Create a Sales Roadmap for Success

Goal

Leafly needed a tech solution that could increase inventory visibility and insights for sales and ad operations to enable faster decision-making for media plan development, optimization, and delivery.

Leafly, the largest cannabis publisher in the U.S., was facing growing pains. With a high volume of ad inventory and a complex mix, ad reps struggled to gain real-time views of available inventory and frequently faced issues such as overselling, underpricing, missing products and lost high-margin opportunities.

Leafly sought a solution that could automate inventory updates, give reps greater visibility, optimize media plan development and delivery, and allow teams to proactively strategize.

We’re not doing inventory forecasting manually anymore, which is huge.”

Problem

A lack of insight into real-time inventory created issues throughout ad operations and limited sales from fully capitalizing on revenue opportunities.

“One of the main problems we faced was that there’s no humanly way possible that our inventory can be manually updated on a daily basis, especially not in a way that gives sellers access to the most updated inventory levels,” saidMelissa LaCaille, Leafly’s Director of Ad Operations for NorthAmerica.“ This lack of visibility led to problems late in the ad and revenue operations chain that were difficult to manage and created delivery bottlenecks.

Without real-time insights into inventory, sales teams couldn’t take complete ownership of the plans they were selling or understand how to optimize for greater margins or their own commissions.

Strategy

Use Boostr to collect and share real-time sales, pricing, and inventory data and make it accessible to sellers and ad operations.

• Collect data in a central place and make it available to sellers and ad operations at large.
• Automate forecasting dashboards that include pricing trends and the highest margin opportunities across products and geographies.
• Alert sellers to crucial changes to inventory and availability.

Leafly adopted Boostr to automate inventory updates and give sales and operations teams access to real-time data to reduce manual processes, overselling, and underpricing. “We just plugged in the ad server, and it was ready to go,” LaCaille said.”I’m not going to lie—the ease of use is really important and really nice.

”With Boostr, Leafly is creating a system that accurately reflects the current inventory landscape and is not based on scattered notes, outdated information, and intuition. With real-time data and intelligent inventory forecasts, sales teams are empowered to optimize their deals while leadership can access analyses anytime. There are no more hours spent manually compiling reports that don’t accurately reflect real-time inventories, individual seller performance, or revenue forecasts.

Boostr provides visibility on what others on the team are able to sell inventory for. It’s creating healthy internal competition. It’s been a force that helps us sell everything for top dollar.”

Results

Leafly is saving time, eliminating busy work, and optimizing for efficiency and sales.

• Media plans are created seamlessly—without gaps, overselling, or underpricing.
• Thirty hours of work each month are saved on trafficking plans and manual inventory forecasting.
• Plans are developed correctly from the beginning, without any mismatches between what’s sold and what’s available.

With Boostr’s insights and ease of use, Leafly teams no longer struggle with gaps in ad sales, overselling, or underpricing.Instead, they are creating plans with the most up-to-date inventory data, eliminating problems down the line that put revenue at risk. With this accurate data, sellers can optimize each plan and spend time on value-added work that keeps clients happy without pushing sellers into overtime.In fact, Leafly’s ad operations teams are saving 30 hours of work overall each month, since they no longer need to traffic plans line by line. By eliminating manual forecasting and reporting, teams can dedicate more hours to strategy instead of busy work.

With greater visibility into inventory and forecasts, teams are selling competitively, maximizing the revenue potential of each placement—an effort bound to create year-over-year profits.

Boostr will save ad ops roughly 30 hours a month on building campaigns and forecasting.”