Digitally enabled hypergrowth for Spotify’s advertising business
With more than 300 million active users across 94 markets, Spotify is the biggest and most popular audio streaming platform on the planet. Around 10% of their revenue stream – EUR 678 million euros in 2019 – comes from selling ads in the shape of banners, video and audio.
When pitching to potential advertisers, Spotifiy’s sales teams use highly relevant, real-life examples of ads and campaigns – tailored to the prospect in question – backed up by performance metrics.
But building personalised sales presentations was taking hours; each sales rep had their own approach so there was little consistency in content and branding, and searching for the right ads was time-consuming.
To enable the kind of hypergrowth they hope for – and have since achieved – Spotify knew they needed to optimise this part of the sales process.
Together with the Spotify team, we created a customised digital ad library, complete with a powerful search and an intelligent export function. The result: personalised, conversion-optimised, and on-brand sales decks in a fraction of the time.
Built with their existing IT infrastructure in mind, and offering seamless integration with CRM solution Salesforce, the new platform transformed the sales process.
With sleek, performant presentations ready in minutes, instead of hours, the sales team could spend more time doing what they do best: selling!
more man-days to devote to selling
instead of 8 hours to create a deck
Follow us on LinkedIn for insights, learnings, use cases and more.
For Spotify’s sales team, finding just the right examples of assets to use in their sales pitch decks was a huge challenge – with almost a quarter of a million files (ads, campaigns, screenshots, audio files and more from a broad range of industries and from all over the world) scattered across network drives and other storage locations, the search could take hours.
To address this, we created a centralised library and integrated an extensive and powerful search function that lets sales reps find exactly what they need in seconds. We also introduced the possibility to cluster assets per campaign and brand, making it even easier to find suitable examples for a new prospect, whatever their industry or sector.
Interviews with the sales reps themselves gave us valuable insights into their workflow that helped shape the platform’s features and functionalities.
As well as a smarter way to source relevant ads, the team also wanted a more efficient solution for building attractive, on-brand presentations. To meet this need, we made it possible to export directly from the platform to Powerpoint or a PDF. We also introduced mobile-optimised templates that took design, structure and text density into account to create beautiful, sleek sales presentations that would be sure to impress.
So far, over 15,000 presentations have been created by sales teams worldwide using the tool. And with time savings of around 95%, sales reps can now focus on more value-added activities.
Developing a powerful ad library and deck generator was already a big step towards streamlining the sales team’s processes, but by leveraging their existing digital landscape and integrating Salesforce CloudSense, we could help Spotify go one step further.
Thanks to this integration, information about the prospect is synced between Salesforce CloudSense and the ad library – while ensuring the highest levels of data security – letting the team create fully personalised presentations in fewer steps.
Sales reps can also make curated collections of ads and campaigns available online to specific prospects or clients to support the sales process. And when a deal is marked as ‘closed-won’ in Salesforce, data from the new client is automatically sent to the ad library through a one-way ‘webhook’ connection.
