4 Tips for Getting the Most Bang for Your Revenue Management System Buck
For more than three years, Julissa Marcenaro, Director of Product Management for Sales Systems at Condé Nast, has been working with a core team at FatTail, a tech lead, her internal team, and key stakeholders to keep them at the top of their advertising game.
Marcenaro offers four tips for how your company can maximize your revenue potential with AdBook+ regardless of your company’s size.
What’s her advice?
#1 - Don’t Make Assumptions About What Your Internal Clients Need
Get to know your users and key stakeholders. Marcenaro lives by her motto: “Assuming that you know what your internal clients want is a recipe for failure.”
First, you need to have a clear understanding of what teams will be using your system and identify key stakeholders within each group that can act as the subject matter experts for that group and voice their team’s needs and wants.
Then, get a pulse of your overall user base by identifying what’s working well along with opportunities for improvement. Marcenaro does this by sending out a yearly satisfaction survey to all of her AdBook+ users.
According to Marcenaro, “These surveys are fantastic because they give my clients a safe place to express themselves, and after three years of going through this process, they know their feedback will be taken seriously and acted upon. If satisfaction improves year over year, we know we’re working on the right projects.”
Marcenaro’s survey asks users to:
1) Rate their overall satisfaction with AdBook+, user experience and performance.
2) Rate the usefulness of features implemented during the past year leading up to the survey.
3) Share and elaborate on pain points. She takes the extra step of tailoring her survey per user group so she can get more meaningful insights per team. Ultimately, the survey helps Marcenaro establish short-, mid- and long-term goals for which projects her team should tackle next.
#2 - Less is more
As with many media companies, Condé Nast's product catalog felt overwhelming at times. The never ending need to stay on top of the game can lead to what seems like an infinite catalog with many permutations of the product offering. After the product catalog was identified as a pain point in surveys for two consecutive years, it was time to do something about it. “Refactoring our product catalog was one of the most satisfying and successful projects we’ve worked on with FatTail,” said Marcenaro. “We were able to consolidate our product offering by approximately 95%. Once we internally redefined our product strategy, we worked with FatTail to identify the system enhancements we needed to make this project a reality.”
The new streamlined catalog saves planners the time they used to spend scouring through thousands of products, without sacrificing complex offerings for Conde Nast’s external clients.The project took about a year to implement from beginning to end but it was extremely successful and has been ranked by internal clients as one of most useful enhancements ever.
#3 - Walk the Walk, Talk the Talk
Marcenaro strongly recommends getting “admin access” to AdBook+ and getting trained by FatTail so you can manage your own console and take ownership of your end users’ experience.
“This was a game changer for us. During the first year, most configurations in our AdBook+ environment were done by FatTail. Even small things like adding a new value in a dropdown, adding or moving around a field was going through them,” she explained.
One of the first projects Marcenaro worked on when she joined Condé Nast was cleaning up their Campaign and Line Item Details page. From the initial setup, both sections of the tool had become crowded with fields that were thought to meet certain needs at one time but in reality were not used. “We spent time with our key stakeholders learning which fields they were using the most, pulling usage reports, etc. Once we identified the potential fields to deprecate, we focused on the best way to organize the remaining fields so the page would have a nice flow, ultimately helping our end users through a guided experience that made the AdBook+ planning experience much more intuitive and easy to use,” she said.
By becoming admins of their own console, Marcenaro’s team came to know many features of the AdBook+ platform that otherwise would have been “kind of a black box.” This knowledge has helped them find creative solutions for business problems, leading to faster response times with fewer tickets issued to FatTail.
Marcenaro says, “Even if you don’t have the budget for significant development work, a hands-on strategy will go a long way toward getting the tool to function more efficiently for your business.”
#4 - Strive for Product Management as Opposed to Vendor Management
Marcenaro has a long history as a product manager. Before joining Condé Nast, she owned and managed an in-house developed OMS that supported 14 different countries, so she was used to working with distributed teams using Scrumban agile methodology, gathering requirements, writing user stories, coming up with mock-ups and wireframes, and working directly with engineers and architects to design highly integrated solutions.
“When I joined Condé Nast, I knew things would be a bit different since it was a licensed software, however, FatTail was open to work on custom development projects with us. They also worked in Agile, following sprint cycles, so I decided to manage the relationship as if we were one product organization,” Marcenaro explained.
Marcenaro’s team and FatTail’s Product leads speak the same language. They understand the importance of capacity planning and laying out the projects in a way where together they can maximize the outcome of every sprint cycle. They go over requirements, mock-ups, and for large initiatives they even work on getting prototypes in front of end users to get feedback early on in the development process and ensure they are on the right track.
“If you have to invest in something, invest in ownership of your platforms. A Product Manager should manage the relationship with your users and FatTail” she suggested, “Look for someone who is a hands-on leader, has experience in user-centered design, and can work with FatTail to come up with creative solutions, many of which won’t require software development but configuration changes. Configuration changes won’t cost you a dime however they can have a huge impact in your user base.”
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