Digital advertising technology and services provider DoubleClick this week announced the launch of Dart Sales Manager, a proposal management and financial reporting product.

Designed to help publishers improve customer relationships and increase revenue from online advertising, Dart Sales Manager reduces the burden of manual data entry and improves the accuracy and transparency of end-to-end sales and service processes, DoubleClick said. With both pre- and post-sales modules, the tool improves workflow efficiencies and controls for sales, ad operations, and finance professionals, it said.

"We created Dart Sales Manager to automate the repetitive and error-prone tasks that are required to convert RFPs into proposals, proposals into insertion orders, insertion orders into delivering ads, and delivered ads into accurate invoices," said Jonathan Bellack, vice-president of publisher solutions at DoubleClick, in a statement.

Publishers using Dart Sales Manager include AOL, Fox News and Media News Group.
AOL began using a custom version of Dart Sales Manager in September 2005 and has more than 600 users accessing the system.

The pre- and post-sales modules that make up Dart Sales Manager are, respectively, the Dart Sales Manager Proposal Module, which offers advertising sales teams a full understanding of a site's advertising inventory, reducing the time required to deliver proposals, and the Dart Sales Manager Finance Module, which allows finance teams to gain visibility into key elements of the ad sales business, including campaigns sold, delivered and booked, and sales staff effectiveness.