Last month at Borrell Phoenix, Devlin Jefferson, WideOrbit SVP, Professional Services, teamed up with Brock Berry, CEO and Co-Founder of AdCellerant, to present a session on the consultative sales strategy and how automation and AI can optimize sales processes to free up time for more meaningful client interactions. Here’s a summary of the session, in case you missed it.

The Shift Toward Consultative Sales

Consultative selling is a strategy centered on identifying client needs and providing tailored solutions. It’s an approach that builds trust and long-term relationships. WideOrbit takes the same approach with media organizations, designing solutions to help them achieve their business goals. In ad sales, where buyers and sellers are increasingly cost-conscious, this approach remains critical.

However, consultative selling has drawbacks. It’s time-consuming and can dilute a sales rep’s primary focus: closing deals. Without efficiencies, sales reps risk becoming overwhelmed, which negatively impacts productivity and morale.

Consultative Selling: Key to Success and Key to Failure

Too often in media sales, reps spend most of their time advising on marketing strategies, analyzing performance reports, and handling administrative tasks. The meat of their role, the actual selling, gets pushed to the margins. Industry changes have increased the administrative burden on sales reps, leaving less time for closing deals. Consultative selling is extremely valuable but it’s also time-consuming. Without the ability to efficiently perform administrative tasks, fewer deals get made.

Selling solutions is essential in today’s market, as advertisers focus on campaign outcomes rather than just viewership metrics. To keep up, sales reps need tools that create efficiencies in their role, allowing them to focus on selling without sacrificing the consultative approach.

Clients value expert advice, but sales reps are not, and should not be, full-time consultants. The key to balancing consulting and sales lies in leveraging AI and automation. These tools can streamline consultative tasks, giving sales reps more time to sell, increasing both revenue and client satisfaction.

The Core Mission: Selling

A sales rep’s goals are simple: close deals, build strong client relationships, and grow revenue. Overburdening them with consultative and administrative tasks diminishes their ability to effectively achieve those goals.

AdCellerant has found that sales teams leveraging AI, automation, and advanced sales strategies see significant growth. Media organizations using these tools achieve an average 17% year-over-year (YoY) growth, while broadcasters leveraging AI report over 30% YoY digital revenue growth. Compared to the local market average of 9.4%, these numbers highlight the impact of AI-driven efficiencies. Ad sales managers who emphasize consultative selling must equip their teams with the right tools to ensure productivity and revenue growth.

The Solution: AI and Automation

AI and automation streamline non-sales tasks, giving reps more time to focus on closing deals. Some key areas where technology makes a difference:

• Data entry and CRM updates: Automating CRM and billing processes reduces manual work and errors. Solutions like WideOrbit, AdCellerant, and Magazine Manager integrate these functions to save time.
• Proposal generation and reporting: AI-driven tools can create comprehensive, omnichannel media plans in minutes. These tools analyze vast amounts of data quickly, allowing sales reps to generate proposals and campaign reports effortlessly.
• Client communications: AI-driven email automation ensures timely follow-ups and professional messaging, improving client interactions.

WideOrbit and AdCellerant are collaborating on a solution that streamlines everything from campaign planning to invoicing. By automating these processes and more, sales reps can focus on selling rather than administrative work. WideOrbit is developing AI-powered proposal automation that delivers optimized media plans in seconds, as well other AI-powered workflows including automated makegood recommendations, allowing sales teams to improve efficiency, accuracy, and outcomes.

The Benefits:

• AI can reduce administrative workload by up to 50%, allowing reps to allocate more time to consultative selling and closing deals.
• Automation eliminates tedious tasks like data entry, reducing errors and freeing up time for client interactions.
• Combining consultative selling with AI and automation ensures sustainable revenue growth without overwhelming sales teams.

With media job cuts totaling nearly 90,000 over the past decade, sales teams face increasing workloads with fewer resources, forcing reps to spend more time on administrative tasks and less time seeing clients.

AI and automation offer a solution to boost productivity. Creating a proposal, issuing a makegood, or preparing performance reports each used to take hours, but with automation, they can now be done in minutes. Time spent with clients is irreplaceable, but everything else can be streamlined with technology.

AI and automation are not replacements for sales reps but strategic enablers. WideOrbit’s human-in-the-loop approach to AI ensures that technology enhances, rather than replaces, the expertise of sales professionals.

Equip Your Sales Team for Success

Consultative selling has value, but it must be balanced with the primary mission of selling. The right technology ensures sales reps can provide consultative services without sacrificing revenue growth.

Are you equipping your sales teams for success, or burdening them with tasks that could be automated?

Ad sales managers must provide their teams with innovative, AI-powered solutions like those offered by WideOrbit and AdCellerant. These technologies allow sales reps to support client goals while driving more revenue.

The future of sales isn’t replacing human connection with automation – it’s freeing humans to connect better by automating everything else.

WO Fusion makes it easy for media companies to manage, optimize, and execute cross-platform proposals and sales. Contact us to learn more.