The purpose of this project is to drive revenue and productivity from Prospecting to Paid. There are three main components to this project:  Salesforce, Inventory, and Invoicing. SFDC will serve as kind of the main frame of this project, with inventory for both print and digital pulling into SFDC from the Accounting Portal. The IOI portion will speak to the accounting department and there will be a portal that connects accounting to SFDC. These protocols are designed to make the sales process more efficient across all our departments including production, billing, and sales reps. This will eliminate every excel inventory spreadsheet in existence and in the varying locations these spreadsheets currently reside: GEN IntraNet, MAL Intranet, CO IntraNet, GEN Advertising Drive, MAL advertising drive, collective memory, etc. This also will eliminate the necessity of sales reps having to call up our digital product managers querying available inventory and impressions thus taking time away from the digital team when they can be utilizing their time in more efficient ways.

The product mapping across all three business units (MAL, GEN, CO) is completed. This project involved making sure all products and positions match exactly to both SFDC PriceBook and Ad Manager so that each product and its position is recognizable across all systems. All of these products have an accounting code attached to them, so that when the order is passed onto accounting, they will know how to bill it. Any new products that become available MUST be entered into SFDC and Ad manager with the same name and have the proper account code implemented.

The process should flow as such: Salesperson (A) creates a new opportunity and has the capability of selecting products for a client as part of the insertion order. Reservations are position-based. Once a product and its position are selected, the available inventory for the following 6 months will appear, and the rep can select the appropriate issue date. Subsequently, a hold will be placed on the selection for **Position-Based default is 5 business days** while the IO is awaiting signature.

The four key elements that determine a product are Publication, Product Family, Position, and Start Date. If any of these four elements are not selected, inventory will not recognize the request thus the hold will not be placed on a product. This will have to basically eliminate the ‘TBD” start date selection that the reps currently utilize frequently.

The five-day hold is a default date based on each position; only managers will have the capability of extending the hold date. If a manager does extend a hold date, there will be an automatics refresh feature, so the rep does not have to refresh the page to get the real time info.

During this hold time period, Salesperson B, C, and D should not be able to see that product as available. Upon reviewing inventory in the Detail Page, they will see a total # of reservations existing for each particular start date. The product becomes available when the hold date expires, and the order has not been signed by client. On the homepage of each rep’s SFDC account, there will be notifications allowing the rep to view how many days until a live item expires. And when and if the product does expire the sales rep will get a notification. If needed, we could also run a report to see what reservations are outstanding.

The Docusigner of the IO MUST be a key contact tied to the opportunity. The docusign cannot be sent to multiple contacts; however, a secondary signer can be manually added but only Signer 1 will be able to edit the document.

It is imperative of the rep to make sure the information on the docusign is accurate especially billing addresses. If a rep sends out the docusign and it has the wrong client address, the client still has the opportunity to change the address themselves before it comes back to us signed.

Once the docusign comes back from the client, it’s locked. No more edits or additions can be made on the order. If the client requests a change after this fact, the rep must cancel the original order and produce a new one to go out for signature, with the exception if the client wants to change the start date of a product. All our internal peoplead production, sales rep, accounting, sfdc admins, managers will get alerted if an order is voided or deleted. There will be a notification that an IO is out for signature.

Once the ‘Send to Accounting Portal’ option is clicked, the inventory is at that point checked off. Reps will know when an invoice is paid when (Insert)