Building a Template for Your Media Sales Project Delivery
Organizations face significant challenges in aligning their sales teams with the teams that deliver media solutions for clients. You can tune these systems by building a template for improved media sales project delivery.
Selling media and related solutions – whether marketing creative, content development, strategy, ad space, or data – requires that one or more teams deliver individual parts of the work. That requires a lot of coordination and collaboration.
To make it more complicated, the sales team often sells with limited input from the teams that deliver, signing the organization up to client expectations that may not consider operational realities, like:
- Availability and cost of vendors to provide input on deliverables
- Turnaround times on creative
- Other nuances of the production process
These create significant problems for sales and production teams and can lead to unmet client expectations, issues with client retention, or cost overruns in production that reduce profitability.
To coordinate your sales and marketing teams and create a positive customer experience, there are four steps you can follow to build media sales project delivery templates.
But first, let’s review the advantages of the improved delivery of media sales projects and the use of templates.
Advantages of Better Media Sales Project Delivery
The most significant benefits of better media sales project delivery are productivity related. Teams discover that these systems provide them with more effective planning, speedy work execution, better project tracking, and easier team collaboration.
One of the keys to overcoming the issues sales teams face when selling media and related solutions is to enable sales and production to collaborate more effectively. It is especially essential in the latter stages of the sales cycle and beyond.
Everyone benefits by providing visibility into the sales and delivery pipeline. Let’s break these down by teams (and others who benefit):
Sales Teams
You can better position the sales team to gain vital insights and inputs from production during the sales cycle. Sales benefits from visibility into the production process, timelines, etc. That way, they can set reasonable client expectations.
Setting reasonable expectations with customers impacts their experience with the company. Roughly 72% of customers share good experiences with others and 57% will buy from a competitor if they offer a better experience.
Production Teams
Production benefits by being more aware of projects coming down the pipeline. That allows them to weigh in appropriately regarding the project details and plan resources for optimal delivery.
It also allows them to communicate with the sales team about how long a project should take. This coordination is another way sales can set client expectations.
Clients
Clients are the ultimate beneficiaries of better media sales project delivery. They get a more enjoyable experience with greater transparency and clear expectations.
Executives and Management
Executives and managers also benefit because they can gain insight into revenue recognition from planned media placements, deliverable timelines, etc. When you manage media and marketing projects in programs like Salesforce, you can improve these insights for better decision-making.
Purpose of a Media Sales Project Delivery Template
By incorporating templates for these project deliverables, collaboration and communication between the sales team and the production team can improve. Media production teams can gain long-term efficiency.
Every project template has a structure your teams can tweak and repurpose for other projects. Also, by using templates for media sales project delivery, your team can refine processes for better decision-making.
The longer your teams use the template, the better outcomes they’ll have throughout the sales cycle.
How to Build a Media Sales Project Template
These templates will help your teams by providing a clear framework for each project. Here are the steps for building a media sales project template:
1. Define Deliverables
When developing your template, make sure that you set a field for describing the type of deliverable the production team is creating. Projects include:
- Email marketing
- Content marketing (blogs, press releases, etc.)
- Pay-per-click (PPC) ads
- Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Product launches
Media projects may also include new marketing strategies for brands. Clearly defining what the project is will ensure teams take the appropriate actions.
2. Divide Up the Project Tasks
Next, you will want to break the project up into tasks and assign each of those tasks among members of the production team. Certain campaigns will require expertise from various team members.
Make sure you divide the project accordingly. For example, you don’t want to assign a series of blogs to a graphic designer. You want to have your writers work on these deliverables.
3. Select a Project Management Tool
To build a template for media sales project delivery, you’ll want to ensure that your teams can collaborate in one place so that each department isn’t using a different tool.
Your teams will need a digital experience platform (DXP) software. These can be integrated into your CRM programs, like Salesforce. The various applications available within the software will allow teams to communicate more efficiently depending on the task.
4. Outline Timeframes and Budgets
Lastly, your template must include timelines and pricing guidelines. Part of setting realistic expectations with clients is making sure your teams meet deadlines and do so for the price quoted to the client.
Include this information in your template so that sales know what to tell clients. Also, production knows what budget they must work with.
Setting Up Your Sales and Media Production Teams for Success
If you are using a CRM like Salesforce and want to integrate it into current systems and processes, Rainmaker can help. Our team of consultants can walk you through the process and set up all your teams for success.
We can help you create effective templates so your sales teams can coordinate with your media production teams for improved project deliverables.
For more information and to book some time with one of our consultants, contact us today.
