Case Study

American City Business Journals (ACBJ) Announces Cost Savings and Added Efficiency

As a Cloud technology integrator and advisor, Astadia helped American City Business Journals (ACBJ) in overall employee efficiency and added cost savings with their investment from integrating Salesforce.com and a customized advertising insertion order application into the technology platform for this business publisher.  

Years of change brought a need for greater visibility and improved processes. For ACBJ, an advanced technology portfolio is part of the business acumen and operational sophistication behind their success.

Choosing the Right Technology for an Established Leader
Over the years of using ACT and Outlook as primary sales and marketing technology tools, ACBJ’s growth and success brought with them more sophisticated technology needs. ACBJ needed to enable sales and support staff to collaborate across markets, save time and steps in the ad insertion process, and give managers and executives visibility into the sales process.

ACBJ realized that they didn’t have in-house technology expertise to bring their vision to life, but they know their business very well and expected technical experts who could listen and fully digest their business requirements. Astadia listened to ACBJ’s goals and requirements in a manner which earned the trust of the business experts. ACBJ’s ability to clearly articulate their operational parameters and their willingness to trust Astadia’s technology expertise and processes resulted in a solution that exceeded all original goals.

“Alex Orfinger (Publisher, Washington Business Journal) and I were tasked with bringing a solution for replacing ACT. It was a big responsibility and it says a lot about Astadia that we trusted their recommendations. They listened to our needs and made sure they had a firm grasp on how our business works before offering recommended solutions. Astadia promised and delivered,” says Rick Baierlein, CRM Director for ACBJ.

Discovery Process, Platform Selection, and Solution Design
ACBJ knew before selecting Astadia and Salesforce.com that their legacy database infrastructure could not be reengineered to support the company’s future. During discovery, Astadia mapped how ACBJ managed 40 ACT databases for their advertising customers – a separate database for each market.  They also identified 350 Outlook user systems containing individual sales representatives’ contacts, and how those contacts were used in the business. Discovery documentation ensured that the solution would fully support or (at best) improve the core business processes, while disposing of inefficiencies the legacy technology had imposed.

Astadia also documented a lack of business visibility, which is common in companies with fragmented data repositories. Astadia then analyzed the needs of ACBJ management, identifying what information they needed to forecast future business and proactively manage the sales opportunity pipeline.

Astadia worked out a data migration path to bring the 40 market systems and 350 user systems into one central repository for account and contact management. This central platform was Salesforce.com’s Unlimited Edition, a cloud based CRM technology solution.

Astadia also designed and developed the IO Wizard, a custom .NET solution, to facilitate the contract > opportunity > ad insertion process.

Separate Ad Insertion processes for 40 markets
ACBJ’s ad insertion process had grown organically with the business – and with this growth, ACBJ had outgrown this critical business process.  Cross-selling advertising and marketing to active and prospective customers relied on completely separate databases. Sales reps wrote multi-market orders on paper contracts and faxed separate contracts to each partner publication listed in the customer’s order. Each fax would be signed and faxed back to the original location. Each of the 40 papers had an Ad Coordinator who validated ad insertions and keyed in local and cross-market insertions into their separate financial systems.

Errors using this time consuming system were frequent and unavoidable for both sales reps and ad coordinators. ACBJ estimates that it lost both time in employee efficiency and money in ad corrections from these unavoidable errors.

Data Consolidation:  No easy task with 350 separate databases!

“Our Astadia team helped us pull off a miracle. They successfully migrated 350 user databases and 40 market databases into just one. Their ability to work with data is truly amazing, and Astadia has been a huge asset to us and I know we could not accomplish this without them,” says Rick Baierlein, CRM Director for ACBJ.

Migrating data for 350 user systems and 40 separate market databases took Astadia 8 months. 

Just before each market’s rollout, the Astadia team migrated the data for that market to load the most current information. This data included Accounts, Historic Opportunities, Opportunity Products, Schedules, and each sales person’s individual contact list from Outlook.

The consulting team used proprietary Astadia database tools developed for involved data migration projects.

Astadia’s implementation team then trained ACBJ staffers on the use of Demand Tools, an AppExchange data management application, to validate new and existing customer and prospect records within Salesforce.com.  Staffers now manage account maintenance with Demand Tools.

The IO Wizard: Eliminating Repetitive Processes
The IO Wizard simplifies ad order processing for ACBJ. The Wizard is a comprehensive ordering and scheduling tool which supports many selling scenarios while simplifying the process for the user.

