Advertising Sales Management

Client: CQ Roll Call Group, a subsidiary of The Economist, offers a range of print and online publications and focuses on events and issues in the American Congress.

CQ Roll Call Group

Objective: In the late 1990s, Roll Call Newspaper was using a combination of a flat-file database, Word and Excel documents to manage their display advertising sales business. To grow their sales revenue, they needed a solution that would improve on their existing sales tracking database by reducing redundant and incorrect data entry, provide more accurate information about the status of advertising contracts, and simplify reporting to improve overall ad sales management.  In the late 2000s, they needed to accommodate a growing online news business.

Solution: Colibri Solutions developed Ad Sales, a display advertising sales management solution that integrates all aspects of the CQ Roll Call Grouip sales process into a single application. CQ Roll Call Group upgraded to Ad Sales version 4 in 2008 to maintain compatibility with newer versions of Mac OS X. The solution allows sales executives and management to:

  • View an account and all associated sales contracts, insertion orders, appointments and calls.
  • Send mass and merge emails to accounts and their ad agencies with messages, special notices, contracts or insertion orders directly from the database.
  • Sell and manage advertising on both web and print properties.
  • Provide a range of comprehensive, company-wide sales tracking reports.

Business Impact: The Ad Sales 4 solution allows CQ Roll Call Group sales executives to track an advertising contract throughout its lifetime and make sure that all contract requirements are being fulfilled by and for the client. It makes the traffic manager’s job easier by tracking automatically what ads are cleared to run in a given issue or during an online campaign. And it gives management complete control over the assignment of new accounts and provides a sophisticated suite of reports.

Technology: FileMaker Pro 11 and FileMaker Server 11.