Break the Excel Cycle

You’re a sales planner at a leading digital media company. It’s 5 o’clock, you’ve haven’t eaten lunch, and you still have two plans due EOD. The good news is that you’re experienced, and you know that copying and pasting from the last proposal is “good enough” to get the job done. The bad news is that everyone else on your team does the same thing, and when plans live in Excel spreadsheets, your business starts to go off the rails. Campaigns run into delivery issues, Sales is constantly second-guessing the pipeline, and Ad Ops scrambles to pick up the pieces.

Getting out of this “Excel Cycle” is harder than you might think. It’s human nature to follow the path of least resistance, and when you’re stretched thin and always under a deadline, it’s easy to cut corners and worry about the consequences later. And when resources are being diverted into managing campaign performance issues, there are even fewer resources that could be focussed on building smarter plans that avoid many of these issues in the first place. It’s a negative feedback loop that traps many publishers who manage a high volume of direct campaigns.

So how do you break the Excel Cycle? You first have to start managing all proposals through a system that accounts for the full pipeline, so new proposals have the most up-to-date forecast information and goals can be allocated accurately. Of course, getting your entire organization to start entering proposals into the system in the pre-sale phase is easier said than done. The planner often has to fill out a nightmare agency template, and it’s simply not feasible to enter every detail into the system, especially when the proposal may not sell. Even publishers who recognize the importance of capturing their pre-sale data still have a backlog of media plans that get entered later or sometimes not at all.

The only viable way to achieve the necessary workflow is to take the burden off the sales planner and allow the system to do the heavy lifting. The system shouldn’t be another repository for data entry, but instead should drive the decisions in the proposal creation process. A system that can automate this process doesn’t just capture the data in real-time, but will build smarter proposals using algorithms and data, rather than a sales planner’s best guess.

If you can imagine a system that builds accurate media plans with just a few user inputs like the advertiser, flight dates, budget, and targeting parameters, then you can imagine a world where your pipeline is updated in real-time, campaigns run into fewer delivery issues, and your sales and operations teams can focus on more worthwhile business objectives. Our whitepaper, The Next-Generation Order Management System, explains in greater detail how the order management system can automate this process and get publishers out of the Excel Cycle.