As an ad sales rep, the advertising products you offer and the types of advertisers to which you sell are the two factors that most often affect your sales pitch.
When you sell killer ad products to the right customers, the challenge is to maximize your sale while also ensuring the advertiser sees maximum results from their spend. These puzzle pieces don’t always fit together, though.
For example, say you have a great restaurant candidate for an e-newsletter ad placement advertising an upcoming foodie event. They’re interested, but they’ve already spent their quarterly marketing budget.
Fear not, there’s a potential tool in your arsenal to help you land this sale—and it can maybe even open the door to further ad spend. It’s time to consider the payment plan.
Payment Plans Can Open the Door to New Relationships
First off, a disclaimer. It’s ultimately up to you to determine the level of risk attached to floating an advertiser’s spend. But when the conditions are favorable, payment plans can be a tool in your sales arsenal that helps to secure significant recurring revenue.
Every time you get an advertiser “in the door” with a proven product, you’re creating a new relationship. And when that relationship opens the door to demonstrable ROI, you can count on that advertiser coming back for more.
Even better, they will likely reevaluate their next marketing budget to include more of your ad products in the future.
What About Accounting Procedures With Payment Plans?
One important note if you’re considering instituting payment plans (or looking for ways to simplify your existing payment plans): you must ensure your accounting software is in sync with your ad sales CRM software
Depending on how your sales team’s software interacts with your accounting team’s software, invoicing and payment plan processes can become complicated. You’ll want to ensure your timeline of payments is properly synced with your reporting so you can see accurate sales results by product (or per month, quarter, issue, etc.).
Grow Ad and Media Sales Revenue With Ad Sales Genius
Automating the communication between ad sales reps and accounting teams is possible with intelligent software. At Ad Sales Genius, that’s what we provide. Our CRM’s invoicing features can juggle thousands of different ad products, automate payment plan invoicing, and account for different types of payments (including barter!) within your reporting data.
We even fully integrate with QuickBooks to ensure accounts receivable can keep up with your ad sales team! Schedule a free personalized demo today to see how our CRM software can help your business automate your ad sales process from proposal, to contract, to invoice.