How Being Scrappy Saved the Day: A Tale of People, Technology and Determination During COVID
When COVID-19 started shutting everything down last March, this event-based company could have been brought to its knees, but with the support of a newly launched inventory management system and an agile team, Bisnow Media charged into one of their most eventful and event-full years yet.
“Had COVID happened two years ago, we would have been in a much different or worse situation,” said Andrew Nathanson, Director of Product and Operations at Bisnow.
Building Trust Among the Sales Team
In 2019, with advertising as one of their core revenue drivers on the publishing side, Bisnow was confronted with a sales team frustrated by order systems and processes that often lent themselves to errors and the inability to properly fulfill deals.
“We definitely had a trust issue,” said Nathanson, “People were hesitant to sell digital because there were so many mistakes. We were able to restore a lot of that trust when we built an interim solution that showed we were listening and working on fixing their issues. It gave them confidence that we could get it right. But that was just the start.”
In their journey to the right solution, Bisnow wanted to ensure a seamless transition to a solution that did not distract the sales team with learning new systems and essentially worked with the platform they were already using the most: Salesforce.
“We didn’t want another place or thing that our team had to go to. We wanted something that sits within Salesforce,” described Nathanson. And FatTail’s AdBook+ has done just that. “Our sales team sees AdBook+ as an extension of Salesforce, not as something separate. It’s a one-stop shop compared to what we had previously.”
Another bonus? AdBook+ successfully removed the bottleneck that required manual approvals on all sales by implementing automatic approvals. “That was a HUGE selling point,” Nathanson said, “We have certainly translated our unique way of thinking to FatTail who have figured out how to set business rules around that mindset in their platform.”
By October, AdBook+’s Salesforce integration for Bisnow launched a solution they got “really right” according to Nathanson, improving the workload not just for the sales team but for the accounting team to manage billing as well.
“A lot of companies come into a process of replacing or buying an OMS and have this silver bullet expectation around it that there’s one system that’s going to solve all of their problems. But requirements change as your business evolves. It’s not a one and done process,” explained Laura Boodram, SVP of Partner Success at FatTail.
Systems alone, however, don’t guarantee a great process. People do.
“Technology supports you, but it’s not going to work magically on its own. You still need people dedicated to running it and knowing what you’re looking to do in the first place,” explained Nathanson.
Scrappy Teams Build Winning Solutions Amid COVID Shutdowns
As the global pandemic bore down on the United States and the world, many companies had little time to shift gears to preserve their event-based revenue.
But with the new system in place by the start of the shutdowns and a take-charge team that prides itself on its commitment, focus and determination, Bisnow had little to worry about.
“The fact that we had our infrastructure with AdBook+ down pat before COVID put us in a better position to allow digital advertising to run on its own while we focused our efforts on the changing landscape of events,” said Nathanson.
“There’s something in our DNA that’s a little bit scrappy. We put on 350 live events normally in a year. If someone needs an extra chair on stage, someone (anyone) gets the chair. Similarly, when we found ourselves pivoting on to something else, we just figured it out,” he added.
By April 1st, Nathanson and his team were ready to launch their first webinar.
As Bisnow shifted course from in-person to online events, they were once again able to utilize AdBook+ to increase revenue, creating actionable sponsorship-based line items for many components of their webinars – from virtual booths to promotional items to programs and more.
“Having the [AdBook+] infrastructure in place meant we could easily say that there’s revenue to tie to these events,” said Nathanson.
“This is a great example of how a single order management system can be used to control all sorts of inventory, whether it’s a digital ad or not. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what you’re selling,” said Boodram.
As of mid-November, Bisnow has successfully run over 500 monetizable digital events in 2020.
Bisnow has now started running virtual versions of live events dubbed digital summits to give a live event feel with the ability to pivot on a per-event basis. “As states become safe, we want to be able to pivot from virtual to live or vice versa on a dime,” Nathanson said.
“We are very proud that digital is rock solid and unaffected. We have a foolproof system for advertising on digital. And the reason we’ve been navigating so well this year was because we knew from AdBook+ what was available, what wasn’t, and what could be booked,” he added.