How CloudSense made cross-media ad sales simple on Salesforce for a leading US Digital Media Group

A note on our anonymous case studies

Our customers can't always share the inner workings of their tech, or the numbers behind their business. 

But we still have some great stories to tell. Stories that might resonate with you and your business. 

So, the story you’re about to read is from one of our customers, as are the quotes and results within it. We’ve just kept the company and any employees’ identity under wraps. Enjoy.

The background

Our customer has multiple Media groups, all of which are leading providers of news and information in their respective markets. Its diverse Media portfolio has allowed the company to weather evolving channels and changing content consumption to retain and grow its audience.

This enduring popularity means the Media group is in demand with advertisers trying to reach a high-quality customer base. But, to ensure customers could continue to effectively engage audiences across every channel, in 2017, the Media group started a project to streamline and simplify its ad sales processes. 

The business needed a platform that offered seamless cross-media advertising sales on Salesforce. CloudSense was the perfect fit.

We spoke to the Media group’s VP of Revenue Operations, as well as its Director of Digital Operations, to find out why they set out on the project, plus the results the group has seen since implementing CloudSense.

Past challenges

Before the project, the Media group had already invested in Salesforce. But its previous non-native Media solution, coupled with custom in-house processes, wasn’t making the most of the platform’s potential. 

A disconnected sales journey

The use of multiple disjointed applications led to a reliance on manual swivel chair processes – where sales and ad operations had to switch between screens to complete the sales journey.

“Our sales reps and local operations had to navigate between different applications. So we had multiple screens open to get a piece of the journey completed on application A, and then moved to a different application to continue the journey. It was a disconnected sales journey,” explained the Director of Digital Operations.

Onboarding & orders slowed by complexity

The inherent complexity of the sales journey made both onboarding and training challenging.

On top of this, the number of systems involved to place an order slowed the sales process. 

The VP of Revenue Operations told us, “We needed something that would get us from point A to point B and get campaigns live faster than our existing systems.”

“It was a pretty laborious process when someone changed products or migrated from one ad experience to another. When you’re in the middle of a current campaign that requires a lot of rework and so we wanted to streamline that.”

Time consuming & costly maintenance

Meanwhile the customization, maintenance and manual processes associated with multiple apps was unnecessarily expensive and time-consuming.

“Our tech team was really having to work hard to support a number of different integrations,” commented the VP.

Why CloudSense fit the bill

Before selecting CloudSense, the group was already in the midst of an Order Management project. But a more strategic outlook, along with the challenges we’ve outlined, led the publishers to take a closer look at CloudSense.

The VP of Revenue Operations noted:

“As a business we’re leaning in hard towards being more thoughtful and strategic. Both in terms of how we leverage Salesforce, and to find ways to potentially simplify our ad stack and our tech stack. We saw that CloudSense had the capabilities, features and functions that we can leverage out of the box that might be really meaningful to us organizationally.”

The Director of Digital Operations continued, “I think there was also a big push in our organization to really be more native in Salesforce. And CloudSense really fit that criteria very well.”

With a strong team of Salesforce developers, by choosing CloudSense the Media group could also use their own talent to help build and produce the system.

Simplifying and centralizing ad sales on Salesforce

By combining CloudSense’s native media-specific Order Management and fulfillment, with Salesforce’s CRM, order history, data and analytics, our customer now has an auditable, automated and streamlined cross-media ad sales hub.

“CloudSense and Salesforce combine to give us the platform we need to deliver, and optimize, the end-to-end advertising sales cycle. By joining-up our print and digital ad sales with CloudSense, we now have a single advertising hub on Salesforce,” said the Director of Digital Operations. 

Sales and ad operations teams now have more visibility and control over ad campaigns, empowering them to offer a better customer experience. 

From 15 swivel chair processes to one platform

With a central ad hub, and automated processes, the Media group has hugely reduced its previous challenges stemming from swivel chair processes.

Rather than switching systems up to 15 times to complete a sales journey, cross-media orders can now be completed from Salesforce using CloudSense’s bi-directional integration to Google Ad Manager.

“With CloudSense, campaign information flows automatically from our existing order entry experience into Google Ad Manager,” commented the VP of Revenue Operations. 

This has made orders faster, more accurate and easier to report – leading to both happier employees and customers. 

Seamless in-flight changes

CloudSense’s Google Ad Manager integration ensures ad operations can optimize campaigns directly, with in-flight changes seamlessly flowing in real-time to Salesforce. 

This saves re-work time for the ad operations team. These time savings, increased accuracy and efficiency are again passed on to customers to deliver a better experience. 

Unified processes across markets

Working across markets meant that, in the past, the Media group’s processes had market specific nuances or variations. Using CloudSense is helping usher in a uniform flow for the first time, to bring a unified process across every market. 

“We've been able to really simplify our product catalog and overall taxonomy by leveraging the system,” said the VP of Revenue Operations. This simplified system not only makes for easier training and onboarding, but is empowering the business to get the most from its teams. 

The Director of Digital Operations elaborated, “I would also add that a tool like CloudSense puts us in a position to reimagine our operational structure, because it pulls a lot of the teams and how they're structured today closer to each other. This lets us rethink a more efficient design of how all these ops teams work together in CloudSense.”

Better employee experience = better customer experience

When we asked the impact CloudSense has had so far for the Media group, the VP of Revenue Operations summarized:

“CloudSense creates simplicity for our sales organizations – which I'd say ultimately, is creating a better experience for the selling organization, a better customer experience and a better experience for our operations team.”