The IO Wizard is the only solution of its kind, as ACBJ’s needs differ greatly from those of other national publications. Those needs include:

• Ad insertion process automation.  With the IO Wizard, users are guided through the insertion order process. Sales reps can spend more time selling and less time entering data.
• Complex market split calculations.  A lot of cross-market selling occurs throughout ACBJ’s 40 markets. The Wizard automatically creates opportunity records -- up to 4 per sale based on the sales scenario.  And each opportunity allocates the correct revenue contributions to each market involved in the sale. 
• Complex revenue sharing calculations.  Revenue contributions are also reliably and automatically calculated for every possible cross-selling scenario. For instance, a sales rep selling an ad for their local market generates one type of revenue contribution.  When the rep sells in a different ACBJ market, they receive a split percentage of revenue contribution towards their market for that deal sold.
• Customizable forecasting.  Astadia enabled customizable forecasting to support revenue schedule reporting, visibility into the sales pipeline, and real-time forecasting. Each user has a unique view of the pipeline. Scheduled reports are delivered to the CEO showing the state of the entire business at a glance. Sales Managers see forecasts for their direct reports including Closed Won Sales versus Quota.  Executives see forecasts for their Sales Managers. Both managers and executives can forecast sales by fiscal periods. Executives can now see this for the entire company, which enables more efficiency in everything from working capital management to print production.

“Along with merging the databases, the other big project was building an insertion order application. Our process for booking an ad is very complicated and building this application was not always been easy. Our Astadia Engagement Manger has been invaluable. Her understanding of our insertion order process, ability to trouble shoot, and problem solving skills have been vital in the creation of this application,” says Rick Baierlein, CRM Director for ACBJ.

Change Management in 40 cities
Getting hundreds of people in dozens of cities to change their daily habits is no overnight task, even if the endgame is more efficient.  Learning all-new technology platforms and applications comes with a learning curve. Not all users progress at the same pace. Yet after 8 months, all ACBJ markets were on board – data migrated, staffers trained, and new processes adopted.

ACBJ first introduced the Astadia solution with 50 users in 6 markets.  Astadia’s technology consultants developed custom training to acclimate new users to the Salesforce.com platform and the ACBJ-specific processes and custom applications.  Astadia’s consultants taught and mentored ACBJ trainers to conduct these education sessions using Astadia’s proven learning techniques.

At Astadia’s recommendation after the system rollout, ACBJ now participates in monthly online training sessions where Astadia consultants offer guidance and answers questions. Astadia now supports 3 system administrators at ACBJ, lending support when technical and process questions arise. Ongoing attention and access to Saleforce.com platform expertise is a key component of the change management strategy.

“Our Astadia Engagement Manager was our trainer when we launched our beta markets. She did a wonderful job in presenting both Salesforce.com and the insertion order application. There was a great interaction between her and the students and she showed a great deal of patience in answering all their questions. One of the goals was to make sure that I learned from her so that I could take over as the trainer. I could not have had a better teacher and because of her I am fully prepared to train the rest of the markets,” says Rick Baierlein, CRM Director for ACBJ.

Custom Modifications to Streamline Workflow
During the pilot, Astadia identified system enhancements to benefit the overall user experience and assist in handling some basic tasks. User feedback made the case for a total 6 major modifications, which Astadia implemented to enhance the system’s timesaving value and user experience for those who use it most.

One of these key refinements was screen design to better reflect end user workflow. Users needed the ability to jump through multiple screens in Salesforce.com. This customization fit the users’ skills, enhanced process requirements, and business needs. This flexibility, and the speed with which it was implemented, fulfilled two of ACBJ’s overall business objectives for the Salesforce.com cloud platform.

Results
Cost savings.  Consolidating 40 separate databases and 350 end user licenses saved the publisher in both licensing fees and data maintenance expenses from their bottom-line cost structure. Sales reps and marketing personnel now save time when processing ad sales, including the contract process, and insertion process.  Eliminating manual reports and paper pushing, while improving the accessibility and sharing of information, also saves administrative time, faxing expenses, and increased revenue and revenue recognition.

Word is spreading!  Word has gotten out about the company’s cloud technology success, and ACBJ spinoff publications, including Inside Lacrosse, Sporting News, and BizJournals.com, are wanting in on the action. A tenet of Astadia’s change management philosophy is, “If the users understand WHY they should use the system, and see how it benefits them, user adoption takes on its own momentum.”  Increasing sales opportunities, saving time on ad insertions, forecast viewing, and straightforward processes are driving the ACBJ family toward enthusiastic end user adoption! 

The custom instance of Salesforce.com is a robust system of record and source of customer truth for ACBJ.  All data for customers, opportunities and insertion orders live in Salesforce.com and empower forecasting, invoicing, and financial analysis. The extraordinarily high end user adoption rate and Astadia’s satisfaction ratings from this customer (all 5s, the highest rating on the scale) hint at the reasons behind the successful ROI.

“I knew American City Business Journals was going to be an amazing client from the start of the project. Allowing us to put our experience to use on their project allowed the project to run smoothly and put in place a great amount of trust between Astadia and ACBJ. We still participate in annual business planning meetings with the Ad Directors,” says Diane Taylor, Astadia Engagement Manager for ACBJ.