Challenge: Raise your hand if you’ve ever had a sales job or worked with sales reps. How many times can you recollect trying to slap together quotes and orders of a smattering of products with all kinds of price-altering variables? How much time did it take out of your day? Was it accurate?

Here’s a common challenge we see with our clients: composing an Ad Sales order. Every time you thumb through a newspaper or a magazine, every time you visit a commercial website, heck–every time you hop on a New York City train, you’re seeing the fruits of Ad Sales’ labor. Advertisers have a zillion different ad placement options; they can do it in different sizes, colors, layouts, places, regions, etc.–each combination of variables having a different pricing model. They can purchase innumerable different bundles and packages for discounted rates and choose from scores of run rates (placing ads for a specific frequency over a specific amount of time–such as once a month for two years.) For the Ad Sales rep, composing a single ad order can turn into a taxing, tedious, “I’m willing to consider a different career path” ordeal.

For companies with complex product offerings similar to the above scenario, a CRM system can certainly help to facilitate a more efficient process, but the average “out-of-the-box” CRM solution will only get you 20% of the way there–at least in the way of complex product pricing and order composition.

If this is your business, here’s what you don’t want to do: require and rely on sales reps for an exorbitant amount of math and finance-like tasks. They’re good at selling, you make money when they sell; as James Brown said, “Please, please, please” let the good folks sell!

Solution: Our fantastically creative Bluewolf Beyond team built a sales rep-friendly Salesforce Ad Sales CRM solution to the once harrowing activity of Ad Sales ordering…so friendly, in fact, that the Beyond team has been able to make a few customization tweaks to this tool and re-purpose it for clients outside of the world of Ad Sales. Check out this demo of how the Beyond team customized their Product Picker for a Software business that uses several different licensing models for opportunities–a similar challenge to the complexity of Ad Sales ordering.