During a recent E&P sponsored webinar hosted by Mike Blinder, publisher of E&P Magazine, John Cheney, CEO of Workbooks CRM, and Ken Campbell, Workbooks’ business development director, explored how AI-driven CRM tools are reshaping the way publishers manage customer relationships, sales pipelines, first-party data and revenue growth.
For Cheney, the role of CRM in publishing is no longer simply about storing customer information. It is about creating measurable business value. “Workbooks is a CRM vendor which really specializes in a couple of markets,” Cheney said. “We are a mid-market vendor, so typically we work with organizations employing somewhere between 25 people at the low end and several thousand at the high end.” He explained that the company’s focus is not simply technology, but outcomes. “We really specialize in creating value,” he said. “So how do we take a piece of technology but really use that to shape business value for our clients?”
That mission is especially relevant in media and publishing, where sales, marketing, subscriptions, events and advertising operations are increasingly complex. “Particularly in media and publishing, which has had an awful lot of change in the last few years, we’re spending a lot of time helping our clients streamline their sales and marketing operations so they’re spending less time on the technology and more time selling, more time marketing, more time growing their top-line revenue,” Cheney said. “That’s very much our focus, is helping with revenue growth, streamlining business process, and really making it easier for organizations to run their businesses and become more successful.”
A CRM that sales teams actually want to use
Campbell, who brings more than three decades of experience in newspapers, digital sales and media revenue operations, said one of the most important tests for any CRM is whether sales teams will actually use it. “As you know, I’m an old newspaper dog from back in the day and with 30+ years around this industry, so I’ve sort of seen it all, seen the technological transition over the last 3 decades,” Campbell said. His role at Workbooks, he explained, is to bring the company’s CRM solution to the media and publishing industry in the United States.
From his perspective, CRM only works if it becomes useful to the people expected to live inside it. “We need that good data, right? We need sales reps to like and not absolutely loathe using the CRM,” Campbell said. He added that CRM is evolving into “really sort of a central truth for publishers that brings in everything from subscribers to first-party data to sales pipeline management, all of it.”
But Campbell warned that many CRMs become too complex for practical use. “A lot of times with CRMs, they can do a lot of things, but sometimes that level of complexity drives a learning curve that is like an arc to the moon,” he said. “We just don’t have time for reps to take 6 months to learn a CRM.”
That usability issue, he said, is critical as media companies face faster change cycles driven by AI, audience shifts and revenue pressure. “The speed of everything in AI is happening in days and weeks, not months and years,” Campbell said.
How AI changes the CRM equation
Cheney said Workbooks is using AI in two practical ways. The first is agentic AI, which allows users to build agents inside the CRM that can perform tasks previously handled manually. “Inside Workbooks, you can build agents that will do the job that humans used to do, and they can do it at scale,” he said.
One example is lead research. Cheney described a research agent that can evaluate a new lead as it enters the system. “As a lead arrives at your website and a lead pops into your CRM system, the first thing it can do is look at who the user is, who the lead is, visit their website, analyze what that business does, and decide whether that’s a good prospect for your advertising sales,” he said. “Historically, you had to do that manually before AI. Sales rep had to visit the website, read through the content, decide if it was a good fit. AI can do that for you.”
The second major shift is the ability to build applications on top of CRM. “One of the challenges with CRM historically was it did what it did,” Cheney said. “If you wanted a workflow that didn’t quite fit, you couldn’t do it, or you spent a load of money getting the software vendor to add it into the platform so that you could. But we can now build applications on Workbooks in literally days.”
Cheney said the goal is simple: make teams more productive without creating more complexity. “The first phase of AI really, I think, is about productivity,” he said. “What I’m trying to do for you is you not have to do the work, right? I’m trying to do it on your behalf, make it quicker and easier.”
Download slides used during the Webinar
Solving the publishing data problem
Both Cheney and Campbell emphasized that publishers face a unique challenge because their businesses have become increasingly fragmented. “This sector has been through such amount of change in the last 10 or 15 years compared to many other industries,” Cheney said. “You’ve gone from paper to digital and then multiple types of digital, you’ve got multiple brands, so inherently the complexity is often higher in this sector.”
