Alight Media manages complex OOH sales and operations using Zoho CRM

The Company

Alight Media is the UK's fastest-growing out-of-home (OOH) and place-based media business. With a strong challenger mindset and growth vision, the business was founded in 2019 with the goal of bringing outdoor advertising to overlooked locations. "We've got four big competitors, and a lot of their screens are based in the major towns and cities, places like London, Manchester, Birmingham," explains Grace Stanton, Operations Director. "We wanted to be different and expand into areas that either didn't have any digital billboards or only had very few."

Its mission to be "positively different" has paid dividends. In a few short years, Alight's team has grown from five to over 90, and it recorded £30+ million in annual revenue in 2023. Its frames can be spotted in more than 190 towns across the UK, and more than 33 million people see one of its screens each month, almost half the UK population.

The challenge

Like many startups, Alight Media relied heavily on spreadsheets in its infancy. Then, over time, the team introduced various software tools to help manage the growing demand and increasing activities. But that also created friction. Each team was using a different platform, leading to siloed information, impossible reporting, data duplication and human errors. If this ambitious company wanted to keep scaling, it was clear that all of its stakeholders needed to sing from the same hymn sheet.

Alight decided to implement a centralised CRM platform, launching a detailed tender process to find a suitable solution that could support all of its functions. A key requirement was customisability, due to Alight's varied sales channels and complex product portfolio. "There's a lot of intricacies that don't replicate themselves elsewhere, so we knew we needed the ability to shape it to our business. It's not one size fits all for the way we sell our inventory," Grace explains.

Alight offers digital and paper advertising across billboards, bus shelters and freestanding units, as well as static, motion, and dynamic options. Its routes to market include direct B2B, agencies, national sales, and specialist sales teams, with sizes, buying cycles, and spend varying greatly. Adding further complexity, client deals can be agreed on either fixed slots, share of voice, number of impressions, or on a number of plays. "It's really important to have flexibility in terms of how we can sell," nods Grace. As such, the CRM platform Alight chose had to be highly malleable.  

The solution

Grace and her team evaluated multiple CRM platforms on the market, but found that none compared to Zoho in terms of flexibility. "We looked at some very popular CRM systems and several other smaller systems. A lot offered out-of-the-box solutions without much room for movement," she recalls. Impressed with Zoho CRM's potential, the team enlisted the technical expertise of Target Cloud, an authorised Zoho partner, to assist with the project from migration to implementation, user training, and beyond.

The first area of customisation concerned Alight's diverse sales channels. Where its large agency clients place deals with hundreds of line items, its direct clients deliver smaller, faster-paced opportunities. The system needed to accommodate both channels in an intuitive interface. So, Target Cloud created multiple different order types linked to custom record layouts, specific deal stages, and pipelines tailored for each sales cycle. "Zoho has given us the flexibility to reflect these different order types and pipelines," Grace smiles.

Next, Target Cloud tackled Alight's huge inventory of frames. It's imperative that the sales team have full visibility of all the frames that are available in an area in real-time in order to associate them with bookings. They also needed to see at a glance whether a frame is subject to any restrictions and its current status. To this end, Target Cloud built a number of custom modules tracking Alight's full register of frames, billboards, bus shelters, and LED screens, along with all their particulars. "Now we have a custom frame-picker widget in the CRM that allows us to see all our frames and, if they're saleable," beams Grace. This has also allowed Alight Media to track the ROI of each individual frame. "We use the widget to make sure that we're allocating the revenue to specific panels. It gives us amazing revenue recognition on a granular level," she adds.

All UK media owners publish their inventory on the Outdoor Industry Standards Committee's database, named Space. To ensure consistency between the database and Alight's internal records, Target Cloud established a two-way API connection, ensuring that Zoho CRM remained the single source of truth. Any new frames Alight builds are pushed overnight into Space and listed as live inventory, while any changes - such as a frame going out of charge - are reflected in real time.

When it comes to securing campaign bookings, a seamless integration with Zoho Sign helps the sales team get more deals over the line at speed. "At the confirmation stage, we can generate the contract document fully inside the CRM opportunity record. Then Zoho Sign ensures that we get a signature from the client to make sure that they pay for the booking," says Grace.

Meanwhile, another external integration helps to streamline Alight's financial processes. A custom Xero widget gives the sales team visibility of all the invoices related to a booking, as well as insights into which have been paid and which are outstanding - right inside the opportunity module of Zoho CRM.

A final, but key, CRM integration has been forged with Zoho Creator, a low-code app builder. A bespoke application called "Specs" documents Alight's entire billboard inventory in a format that can be shared directly with clients for perusal. It's also plugged into Alight's website, where an interactive 'Find screens near you" tool surfaces billboards within Google Maps according to a regional search.

As Alight Media continues to power a path across uncharted OOH opportunities, Zoho CRM will continue to power its sales pipeline, operations, revenue reporting, and payments processes.

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