Combining Your Pre- and Post-Sale Workflow

Publishers handle dozens of different responsibilities from the moment they receive the RFP to the moment they send the invoice, and the team structure around these responsibilities will vary from publisher to publisher. Generally, tasks will fall into two categories: pre-sale and post-sale. Some publishers have teams that are exclusively focussed on each area, with a pre-sale team handling the media plan and everything leading up to the receipt of the insertion order, and a post-sale team that manages the campaign and sees it through to completion. Other publishers combine these responsibilities and have one team that manages everything from start to finish. However you decide to structure your team, there are pros and cons to either approach.

With the combined approach, employees benefit from understanding the full campaign lifecycle. When the person who manages the campaign is the same person who builds the plan, that person learns the pitfalls that can occur during the campaign and knows how to avoid them during the planning phase. There’s also less likelihood for things to slip through the cracks during the transition from pre- to post-sale. The person who’s managing the campaign also has full ownership of its success or failure because they were involved at every stage. Lastly, it can be argued that having a variety of responsibilities keeps the job interesting and reduces the amount of turnover.

Breaking out your pre- and post-sale teams has its own benefits. By having dedicated teams for each area, you develop specialists who are arguably more efficient because they can focus on a limited set of tasks. Hiring and training for these specialized roles is also more efficient because there isn’t such a breadth of responsibilities.

While the case can be made for either approach, you’ll find that having separate teams is the more common structure at larger companies. As a publisher scales, the efficiency gains of a specialized team becomes greater and greater. However, with the development of more sophisticated software that can reduce the burden in the pre-sale phase, we may see more integrated teams in the future. When the pre-sale phase is largely automated, the post-sale team can oversee that process without sacrificing efficiency, and they can begin to regain some of the benefits that come with being involved in the full campaign lifecycle.