Designing a new digital sales strategy for a national broadcaster

The Situation

The vision of BroadcastCo's* CEO included a complete redesign of the company's local selling model, optimizing various businesses, re-thinking their senior leadership roles in the market and developing a digital strategy and execution plan.

In pursuit of these objectives, BroadcastCo asked Bain to help to develop a digital sales strategy that aligned with current market trends. Broadcasters were experiencing slow industry-wide growth in their core businesses, while digital broadcast offered greater growth potential with digital advertising spending expected to double over the next five years. Unfortunately, though BroadcastCo's digital audience was growing, their sales were lagging.

BroadcastCo's revenues were not aligned with expected market advertising spending

Our Approach

Bain's approach to developing BroadcastCo's digital sales strategy sought to answer four key questions...

• What is the size of the digital market and who should BroadcastCo target?
• How should BroadcastCo "go to market" in pursuit of these targets?
• How should BroadcastCo organize their digital team for success?
• What is the opportunity for BroadcastCo?

...and followed five distinct work streams:

• Conducted a survey of over 1,500 local advertisers to determine their media preferences, purchasing patterns, and decision making criteria, to determine the best segments to target
• Analyzed BroadcastCo's digital inventory, including audience growth, impressions, sellout rates, and cost per mille (CPM) to identify areas of growth over the next 3 years
• Optimized the digital sales organization, with standardized roles and best practices across all markets
• Redefined BroadcastCo's value proposition and updated their sales collateral to arm sellers with products and messaging tailored to advertiser needs
• Designed a comprehensive digital training to ensure digital fluency across the organization

A survey of local advertisers with more than 500 employees helped determine who to target

Our Recommendations

After doing a full analysis, Bain's recommendations led to:

• New roles and responsibilities for the sales leaders in BroadcastCo's largest markets
• The creation of new centralized support functions with proposed organization structures, a blueprint of critical activities and a robust process for assessing and prioritizing gaps in syndication programming, including a plan to successfully fill those gaps
• A streamlined external sales representative organization with a plan for investment in new business development (including key roles, activities and coordination plans with key clients)
• A clear understanding of potential customers in the digital space, based on survey results and analysis

The Results

In addition to the establishment of a much needed organizational refresh, BroadcastCo is now armed with a clear set of customer priorities, a comprehensive sales plan and has committed to a 40% revenue uplift in their digital business, outpacing the market.