Media Case Study

Customer – Product Alignment in a Digital World

A Leader In Digital Advertising

A digital advertising technology client offers a self-service, omnichannel demand-side platform (DSP) that enables sales teams to create programmatic solutions for their customers. The company connects advertisers, agencies and buyers to deliver advertising solutions to the right audiences to maximize their sales investment.

Their strategic goal was to accelerate growth and expand wallet share by leveraging their teams, using a combination of self-service and managed service options. In addition, they wanted to increase retention while improving spend from existing clients. As a result, Alexander Group focused on their sales process to identify gaps and opportunities to help them meet their goal.

Project Approach

Do Customers Want Self-Service vs. Managed Service?

This project revealed that the client’s coverage model included several inefficiencies where the company was not consistently executing sales motions for similar buyers. For instance, for one customer, reps would consistently execute motions that resulted in a sale to a significant prospect yet not follow the same steps for a similar opportunity in the same vertical. Without a clear understanding of customer profiles, rep rules of engagement and product needs, it would be difficult for the client to reach its strategic goals.

The solution lies in aligning customer types, optimizing support resources, and defining consistent sales processes. We worked with the client to define a single question to achieve this goal: what kind of service do customers want?

Self-service, programmatic advertising options are attractive because they drive higher spending volume, greater retention and require less support service per dollar of client spend. However, clients must be willing to adopt the DSP platform to get the most from their investment and typically require ramping support to fully recognize the benefits of the platform.

Managed services require more support resources and have a discrete renewal process which may reduce overall retention, but customers are often more satisfied with the service. Additionally, managed service providers have distinct renewal and expansion opportunities once a campaign has been completed.

Alexander Group used VOC interviews to gain an in-depth understanding of unique customer profiles and the service levels, as well as type of service (managed versus self-service) required to support them. As a result, these interviews gave us a better understanding of why customers chose competing services and what they thought of the client’s value proposition.

Key Findings

Our client originally assumed that they needed to provide strong coverage and support to grow small accounts. However, our analysis revealed that only eight accounts grew in revenue, implying that initial customer segmentation was appropriate for defining coverage.

Next, we identified spend by account type. For agency or direct clients, 16% of accounts drove 76.7% or nearly $250 million of platform spend. In addition, approximately 43% of revenue was generated by 15 direct or agency accounts. This segmentation effort helped to identify specific, actionable recommendations based on the needs of unique account types.

of platform spend driven by only 16% of accounts

of revenue generated by 15 direct or agency accounts

Project Recommendations & Outcomes

Alexander Group divided our team into four focal areas, analyzing account growth by spend type and the resources required across the enterprise to serve customers. Comprehending the nuances between customer types, products, and services was essential to defining the sales processes, incentives, and motions required to support defined customer types. Alexander Group’s recommendations included the following:

Defining customer types

VOC interviews revealed attributes including product, service, support preferences and industry sector attributes. Additional analyses looked at spend, the number of accounts and expected revenue.

Segmenting product offerings

Based on customer types, product offerings were aligned, including self-service and managed-service offerings.

Updating coverage models

After aligning customer-product requirements, appropriate sales and support coverage models were developed using Alexander Group’s proprietary industry benchmarks to deploy staffing resources appropriately.

Standardizing compensation structures

The compensation structure was updated to drive company goals and motivate sales reps.

Leveraging support roles

By defining job roles and expectations, junior-level support roles were targeted for customers needing additional service.

Including a product champion

Product champions are essential to consistently promote products, services and the value proposition they offer.

The client chose Alexander Group because of our expertise in establishing strong client success organizations, enhancing revenue operations and aligning client coverage models that support strategic goals.

Growing Revenue by Aligning Resources and Coverage

Based on the recommendations, the client transformed their sales organization to better meet their revenue goals.

They grew nearly 10 accounts by 4X due to proper alignment between customer segmentation and coverage. The client’s coverage model now reflects aligned resources from enterprise sales and support resources.

The client discovered an 80/20 correlation where nearly 20% of their accounts drove almost 80% of their DSP platform spend. In addition, more than 40% of revenue is generated by less than 20 agency or direct relationships.

Core sellers and support roles are now correctly aligned with their account responsibilities. In addition, their talent development pipeline is more focused on developing associate roles.

Focused brand-differentiated client support, paired with appropriate job expectations and updated client support timelines, has led to a more productive workforce.

The client continues to deploy recommendations, finding additional improvements that support company goals.

Customer Alignment is Essential

Discovering the right balance between customers, product offerings and sales expectations are essential for accelerating growth and improving revenue operations. Alexander Group has deep experience, along with exclusive benchmarks, to help media companies grow revenue to ensure companies optimize their sales investment.

Find out how Alexander Group can help your organization drive revenue growth.

About Alexander Group

Alexander Group understands your revenue growth challenges. Since 1985, we’ve served more than 3,000 companies across the globe. This experience gives us not only a highly sophisticated set of best practices to grow revenue—we also have a rich repository of unique industry data that informs all our recommendations. Aligning product, marketing, operations and finance efforts behind a successful sales organization takes insight and hard work. We help the world’s leading organizations build the right revenue vision, transform their organizations and deliver results.