Every local media company is looking at the same two things right now: cutting expenses and growing margin. Almost none have looked at the systems sitting underneath the selling operation — and that’s exactly where the margin is leaking.
Sellers can’t quickly answer the questions that actually move revenue. What’s available to sell? What’s performing? Where is the margin being lost? What to pitch next? Every handoff between sales, operations, and account management slows the whole thing down.
There’s a name for it: decision drag.
It builds up quietly. A workflow breaks, so a person gets added to cover the gap instead of fixing the system that created it. Do that enough times, and you’ve got a team spending more energy managing workflows than creating revenue — buried in manual proposals and reports pulled from one system, reconciled in a second, delivered in a third.
The fix doesn’t start with ripping everything out. It starts with a diagnostic: follow the full revenue cycle from prospecting through reporting and renewals, trace every handoff, and find the swivel points where someone closes one platform and opens another just to do their job. The relationships, the audiences, and the local market knowledge haven’t gone anywhere. The infrastructure underneath them just never caught up.
In her interview with The Intelligence Record by Polaris I/O, Ribeye Chief Growth Officer Jennifer Scilabro breaks down what decision drag costs local media, how to map it, and what separates a real technology partner from an expensive distraction.
