Background

• 92.7 BIG FM is India's largest FM network with a presence across 45 cities, 1200+ towns and 50,000+ villages and a weekly reach of 4.3 crore Indians across the country.
• It is part of one of India's largest media company Reliance Broadcast Network Ltd. BIG has taken FM as a medium of entertainment beyond the metros, to untapped markets, offering consumers and advertisers a new experience of the power of radio as a medium of entertainment.
• As a fast growing media company in fiercely competitive market it was critical for BIG FM to create a strategy execution platform across geographies and various teams to retain its market leadership and create a sustainable competitive advantage.

Challenges

Customer coverage

• Covering the entire universe of spenders with analysis of data from industry portals like ADEX, Aircheck, etc.
• Creating strategies to increase its market share based on seasonality, spending power and trends of brands.

Sales forecast

• Since Ad slot is a perishable inventory, pipeline visibility is very critical. Manual reporting and coordination on excel sheets in different formats made it difficult to have a timely visibility on the opportunity pipeline.
• Due to limited visibility and manual processes coordinated on emails and excel sheets, getting timely approvals was difficult. This would result in loss of opportunities.

Activity management

• Planning and execution of effective sales activities like number of sales calls, customer contacts, meeting the right people, right customer depending on seasonality, etc.
• Monitoring and executing relationship management activities with agencies and key customers to ensure maximum wallet share.
• Customer contact strategy based on spend, seasonality, wallet share, etc.

Solutions

Customer coverage

• CRMNEXT created a single version of truth by integrating with Adex, Aircheck, trafficking system- wide orbit, plum, broadview to boost the overall efficiency of the system and decision making.
• The implementation also ensures periodic sync with Adex and Aircheck reports ensuring all new advertisers are present in the system.

Sales process reengineering

• Ensuring clarity of numbers with targets, achievements, missed opportunities, neglected customers etc. tracked on real time basis with the new system.
• Creating accountability of the sales teams with self evaluation tools for portfolio management, client coverage and wallet share.

Process monitoring and control

• Created unified processes across department for rate approvals, placement approvals, network deals etc. to improve visibility and efficiency.
• Established strict turn-around-time and escalations based on opportunity value, ad slot inventory etc. to reduce sales cycle time and better pricing power.

Benefits

• Over March 2010 to March 2012 sales increased by a whopping 184% from INR 1084 million to INR 3087 million and operating profits increase from a loss of INR 328 million to INR 287.8 million.
• Improved price discovery by defending price, focus on value selling and focus on leveraging network strength.
• Call rates increased, number of missed deals has declined, average sales cycle time declined resulting in improved productivity.
• Conversion rates increased by about 40%.
• Significant increase in number of large deals.
• Significant increase in cross selling across multiple brands of a single client and also across media network.
• Significant increase in repeat business and decrease in customer attrition.
• Consistency of information and response by various teams to any customer request across organization.