Software

Sales teams love Drive’s live sales dashboard and its ability to quickly set up a contract and proposal. Drive lets you copy and paste weekly schedules and schedule multiple stations at once. We built Drive alongside sales teams. By understanding their pain points and what slows them down, we’ve been able to build Drive as the ultimate solution. Our learning never stops – and because Drive is web-based, you can take advantage of updates and new features instantly.

Sales

Real Time Sales Stats

In Drive, sales managers can set targets and keep a real-time eye on how each team member is tracking. Sales staff can see a dashboard of how their latest sales data compares to their targets.


Contracts

We’ve streamlined the contract and proposal stage. By removing wasted time, sales staff can focus on bringing in more revenue. Campaigns, commission, discounts and product details can all be entered into the contract from the start. Drive analyses all of these elements automatically. Flags will appear if the client has an overdue balance or if they have exceeded their credit limit. The spots booked are checked against available inventory and the rate is checked against rate card rules. If any of these automatic checks fail, the traffic team is notified automatically and the sale put on hold until approved. Once approved, Drive generates a proposal for the client and when the client signs off, the contract becomes live.


Creative Brief

Once a contract is confirmed, the sales representitive creates a creative brief, guided by a simple series of questions. What does the client want to achieve? What do we want the listener to do? These and other questions help deliver the best information to the creative team.


Creative

When the sales person submits the creative brief, it instantly appears as a card on the Trello-style dashboard of the creative director in the “unscheduled column”. Here, the creative director can easily add notes and assign the job to a writer. The writer’s dashboard shows all his or her assigned briefs, including any notes from the creative director. Without leaving Drive, the writer can click to open a simple editor designed specifically for writing radio advertising scripts. There are shortcuts for indicating where sound effects should be inserted. The writer can assign specific voices to the script. A word counter and built-in timer helps the writer keep a close eye on script length. Drive can manage multiple scripts if these vary across stations and can manage change outs when small changes are required across the life of the advert. When the script is approved, the writer moves the brief to production with a single click.


Production

On the production dashboard, jobs can be sorted according to the assigned voices, making it simple for a voice artist to tick off all their upcoming jobs in one session. The audio can be added directly to the card. Once all the voices have been recorded, the job moves through the system for mixing. The person doing the audio mixing then has all the files and script in one place. Finished audio is ready for instructions to be assigned. These are the limitations that the scheduling algorithm needs. For example, if a spot should only be played at certain times or on certain stations. Now, the algorithm is ready to build the schedule for each station.


Traffic & Scheduling

Drive improves the workflow for the traffic team at both the sales and scheduling stages. The automatic link between sales and traffic averts problems before contracts go live. Drive reviews the client’s credit status, spot availability and rate rules. If no problems are found, the contract is approved automatically. If anything doesn’t pass Drive’s automatic checks, traffic are notified by the system to have a closer look. Once a sale is approved, Drive’s super-smart scheduling algorithm goes to work – avoiding product clashes, voice clashes, and schedules spots throughout the day. A few days before the schedule goes live, the traffic team can review the schedule screen, where they will see all the spots the algorithm has placed. The system flags any spots with problems that might need their attention – like spots that are missing audio files or any breaks that are oversold or undersold. In the scheduling screen, the traffic team can manually verify or manipulate the schedule. The smart algorithm and the flags allow the team to focus time and energy on the areas where their expertise is most required.


Invoicing & Accounting

Drive automatically bills each client at the end of the month. These invoices can be integrated with the business’s existing accounting software or you can use Drive’s own simple general ledger and cashbook with integrated bank transactions.

In Summary

From the first interaction with the client to the reconciliation of the paid invoice, Drive has built an open, integrated and transparent tool for radio advertising management that can be accessed from any browser. It’s beautiful to use and saves time and money across the entire business.

Looking Forward

Drive is a system built on solving problems. So as the radio industry changes, Drive helps you adapt. We’re building powerful tools to analyse audience demographics and give sales teams insightful recommendations that help clients reach the people they’re targeting. We’re looking for ways to integrate radio advertising and digital advertising into one system. We’re developing an advanced rate analysis tool that will show you how small changes in pricing affect the bottom line over a year. These improvements will automatically update with your browser-based Drive subscription.