Part 1: Building an ad sales organization — a basic blueprint
So you’ve decided that you want to start offering ads on your platform. Assuming you’ve already figured out what kind of ads you want to sell, you’ll need to put together the team that’s going to make it all happen. In this post we’ll provide a basic blueprint for the most critical customer facing roles you’ll need and demystify what they actually do. Here goes!
The Cast
Account executives: These “Hunters” are people who go out and seek new business relationships and help customers buy ads on your platform. You might encounter different names — such as Sales Manager, Client Partner, Business Development Managers. They’re skilled at developing new relationships, especially with large customers, and often specialize in specific industries — like retail, entertainment, or sports — due to the nature of different ad types, measurement needs, and marketing offers that these industries tend to focus on.
Account managers: These “Farmers” partner with Account executives and focus on helping to nurture and grow the customer account after it’s sold. They do a lot of the 1–1 educational work to help your customers understand how to use your product, best practices to apply, and support all the reporting and analytics behind campaigns. This last part is critical in helping customers understand the efficacy of their promotions and the key levers that are driving performance. Account managers are a critical backbone of any sales “pod.”
Note — Account executives and account managers are crucial if you’re selling to large companies. The larger the company you’re selling to, the more likely it is that these roles will need to be distinct and separate. If you’re selling to mid-sized or smaller companies, these roles can be combined to simplify the sales & account management handoffs.
Ad operations (also called campaign managers): Just do it for me. Sometimes customers don’t want to self serve and log in to AdWords themselves — they want someone to run their online campaigns for them. Or, your product stack might include “flighted campaigns” for fixed placement in addition to auction-based placements. Your ad operations team is the critical layer that helps ensure these campaigns execute smoothly, and work to troubleshoot any technical issues or anomalies.
Product specialists: Why don’t I see my ad? Inevitably, your promotion system won’t work as expected. If you have a complex product stack, product specialists focus on troubleshooting specific features or product areas. While not usually directly customer facing, they serve as an internal resource to help your customer account teams investigate more technical issues that might pop up.
Sales operations: This team helps your sales organization operate more efficiently by handling all of the administrative but critical support needed around a sales motion: building qualified customer lists for sales outreach, setting up and managing CRM systems like Salesforce, determining sales targets, and assessing the efficiency of your sales efforts. How long is a typical sales cycle? Which customers are up for renewal? How are sales trending relative to forecast? Your sales operations experts will have all the answers to these mission critical sales questions to help optimize your sales team’s time and keep the engine running efficiently.
Product marketing: Which customer segments should we go after? Who are our competitors and how should we position ourselves against them? Once a customer has decided to use your product, how do you teach them how to use your seller tools, without relying on the individual attention of account executives and account managers? This is the job of a product marketer. They specialize in helping your (potential) customers understand your solutions, developing the content to reach these customers, and finding the right venues to deliver this content — whether it means re-marketing to your existing base, delivering talks at events, or doing online campaigns to reach new customers.
There you have it — the 6 key roles needed to bootstrap your initial “go-to-market” team. If you only have budget to hire one role out the gate, I’d recommend hiring a generalist role like a product marketer first. They can double as an interim sales team while also giving you a broader view of the competitive landscape and positioning. The latter will ensure you’re set up to scale your ads business.
Ready to move on from the basics? Stay tuned for Part II: Scaling a promotions organization!
