I worked with a national NFL Team to evaluate their database and email marketing tools and provide vendor recommendations. It was a comprehensive evaluation of their internal resources, budget constraints, timelines, as well as the multiple platforms that were central to their organization’s operation.
As I looked at viable solutions, the areas I focused attention on were:
- Ability to integrate outside solutions via APIs
- Ability to automate processes internally to reduce manpower and costly downstream errors
- Ease of use for the marketing team, which was largely made up of interns and junior personnel
- Responsiveness of the vendors through account management and support
The first two of these were benefits for the future. I wanted to make sure that the organization was working with solutions that embraced integration and automation, even though their current features may not have been up to the competition. It’s a difficult argument to get people to understand, but companies have core competencies. When they begin to work outside those core competencies to generate additional revenue, they begin to weaken their core product and will likely have a selection of products that are feature-rich, but poor in design, support, and innovation.
Today’s technology landscape is changing. I would rather point companies to open technologies that can be automated and integrated well, than feature-rich products.
In the end, the company took my advice. Rather than working on a single solution, they have begun working on 3 different solutions, and another that isn’t currently available is around the corner:
- Ticketing – their ticketing is done in their ticketing system.
- Customer Relationship Management – their sales enablement and customer service is done in their CRM system (Salesforce)
- Email Marketing – done in their Email Marketing Solution (Marketing Cloud).
- Householding – The additional solution is an online householding solution to cleanse and manage their direct mail data.
Within a week of the first integration, we had an email out the door to improve communications with their Season Ticket holders. Now we are working on integrating their ticket database into their CRM… the challenge is that the ticketing system is not integration friendly. That’s unfortunate and it’s seen as a roadblock to continuous improvement in the process.
The ticketing company may want to rethink its strategy and stick to its core competency, otherwise, someone else will come in with a solution that will play well and replace them.
