follow when you are an advertising agency with a CRM implementation project.
Indeed, we offer a CRM dedicated to media and sales house, and during the many installations of MediaCRM, we have seen the best practices to follow.
- The CRM must be adapted to your needs and respect the practices of your industry (including the type of advertisers, groups of advertisers, management of mandates, …)
- The teams must be involved in the project to understand the added value. You can use the RACI method which is very effective for this kind of project.
- Sales teams need to be trained and supported in order to master the software and drive adoption.
- The CRM must be accessible remotely so that salespeople can work from home or from their meeting places.
- The data must be up to date. To do this, nothing could be simpler: just update it as you go along. There is nothing more frustrating for a sales person than having to spend a full day just before your monthly reporting meeting.
- Use the data produced by its CRM to support your sales meetings because your sales teams will be much more involved and motivated to update their current transactions.
Finally, if you want to know more about the implementation of such a project, we invite you to watch the replay of our webinar “CRM in the media”. Finally, you can also consult our product page Media CRM, our CRM connected to Media Pilot.
