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Best Practices & Strategy
Your Top 1%: Partner Relationships in CRM
Shared by KORE, (SEAT Sponsor)
In the world of sports Customer Relationship Management, it has become a fairly common practice that all staff involved in ticket sales and retention should log their interactions with current and potential customers. I think everyone sees the benefit to this – more detailed profiles of fans, more visibility into sales and retention efforts and more insights around productivity and business decisions.
So, let’s run through a hypothetical scenario. Let’s say our team has 10,000 full and partial-plan season ticket holders. We know that in sports, a large percentage of revenue often comes from a small percentage of your highest value customers. So what would you think if I said, with regards to our CRM usage, that for the top 1%, roughly 100 of our most valuable customers, usage of CRM was “optional.” Go ahead and stick to Excel files, emails tucked away in Outlook folders and whatever you can remember from your last conversation.
Let’s think of this same scenario in a different industry, like casinos, where we know they have very robust loyalty and CRM systems. Casinos have dedicated staff for their biggest high rollers whose entire job is based on knowing every possible detail about these players to make sure they keep coming back. Would it make any sense to not use CRM for this “top 1%” but use it for the rest of the general customer population?
I think most of you reading this would think that my examples are crazy. If we’re using CRM to record our interactions with the other 99% of our customers, we should most certainly use it for our top 1%. Well, I raise this scenario to you because I see it happening far too often with teams… when it comes to our corporate partners. When you boil it down, a team has on average around 100 key sponsors, and yet the interest in capturing traditional relationship-driven data for this “top 1%” is spotty at best.