Recently after internal alignment of data and strategy focused departments and divisions, I received additional scope and responsibility over larger revenue generating portions of our business. One major addition has been the strategy, research, trafficking, reporting, and pricing optimization responsibilities as it relates to our corporate partnerships group.
I’m incredibly excited for this opportunity to be centrally focused on such a large revenue generating division. My group and the work I’m doing remains as a separate department – as I often describe it, we’re the internal consulting division to the rest of the organization.
Off the bat, I see three major opportunities for improvement that I am looking to solve during our 2016-17 season.
Step 1 - Apply Trafficking Across All Assets
In many ways we’re flying blind when it comes to traffic management and inventory. If a question comes up as to whether or not a certain asset is available to see, dozens of contracts and phone calls need to be made to answer the question with any real degree of certainty. Although a few assets have been entered into internal trafficking documents, nearly 80% of what we sell isn’t. Priority one will be to get this situated so we can better understand the landscape in which we are operating. [POST UPDATE: Completed October 2016]
Step 2 - Set-up Reporting
How are our assets performing and which ones provide us with future opportunities to take advantage of? Proof of play and valuation reporting has been done, but it’s been on an ad-hoc basis. Pulling an end of year report on a particular client across all of their contracted assets can literally take an entire day. Pulling for several clients could literally take a week of focused effort. The data exists, but getting to it is inefficient and no real foundation exists to allow the process to be replicated efficiently. So far it’s also pretty clear that we’ll have to solve Step 1 before we can get to Step 2. [POST UPDATE: Completed January 2017]
Step 3 – Identify the Low-Hanging Fruit
Once we know what our environment looks like (step 1), and once we’re able to report accurately on it (step 2), it’ll be time to uncover opportunities and create efficiencies across our sellable assets. Step 1 and 2 required. [UPDATE: Completed March 2017]
These are my 3 major goals for the 2016-17 season. In many ways it may be biting off more than we can chew, but I’m also confident that so long as we put our heads down and work towards the goal with a measure twice, cut once mentality, we’ll be successful. Even if we aren’t able to completely solve each of the above, laying a foundation to set us up for eventual success may be just as important. There’s also a lot more out there to work on, but if we can solve the above in our first year, not only would that be a huge success, but it’ll lay the groundwork for everything else that could use efficiency building and streamlining.
-Alex