How seamless are your Salesforce CRM integrations for ad operations

Gartner forecasts that by 2021, CRM will be the biggest revenue area of spending on enterprise software. With targets for sales and profitability, how do you translate the streams of data from both ad servers and billing software into your customer relationship? This raises the question of how seamless your Salesforce CRM integration is with the rest of your ad operations tech.

Publishers working in ad sales moving from legacy advertising technologies, delegating online programmatic inventory to ad servers and exchanges. However, ad operations professionals have a hard time trusting completely any order management system for ad booking, and tracking multiple channels and sources as they require a comprehensive overview of both the inventory and media packages they offer customers, agencies and advertisers.

In the end, ad operations not only need a simple CRM to manage their accounts but a full-process integration in the back end, to automate their entire workflow of interlocking servers, ERPs and financial tools. Those looking to integrate and make the most of ad servers and programmatic networks such as Google DFP (now Google Ad Manager), Freewheel or AppNexus need to make sure that the choices they have as a CRM and an OMS helps them make the most of them, and is easy for them to manage out of a single tool.

Sophisticated CRM systems not only track and manage client accounts and contacts but also forecast sales. Salesforce is implemented with the aim of integrating reporting, offering visibility in ongoing projects, and process controls.

However, too many lengthy procedures and installation of multiple software usually make the operational procedures complicated, and often at the expense of their effectiveness.

Here’s how to ensure that your Salesforce CRM integration with ad operations is seamless.

1. Ensure Native Salesforce Application

Salesforce AppExchange has many options available to automate sales with third-party productivity software. But many ask what is the difference between a software that is native to Salesforce and one that is not.

What is a native Salesforce application? Native Salesforce was created out of force.com, and stores all data in a single place, with a similar look and feel to Salesforce and a range of built-in tools to build custom dashboards and reports.

Non-native applications are excellent and responsive, but they don’t necessarily get all the functions from salesforce, as they work out of their own security and management features, as well as storing data in other third-party servers.

Why is it important? The manual billing and selling of digital ads are not only tedious but also inefficient. Ad operations spend a lot of time acquiring and entering the data in multiple places. You can consolidate client data by integrating the Salesforce CRM with data management platforms (DMPs).

2. Set Up a Comprehensive Sales Reporting System

Over the years, we have listened to countless ad operations professionals requesting a strong ad reporting software integration to information from their CRM, looking to leverage their multi-channel inventory management with in-kind reporting capabilities, to track different servers, ad server platforms, targeting insight and in-house information, as well as financial records.

They’d rather have this available in the cloud rather than exporting them, mashing them together and working them out of a spreadsheet.

• How comprehensive are the line items that it brings out?
• How comprehensive and understandable is the bidding data coming out of an exchange server?
• Do you have to go back and forth between applications to have a bigger picture?

3. Assure your Salesforce CRM is Flexible to Your Ad Units

Most CRM programs have plenty of features. Such features offer a wide range of range of capabilities useful for diverse industries including shipping, manufacturing, healthcare, and consumer packaged goods, not forgetting media and publishing.

We realize that ad operations in publishing and broadcasting are one of a kind, and you must tailor your software to your particular ad specs and product configurations. You may be even considering developing a solution in-house, so you can customize it to your channels, internal workflows and interact with billing automation, commission tracking software, invoice generation, data analytics, and native advertising tools.

A common misconception is thinking that the only way to tailor your workflows is going in-house rather than looking for off-the-shelf advertising management software.

How many data sources are you working from?

One of the benefits of working out of a CRM built natively in Salesforce is that companies work out of a single database that feeds the rest of the management resources, reducing errors and duplications. Publishers across business units such as subscriptions or supply chain can make sure that they work out of the same information, preventing issues with the export and import to other ERPs and resource managers.

Vertical CRMs are also easy to customize. They use the CRM database to extract information and then leverages it to support automated processes and workflows specific to your work demands.

4. Upgrade Systems Continuously

Working with a resource manager developed in-house requires assigning considerable resources to its constant upgrade and improvement processes.

The publishing and advertising industry constantly review its processes to comply with the latest standards, and best practices for GDPR, programmatic guaranteed or header bidding technologies.

Working out of a native application is useful and nurturing. Both the native and the custom developer are constantly upgrading and scaling up their offer. Most importantly, as they serve large numbers of customers and accounts across various industries, they have teams exclusively dedicated to running these upgrades, as they are part of a community of developers sharing best practices in development ensures the security of your data.

Why Ensure Seamless integration Between Your Salesforce CRM and Ad sales?

What does seamlessly mean? It means that you’re linking your Salesforce CRM, your order processing software and the rest of the information from your ad tech stack accurately and that all these items are configured and connected to effectively automate your workflow in the most painstaking tasks, saving time in processing orders, dealing with emergencies and revising errors.

Without an accurate setup, your teams must go back and forth between platforms.

Originally published at www.advendio.com on November 30, 2018.