AdCellerant - Account Management Team of the Year
Company: AdCellerant
Company Description: AdCellerant is a digital marketing and technology company that provides Programmatic Marketing solutions, ConnectedTV, OTT, Email, Native, and Search solutions to local marketers through white label partnerships with agencies and publishers. The team does this by leveraging the end-to-end advertising platform they created, ui.marketing.
Nomination Category: Sales Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Account Management Team of the Year
Nomination Title: AdCellerant ‘s Account Management Team
AdCellerant’s award-winning Account Management team had finished growing 2019 revenue by 80% YoY placing AdCellerant in the top 25% of companies on the Inc 5,000 List. The company was poised to accelerate in 2020 but COVID had a different plan. Once the Pandemic started, AdCellerant’s business dropped 30% while customer’s business dropped 40-60%. In the wake of the Pandemic, AdCellerant ‘s Account Management Team focused almost exclusively on helping small businesses navigate the economic downturn.
When in a crisis look for the helpers. The country was under stay-at-home orders, businesses were closed, offices shut down, and essential businesses were the only companies operating. The Team started a multi-pronged approach to help salvage losses taken by small businesses and AdCellerant Partners. The team created a COVID Survival guide, including 48 pieces of content across 16 categories, a webinar series focused on marketing with social distancing as a centerpiece and Phased Reopening playbooks that helped small businesses reopen in the face of ever-changing government guidelines. The team released its first guide on how to start navigating the Pandemic on March 12. Days later, the team moved to remote work for the first time in AdCellerant’s 7-year history. The team’s entire focus was on helping create sustainable business models that have social distancing as the centerpiece.
The team’s work allowed the company to keep everyone on the team, grow revenue by 2%, and save small businesses.
In spite of the unprecedented year in 2020, AdCellerant was still able to grow by 2% YoY, earning a third Inc. 5000 title listing (this is only attained by a handful of companies), and grow the customer base by 10%. This success allowed the company to retain the entire team and add 14 new team members while navigating the Pandemic.
AdCellerant’s success was driven by the company’s Partners success. While many businesses struggled or closed their doors, AdCellerant was able to set Partners up to thrive during the economic downturn by deploying tactics ranging from helping traditional businesses set up virtual methods of doing business to creating entire e-commerce solutions to keep brick-and-mortar stores selling. Since March, the team distributed 1,000’s of copies of their COVID survival content to SMB’s, coached 100’s Partners, and 1000’s of salespeople on supporting SMB’s, hosted over 20 webinars with over 2,600 attendees, and rebuilt business to Pre-COVID levels by August of 2020.
These efforts helped flatten the negative ‘business curve’ created by COVID-19 and helped many partners return to pre-COVID revenue by mid-year. One partner returned to pre-COVID revenue by June, after a 30% revenue drop in April.
Even in the hardest-hit regions, AdCellerant Partners are seeing success. During the first 6 months of their partnership, one partner realized $672,000 in retail revenue, and in the second six months (which occurred during the COVID summer), they achieved $1.16 Million in revenue.
The focus for AdCellerant’s Account Management Team in 2021 has been acceleration for its partners. Since the team helped most of its partners recover financially from the pandemic in 2020 with COVID survival content and support, they focused their efforts on taking advantage of the surge that would come as vaccines rolled out and markets opened back up. AdCellerant created a guidebook focused on taking advantage of the imminent summer surge. This strategy consisted of more than 20 pieces of content across 14 categories and a phased approach on how to best capitalize on the return to normal and spending money again.