“We Try to Eliminate Anonymous Buyers”: Basketball Team Official

Many consumer companies discover as they try to develop integrated marketing and sales programs that their customer and prospect data is scattered among five or more repositories around their companies.

Nowhere is this problem more pronounced than with professional sports teams, which have customer information within software databases handling accounting, bulk email, season tickets, point-of-sale and, not coincidentally, their Microsoft Dynamics CRM software, among others.

"Most of us are dealing with the concept of software integration," Scott Jeffer, assistant general manager of the Toledo Mud Hens, a minor league baseball team, told a webinar gathering of the CRM User Group Sports SIG, formed last spring. "Some of us have the same fan in five different spots."

The Sports SIG is independent of Microsoft, but is an outgrowth of a Microsoft sports initiative that has garnered substantial commitments by professional sports teams to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The Toledo Mud Hens were recently named winners of a Microsoft Customer Elite Award for small business for their progress in applying Microsoft Dynamics CRM. (See MSDynamicsWorld.com's previous article on the Sports SIG.)

Underlying the integration effort is a growing movement by professional sports teams to collect as much customer information as possible. An official of a professional basketball team put it this way: "We don't want people coming to our ticket office. We try to direct as many customers as possible to the web. We do loyalty cards, some food cards, which all work like gift cards. We are selling our merchandise, but we know who's buying it. When customers stand in line at the refreshment stands, we try to ...