Conga Composer helped Marathon Ventures eliminate superfluous steps and human error

Marathon Ventures is a full service advertising sales company that manages direct response advertising and paid programming sales for multiple television networks and nationally syndicated television programs.

Stats/summary

• Marathon Sales Planners generate more than 1,000 paid programming proposals annually
• Creation and delivery process occurred outside of Salesforce® and was heavily manual, which allowed for the possibility of human error

• Manual time before Conga solution: 6 hours per month

Challenge

The Marathon Ventures Paid Programming Operations department manages the sale of thousands of half hour infomercial time periods for multiple networks annually. Prior to implementing a Conga® solution, Marathon sales planners would build Excel®-based paid programming proposals by copying and pasting data from a master spreadsheet into a client-specific template customized with different rates that then would be saved on a shared drive for use by account executives as the basis for negotiation with media buyers.

Solution

Implementing Conga Composer® and Conga Batch® with Salesforce Sales Cloud® has enabled Marathon Ventures™ to remove sales planners from the proposal creation process entirely. Now account executives click a single button on a list view to create and e-mail customized proposals to media buyers. The Conga solution also helped Marathon Ventures consolidate final listings into a single spreadsheet for multiple networks that includes Excel formulas to allow for a quick calculation of total paid programming spending.

Results

Conga Composer and Conga Batch integrate with Salesforce to automate the generation and transmission of paid programming proposals for Marathon Ventures, providing tremendous time and resource savings. Marathon Ventures can now create and e-mail customized proposals to each paid programming media buyer with a single click. The Conga solution has also virtually eliminated errors by eliminating the manual re-keying of data.

• Time savings and improved efficiency: The time required to generate and send all bid sheets has been reduced from 6 hours per month to about 15 minutes, a 95% improvement in efficiency.
• Increased user satisfaction and error elimination: Streamlining the process has reduced personnel requirements. Marathon Ventures also benefits from improved proposal accuracy because the Conga solution automatically merges custom Salesforce data into a standardized Excel template.
• Improved customer experience – Paid programming media buyers benefit from a consolidated bid sheet that displays available opportunities in a single spreadsheet.

What made the Conga solution stand out? – Scalability, customized templates, mass exporting of data and the ability to work with custom objects and reports enable Marathon Ventures to streamline the paid programming sales process.

Additional use cases – After negotiated rates are finalized, Marathon sales planners use Conga Composer and Conga Batch integrated with Adobe EchoSign® to send hundreds of annual confirmation orders to media buyers for digital signature with a single click in a list view.