“The biggest pain point for media companies today with regards to cross-media campaigns is the execution,” says Susie Hedrick who is SVP of North America Sales at WideOrbit. “The more complex the sale, the more complex the buy, the harder it gets.”

Susie Hedrick, SVP Sales, North America at WideOrbit, recently discussed the challenges of the digital and TV convergence for sales teams on BeetTV while she was at the WideOrbit Connect TV & Radio User Conference in New York:

Creating Sales Organizations That Are Matrix

I think the most interesting observations from the conversations I’ve had with customers are the new sales organizations. They’re creating organizations that are matrix. You have a team that may go across many different products and then you have specialists that come in and go deep within those products. But the expectation isn’t that the sales team can go wide and deep. They’re able to go wide where we have people who are very good at going deep.

My take on the data issue is that there is a ton of data out there. We haven’t quite figured out how to use that data in the day-to-day sales effort in adding value to the products that we’re trying to sell. It’s there, we can present it, but we haven’t automated that through software.

Automating Sales Processes is Huge

There’s a lot of technology available that makes selling easier and more efficient. Automating that process is huge and it’s a huge driver for us within WideOrbit. If we can solve that we can create an environment where salespeople are able to use their time doing more revenue-generating activity and more strategic activity.

What we don’t want is to promote an industry where we’re doing a bunch of busy work or we’re swivel-chairing between systems because we can’t enter something in one system and have it go out to digital and traditional broadcast.

Cross-Media Campaign Execution is a Pain Point

The biggest pain point for media companies today with regards to cross-media campaigns is the execution. It’s simple. Not that the selling or buying is simple. Where it really gets complex is when you have different media types and you have to go through the execution process through delivery, invoicing, attribution back into the system, and collection. So that full process, the more complex the sale, the more complex the buy, the harder it gets.

It’s more complex because the execution system for every single media type may be different. You have a different ad server for digital versus streaming versus TV. There are all different ways to execute across different platforms and the more that fragments the more work there is to do on the backend.