That complexity often results in disconnected systems and incomplete customer visibility. Cheney said many media companies historically invested more in audience and brand growth than in the back-office systems needed to monetize those relationships efficiently. “There has been historically a tendency to focus the investment on the brand building and the audience building, and kind of the internal CRM platforms, the marketing generation for the brand tends to play second fiddle,” he said.
Campbell said publishers are now dealing with far more data than ever before, but many still struggle to use it effectively. “AI has driven a lot of data to publishers who are trying to navigate what to do with it” he said. “How do we provide value to our readers? How do we provide value to our online consumers of content? How do we provide value to our advertisers who are trying to reach those eyeballs?”
For Campbell, that is where CRM must become more than a sales database. “As that volume of information has increased, everybody’s trying to come up with a system to get their arms around it,” he said.
Why first-party data must connect to revenue
Cheney said first-party data remains vital, but publishers also need a deeper focus on the customers and prospects who actually generate revenue. “For media and publishing, first-party data is absolutely important, right, and key to business success,” he said. “But if you talk to any of my other customers, every single one, they would say the most important information for them is details about their customers and prospects.”
He argued that publishers need to move beyond simply adding more salespeople. “It used to be just throw more salespeople at the problem, right?” Cheney said. “You make more dials, you try and close more deals. There isn’t that focus on how do I run a sales funnel and marketing funnel that delivers outcomes and is repeatable.”
Campbell said that shift is especially important as publishers compete with thousands of digital agencies. “The competitive environment for publishers has changed pretty dramatically just in the last 3 or 4 years,” he said. “We’ve gone from a handful of digital marketing agencies to literally thousands.”
That makes publisher-owned audience data more valuable, Campbell said. “The one thing a digital agency cannot provide is a first-party audience,” he said. “The publisher wants to make themselves more important, more valuable to the reader, and then ultimately to the revenue generating side with ads to those audiences.”
The single customer view
Cheney said one of CRM’s most important functions is creating a single customer view across advertising, subscriptions, events and other revenue streams. “It’s very difficult to know your customers if you don’t have all of the data in one place, and even more difficult to make AI valuable if it can’t access the data that it needs,” he said.
He explained that revenue growth generally comes from either finding new customers or selling more to existing ones. “It’s very difficult to sell more to your current customers if you don’t have the data in the middle for everyone to access,” Cheney said.
He described media companies with multiple brands where separate sales teams were contacting the same advertisers without coordination. “Those customers get annoyed, right, because they get calls from different reps from the same customer all trying to sell them advertising space,” he said. “We solved that by bringing all the data into one place. So they’ve got one single view of their customer.”
Campbell said integrations are also essential. “The importance of being able to integrate with other applications is really, really important,” he said. “If we can play well with some other applications that the teams are comfortable with, you start to unravel that operational spaghetti a lot quicker.”
Start with the business problem, not the technology
For publishers considering CRM modernization, Cheney said the starting point should not be features or vendors. It should be business outcomes. “We have a process that we take customers through, and it starts with the business outcomes, the why, the how, and the what,” he said. “What are you looking to achieve?”
He said most customers are trying to do one or more of four things. “They’re either looking to grow revenues, they’re looking to streamline business process, they’re looking to provide a better experience to their customers, or they want better metrics,” Cheney said.
His advice is clear: define the business problem first. “Forget the tech,” he said. “As a tech vendor, I’d much rather customers worried less about the tech to start with and worried much more about the why. What are they trying to achieve, and how are they going to do that?”
The same logic applies to AI. “Don’t just buy tech for tech’s sake,” Cheney said. “How do you make AI really create value for your business?” For publishers, he said the most immediate opportunity may be simple but powerful: “Let’s not try and do something you don’t already do. Let’s just give you the time back that you’re spending doing manual stuff so you can spend more valuable time thinking about what else you could be doing.”
Campbell said the goal is making sales work easier, faster and more productive. “Stuff that used to take us hours and hours and hours is now done for us in minutes and seconds,” he said. “Everything needs to be about building that practicality.”
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