Magazine advertising sales software

CRM is your playbook for winning with advertisers

To beat the competition you need to understand how you can help advertisers reach their goals and consistently deliver on commitments. You use RunMags to manage advertising sales but the road to successful sales is so much more than ad order entry. That very strategic working process is what we call CRM - Customer Relationship Management. See how RunMags works as a publishing CRM for advertisers, subscribers, contracts and billing.

RunMags will help you create and manage account records with company information along with relevant information such as contacts, activities, email, deals, invoices and more.

From advertiser to paid invoice: how ad sales work in RunMags

RunMags covers the direct advertising sales workflow a magazine publisher runs every issue, in one system:

1. Advertiser record. Each advertiser has one organisation record with its contacts, activities and follow-ups, the emails you have sent, its orders and contracts, and any outstanding invoices.
2. Proposal from your rate card. Sales reps add products from your catalogues for print, digital, web banners, newsletters, events and social. The catalogue price is copied onto the order row and can be adjusted there. Package bundles, frequency and prepayment discounts and agency commission are handled on the order.
3. Contract and online signature. The proposal goes out from a central email template with a personal link to your advertiser portal. When the advertiser signs online, the contract is marked as signed and your team is notified. You can also see when the email is opened and its links clicked.
4. Issue schedule and flatplan placement. Every line item on the signed contract references the issues or dates it was booked for. Print bookings appear in the magazine flatplan for that issue, where each ad shows whether its material has been received and how many artwork reminders have been sent. From there you can send a reminder with an upload link to every advertiser whose artwork is missing.
5. Invoice and payment. Billing invoices the booked issues up to the billing date you choose, and each invoice row keeps its issue reference. Invoices are sent from RunMags, and finance registers each payment against its invoice under Finance > Collection. Invoices sync to Fortnox, QuickBooks or Xero. Read more about publisher billing and payments in RunMags.

At a glance, sales reps and other users can easily understand how to best service the client. Historical sales is graphically displayed, current deals and recent engagements with client representatives form an understanding on what's most important to grow the account.

Contract management for advertising sales

Your advertising contracts form the foundation for your business. They document the contractual commitments that will feed your business cash for several months and as well as your obligations to deliver a service that will help your clients grow their business.

RunMags sports a very robust contract management module with product catalogues and bookings for every channel, including print, digital, web, events, social and newsletters, and a print flatplan.

You manage your inventory and pricing strategies and sales reps can easily pick the right products with corresponding accurate and up-to-date pricing.

Instant proposal delivery and eSignature to boost conversion

Centrally managed email templates ensure that sales reps present proposals professionally while also allowing them to personalize the message to connect with the client. The content editor can include personalized links for the client to click in order to sign the contract electronically.

Emails are delivered from your business domain, set up to ensure stellar email deliverability and a professional representation of your brand. Every email is tracked, so you can see when clients open it and click its links.

Business support throughout the entire commercial process

When most CRM systems stop supporting the business process at ad order entry and a closed sales order, RunMags gives you the tools to manage the contract through fulfillment, helping you ensure that ads gets placed as promised and that invoices are issued correctly.

All invoices are saved and readily available for future management of customer relations as well as comparative data analysis. Each customer contract agreement contains references not only to the inventory sold, but also to which magazine issues and timing that was included.

RunMags also helps you map your commercial process to how your advertisers are buying advertising. Connect your website to our API and engage with potential advertisers when they are educating themselves on whether you can help them communicate with potential customers.

Effective coaching of sales reps

As RunMags is role based, sales staff can be assigned access to focus on advertisers and contract management. Team managers can run statistics and monitor performance in terms of quantity and quality of sales activities – to be leveraged for enhancing tactics and coaching sales reps to increase their effectiveness.

Each sales rep is presented with a sales dashboard displaying their results by week, effectively comparing actual results to sales goals set in cooperation with the team manager. The immediate feedback loop allows for effective coaching of talent that just started in their job as well as experienced sales reps.

Outsourced ad sales

With RunMags you can easily outsource your entire advertising sales operation. Simply assign roles to external sales reps and direct them to use the limited access they get in your RunMags installation. They only get access to the information you want them to have access to.

Who RunMags advertising sales software is for

• Magazine and B2B publishers that sell print and digital advertising directly to advertisers and agencies, for one title or several.
• Sales teams where reps should only see and edit their own customers, and where managers set sales targets per rep and channel.
• Publishers who want bookings to reach production and billing without re-keying orders.

RunMags is ad sales software for publishers that sell their own advertising. It is not a programmatic ad server. Plans start at €399/month excluding VAT, with tiers based on the number of legal entities and magazine brands. See RunMags pricing.

Setting up or reviewing your sales process? Read the guide to magazine sales operations and follow an ad sales pipeline example for magazine publishers. Comparing ad sales platforms? See comparing RunMags with Mirabel, the MagHub / Ad Orbit comparison for ad sales teams and how RunMags compares with Lineup Adpoint.