How media is actually sold in Nigeria
The brief arrives on WhatsApp, not in a procurement portal
A Nigerian ad sales week rarely begins with a tidy request for proposal. It begins with a planner at a Victoria Island media independent sending a voice note, a brand custodian asking for a current rate card, a bank marketing manager calling about sponsorship of a programme, or a retailer walking into a station in Ikeja wanting spots before the weekend. The enquiries are real and they are commercial, but they arrive as messages and calls rather than as documents, which is why so many of them never appear on any list.
That single fact shapes what a CRM has to do here. If capturing a brief means opening a laptop and filling a form, the brief will not be captured. It has to be possible to turn a WhatsApp thread into an opportunity in a few taps on a phone, with a budget band, a flight window and a deadline attached, while the seller is still sitting in the agency reception.
The deal cycle has two gates, and only one of them is negotiation
Selling a schedule in Lagos or Abuja means clearing two very different gates. The first is commercial: the avails, the package, the discount against published rate, the added value the planner expects. The second is administrative: the local purchase order. Plenty of confirmed schedules sit for weeks between those two gates while procurement processes documents, and a sales house that treats a verbal yes as revenue will report a number it cannot bill.
Keeping those stages separate in the pipeline changes the conversation in the Monday meeting. Instead of arguing about whether a deal is real, the team works from two clear lists: proposals still under negotiation, and confirmations waiting on paperwork. The second list is a chase list with names on it, which is far more useful than a forecast built on optimism.
The money is in naira, and it moves slowly
Media receivables in Nigeria are patient money. An agency pays when its client pays, larger advertisers deduct withholding tax at source and send the credit note later, and a flight that ran before the rains can still be outstanding by the time festive planning starts. None of that is unusual. What is unusual, and expensive, is that the details of what was agreed live in a thread on a seller phone, so the collections call becomes an archaeology exercise.
Holding the invoice date, the agreed terms, the deduction and every follow-up against the campaign record turns that around. The person making the call has the schedule, the signed order and the last three reminders in front of them, and the client hears a business that keeps its records rather than one hoping to be paid.