The following is a Q&A with our Customer Success Team around what a Ad Sales Company using Copper should consider.
How might an ad sales team use leads, people, companies and/or opportunities?
Lead: A pre-qualified contact that represents a prospective client (individual and/or company) who may need advertising services. Met through networking, marketing, conventions, etc. Lead statuses represent the process to qualify the lead for the advertising pitch.
People: Existing clients related to the Company that you have or are currently doing business with. Prospective clients who are or have considered your advertising pitch
Companies: Companies that you have or are currently doing business with. Companies that represent Prospective clients who are considering or have considered your advertising pitch. These could also represent be vendors or partners.
Opportunities: The steps of the presentation/pitch and contract process. The high level steps of the production/fulfillment process.
How will an ad sales company structure its pipeline?
Multiple pipelines can benefit this use case. You might have one to track a pitch or track production/fulfillment. Let's look at how you might structure each:
In your 'Pitch' pipeline, you could have the following stages: Qualified > Meeting Scheduled > Meeting Held > Follow Up > Negotiation > Contract Sent
In this 'Pitch' pipeline, you could treat the closure of an opportunity as follows:
Won = Client approves pitch and agrees to Service contract.
Lost = Client decides against using Services at this time. Potential client options still open.
Abandoned = client has gone radio silent and potential options do not exist.
In your 'Production/Fulfillment' pipeline, you could have the following stages: Planning > Execution > Delivery. These are high-level suggestions, and you might want to add more.
What custom fields should an ad sales company add to records?
We'd recommend considering the following custom fields for each record type:
Person
Person Type - Dropdown
Role (for filtering purposes) - Dropdown
Company
Entity/Organization Type - Dropdown
Industry - Dropdown
Advertising Type Needs - Multi-Select Dropdown
Opportunity
Advertising Budget (we recommend making this required)
Project Type
How should an ad sales company structure its teams and visibility permissions?
You might organize your teams as follows:
business development
account management
creative
With regard to visibility, consider the following:
Email: Likely a collaborative environment between departments mentioned above, leave visibility open.
Records: Same as above except for sensitive contacts such as legal, accounting, HR, etc.
Reports: Ad Sales by Industry, Project Type.
What reports should as ad sales team pay attention to?
As a manager, you might like the following in-app reports:
User Activity: See client outreach related to the Pitch process.
Sales by Source: See where your Opportunities are coming from to help factor the expense of marketing to those Sources.
Pipeline Projection Report by Value: See incoming revenue of Open Opp in the Pitch Pipeline
As a manager, you might consider creating the following custom report:
Timeline from Lead to Opportunity Close in the Pitch Pipeline to determine the average length of the Pitch Process.
As an individual salesperson, you might like the following in-app reports:
Pipeline Summary for reviewing individual sales in the pitch pipeline
Pipeline Projection Report by Count for tracking how many Production Opps are in certain stages for Project Management purposes.
What integrations could benefit an ad sales company?
You might consider using Zapier to do the following:
Create an opportunity in the 'Production/Fulfillment' pipeline when an opportunity is won in the 'Pitch' pipeline.
Still have questions?
Still have questions? Ask in our Community, and get answers from our Customer Success Team as well as fellow users.