How to Achieve the Most Accurate Revenue Forecasting for Media Publishers With Boostr

Goal

Create an easy-to-use, accurate, and rapidly configurable revenue projection system that empowers strategic C-Suite decisions.

What if you had true confidence in the revenue projections you provide to the C-Suite? And as the business changed, your sales projection technology pivoted too—without any code updates or millions spent on custom configurations?

Read on to see how Matthew Fishman provides robust and thorough projections without relying on costly software as Senior Director of Global Revenue Operations at Fandom, the world’s largest platform for fans and a top digital source for information on pop culture, entertainment, and gaming.

Boostr is something I’m very proud of. It will allow our company to make educated decisions about the future of the business.”

Problem

Overextended teams and stretched budgets made proficient forecasting difficult.

When Matthew Fishman came on as Senior Director of GlobalRevenue Operations for Fandom, he recognized quickly that his team was spread thin. “They were switching hats left and right,”he said. “I knew we couldn’t continue to operate this way and expect our business to get better.”

Fishman wanted to improve forecasting and progress tracking but didn’t want to incur the cost of custom tools or the effort of building their own proprietary platform. In order to support his team better, he knew he needed to leverage in a deeper way software that could get the job done while being intuitive, easy to use, and quickly integrated into daily operations.

Strategy

Use Boostr to establish a single go-to source for information while streamlining operations and generating more trustworthy data to drive big-picture decisions.

• Customize exactly how sales data is being tracked while maintaining ease of use by sellers
• Mandate the initial support requests between sales and revenue operations flow through Boostr in order to drive greater efficiencies.
• Move away from offline workflows that limit the ability to track, analyze and answer core questions coming from theC-suite.

Fishman wanted to create greater operational efficiency and glean better wisdom from trackable data, which is why he integrated Boostr into daily operations. He split his team into media planners and account managers to focus on scaling efforts, but rallied everyone around Boostr, where all data was aggregated. Fishman soon customized the platform, further enhancing the way Fandom works with it. “It’s really user-friendly,” Fishman noted, which made configuration and customization a cinch. “We’re now working on everything being administered through Boostr,” he said. “If an opportunity isn’t being logged into Boostr, it’s unacceptable. It has to be started in Boostr.” The single source of truth Boostr offers eliminates guesswork, increases accuracy, and means no one ever has to hunt down the latest spreadsheet.

If an opportunity isn’t being logged into Boostr, it’s unacceptable. It has to be started in Boostr.”

Results

Powerful forecasting means Fandom can now provide direction for core business decisions while teams benefit from smoother day-to-day processes and a higher degree of accountability.

• The ability to scale products and internal business operations without needing to spend millions more on custom development.
• Getting far greater insights into the product mix being sold, percentages of custom content, and costs to produce.
• Greater trust and accountability that sales forecasts are accurate coming from easy-to-use inputs for sales and tracking highly customized deal data.

Boostr is built for media companies, so it “really filled a niche need for our company,” Fishman said, “and does so right out of the box, without a lot of risks.” While the company has integrated new, more efficient operations and forecasts with Boostr, they’ve remained nimble—a necessity for them. “We evolve based on what our client wants,” Fishman said. “And a lot of that is based on account executives’ insights.” As such, the increased relevance and accuracy of the forecasting that the Boostr platform provides leadership at Fandom is ultimately creating more value for their audience. Meanwhile, more gets done thanks to Boostr’s entirely trackable system that creates accountability. “Everything is collected in one system, so we’re pulling people out of Google Docs, spreadsheets, email—these systems that are very hard to track,” Fishman said. “And when it is trackable, we can learn from it.”

We’re pulling people out of Google Docs, spreadsheets, email—these systems that are very hard to track.”