New technologies have changed the way we do business. Companies have been forced to adjust to meet the rapid demands of a complex marketplace.

Advertising sales is no exception – the process of selling is harder than ever. Marketers are strategic when determining which formats they value. Not surprisingly, publishers have numerous products to sell, but need to know what is valued by the advertiser. Sales managers must easily see where their team is winning or losing deals, determine the size of the market, uncover new growth opportunities and deploy resources accordingly.

MediaRadar understands this landscape. They understand the changing needs of sales professionals. They understand the new sales workflow. MediaRadar serves media ad sales teams as an indispensable business partner.

ADAPTING TO A NEW ENVIRONMENT

As the market changed, MediaRadar has adapted too. The company is committed to playing an increasingly bigger role in helping ad sales people sell more advertising.

“The life of the sales rep is getting much harder,” says CEO and Co-founder Todd Krizelman. “For many people, 10 years ago, the job was much simpler. Today, if you’re in ad sales at a B2B media company, you’re a jack-of-all-trades. You have to sell email, display, mobile, event sponsorships and a print page. In consumer media, it’s not so different. There’s native, there’s mobile. The complexity is so much greater, and there’s a need to have a right hand to help you through it.”

This understanding has pushed evolution for MediaRadar. MediaRadar knows that along with the vast complexity of the salesperson’s job came the need to advise sellers. Salespeople don’t have the time to search databases. So MediaRadar does it for them and suggests qualified prospects.

More than that, MediaRadar identifies prospects, and then provides insights about that prospect’s buying patterns. The MediaRadar platform, Krizelman says, was designed and built with this functionality in mind. He suggests some real-world scenarios:

• If you’re a sales rep at a finance website, for example, it helps to know before you get on the phone with a prospect that they like, say, native advertising.
• Or perhaps a big e-commerce company only buys email advertising, because it likes the trackability and the accountability. A rep working on the MediaRadar platform would see a recommendation that says, ‘Be sure to talk about your email capabilities. That’s a great differentiator.’
• Another example, jewelry brand Tiffany buys advertising in video, TV, mobile, and email. And you sell all those assets on your platform.  MediaRadar will tell you this. Knowing what to pitch helps your success.
• Using MediaRadar, a rep can even show a prospect what their ad will look like on their prospect’s website.
• MediaRadar can quickly model out how you should complete an RFP for any advertiser.
• MediaRadar even includes a recommendation engine which easily shows reps exactly which brands they should prospect NOW and why.

“We are extremely solution-oriented,” Krizelman says. “We’re increasingly focused on giving specific advice and recommendations to salespeople. A lot of our clients say they have so little access to marketers and agencies that they need to know what’s important to agencies and prospects before they get to the meeting.”

MANAGING THE SELLERS

For sales managers, the priorities, questions, and needs are completely different, but just as vital for organizational success. “The questions are difficult,” Krizelman notes. “‘Is my market contracting? What’s the health of the market? How should I deploy my resources and staff time? Which territories and opportunities are most important?’”

Adds Krizelman: Executives will ask MediaRadar, for example, ‘I need your help to assess my opportunities. Are we overweighted in Los Angeles and underweighted in New York?’

These are imperative economical questions for those running the complex operations of a modern media company. For example, executives might see that YouTube is a $10 billion platform, and try to get their arms around the opportunity in video—as well as the opportunity cost. “When MediaRadar got started, there was hardly any of that,” Krizelman says. “Now we can tell clients, ‘In your market, video is indeed attractive.’”

Another critical subject is the changing nature of programmatic advertising. When programmatic emerged several years back, it was considered a channel for generating incremental revenue on low-value inventory at bargain-basement CPMs. Today it’s totally different. The level of targeting that’s available is remarkable, and it’s of significant value for clients. MediaRadar has been a leader in counseling its clients on programmatic sales, and in tracking programmatic buyers. As Krizelman points out, the median number of new programmatic advertisers each month is 620 brands. “That’s how fast it’s growing,” he says. “Programmatic is both good and bad, but your clients have to know about it.”

COMPANY ETHOS

MediaRadar has grown into a large business, with nearly 1,600 clients and more than 400 employees. But its core ethos has never changed. “We take what we do very personally,” Krizelman says. “We take our jobs very seriously – We’re customer-centric. We put all the investment back into our clients and our product.”

The biggest transformation is how MediaRadar evolved to be more consultative. “The essential product remains a software solution, a service, but the relationship with the customer is much tighter,” Krizelman says, “as we continue to grow we don’t want to lose our connection with each client. We demonstrate our value to our clients every day. Our client services team is extensively trained in ad sales, the changing industry as well as MediaRadar. We take the time to learn the unique challenges each of our clients is facing and together we make sure those goals are met…and exceeded.”

MediaRadar is your partner in ad sales.