Case study

Ad sales now streaming through the door at a social media giant

How a leading social platform harnessed predictive insights to sharpen sales qualifications and boost customer retention and conversion

Who we worked with

A global social media platform with over a billion users.

What the company needed

Growing rapidly, the company was receiving an unprecedented number of advertising leads from small and medium-size businesses (SMBs). It needed to speed up the lead qualification process while ensuring that good leads weren't missed.

How we helped

Using ad sales analytics, we identified gaps in current processes and opportunities to streamline and accelerate the SMB qualification journey. We then implemented new lead outreach and employee training programs to kick-start improvements.

What the company got

Through business intelligence dashboards, the sales team now has all the analytics it needs to qualify sales at its fingertips. The result: 40% of assigned accounts qualified and 35% activated within month one of going live.

Challenge

A boom in business

This company was growing. Fast. With that growth, interest in advertising on its platform was booming. Inundated with leads, the sales team struggled to differentiate between high-value potential SMB advertisers and those ready for disqualification.

It had plenty of sales data coming in, but much of it was getting lost amid the volume. Employees had no way to access analytics easily and little time to interact with customers, meaning they frequently disqualified good leads and chased bad leads.

All of this meant that the sales team couldn't focus on finding valuable SMB advertisers. It needed the insights to find them faster and self-serve analytics solutions to improve lead qualification and boost customer spend.

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Solution

Insights to accelerate sales

We collaborated closely with the company to identify the gaps in its SMB advertising sales process, with a primary focus on EU and US markets. We pinpointed the reasons behind false disqualifications and delayed qualifications.

Following this evaluation, we:

Created an industry-leading sales qualification program built on insights from ad sales analytics
Established a pilot team focused purely on lead qualification or disqualification. This ran separately from the activation process, allowing the sales team to become more efficient
Instituted activation, onboarding, and education strategies to nurture new advertisers and encourage spending growth on the platform

Business intelligence dashboards that self-serve analytics through data visualizations
The ability to mine intent and interaction data to uncover SMB sentiments and sector trends
Behavioral intelligence to identify the leads most likely to spend on advertising

Impact

Qualification accuracy, activation, and spend are all up

With all of these insights at their fingertips, employees make better decisions faster, boosting qualification and activation rates.

The analytics-powered qualifications program helps identify valuable leads and disqualify others at speed. Predictive insights allow employees more time to follow up with SMB advertisers with high spending potential. They can then activate and grow accounts at speed.

Continual testing and scaling ensure growth is in line with business needs. And ongoing training enhances employees' skill sets, empowering them to work smarter and boosting productivity, service, and experience.

The numbers are impressive:

Within one month of the new program going live, employees qualified 40% of overall assigned accounts
Of these, 35% were also activated in month one

With this impressive qualification rate, spend is up. So too are advertiser conversion and retention rates. Employee satisfaction is high, as is customer experience.

We're now working on expanding the program into more markets and getting even more valuable advertisers through the social platform's door.

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