The Top Operational Challenges for Local TV Selling

Too Many Manual Processes

Your sellers don’t want to spend time manually inputting information related to proposals and orders. It’s inefficient and prone to error. If your sellers are busy doing this, they aren’t out there selling. Automating parts of the sales process can reduce the time it takes to complete an avail, proposal and order from hours to minutes.

With a sales platform built for local TV selling, you can:

• Convert a proposal to an order automatically
• Access real-time avails and rates
• Accelerate order review and approval

There’s no need to duplicate efforts, which means you save time and improve accuracy. An integration with your traffic system enables real-time access without sellers having to log in to those systems. If sellers must exit the system to find information, the possibility of errors and distraction can be elevated and cause numerous challenges around productivity and accuracy. If one system is all they need, they’ll zip through the process without distractions.

Another tool that eliminates manual work is the ability to generate exception reporting, so sales managers only have to focus on reviewing those versus going line by line.

The “What’s the Right Price?” Conundrum

Optimizing every spot ad rate is the key to more top-line revenue. To deliver the “right price,” you must leverage real-time data regarding avails and demand. While some media companies practice this with yield management, it’s not always accurate or automated. Only platforms that deliver real-time inventory data to price spots will maximize the spots’ value. When you have an effective solution like this, you have dynamic pricing, which is the real-time segment of yield management.

Standard yield management may only update weekly. If you’re working with week-old data, it’s hard to achieve optimization at scale because sellers may inadvertently offer pricing or spots no longer available. The ability to maximize revenue declines further for those not using these strategies. Pricing shouldn’t be this complicated or time-consuming, and it isn’t when you have the proper functionality. You should also be able to set floors, ceilings and discount tolerances by salesperson to avoid over-discounting.

Inability to Create Multimarket Proposals

If your organization covers multiple markets, you likely have operational hurdles. Thus, you’ll need a system that allows for multimarket linear proposals. Such a feature is nonexistent in most TV sales platforms, but it is highly effective for certain advertising categories, like political. If this feature is available, it saves time, improves avail visibility, integrates workflows and optimizes all spots related to the buy.

Workflows Create Too Much Work for Your Sellers

The big picture of operational challenges includes highly fragmented and disjointed workflows. Sellers must use multiple platforms, so their workflow is terribly broken and their attention fragmented. Sales order management shouldn’t be a burden, but most legacy platforms don’t align with the process. Ideally, your sellers should be able to do all these things in one system:

• Generate proposals
• Automate order creation
• Import orders and proposals if needed
• Provide access to converged inventory
• Create custom packages

Reporting on Campaigns and Seller Performance Is Elusive

Another operational challenge for local TV selling is reporting and analytics. If you use multiple systems, you must aggregate this data either manually or by integration. Some software won’t let you retrieve your data without a hefty price tag. Further, most only provide one type of reporting — at either the campaign level or by seller. The reality is that you need both to have all the business intelligence necessary to make better decisions regarding performance. Don’t let restrictions around data access prevent you from managing pipelines and campaigns more effectively.