Managing a sports team presents a few unique challenges primarily because each player — and the organization as a whole — is a public figure. As new players are signed and old ones retire, the general team persona may change. Keeping up with these changes can be challenging for the owner and management personnel.
A sports customer relationship management or CRM system can make these shifts, growths, and changes easier to manage, no matter how many times your roster changes, by providing accurate, detailed tracking year-round. in this blog, we’ll explore the opportunities for organizations using a CRM for sports and how you can customize one with monday sales CRM
What is a sports CRM?
A CRM software is a platform designed to help you store detailed customer data to manage customer relationships better. A CRM can track a sports organization’s fan base and help build stronger relationships.
Using a sports CRM benefits the whole sports organization but is especially useful for fan-facing departments like marketing, sales, customer service, and public relations.
Who can use a CRM for sports?
Any professional or casual sports team or organization can benefit from using a CRM.
CRM for sports systems are designed for professional-level and amateur sports organizations.A few examples of who might benefit most from using one include:
- Professional football, soccer, baseball, basketball, or hockey teams
- Professional Olympic sports teams or athletes
- College football, baseball, soccer, basketball, or hockey teams
- High-level school, town, or district youth teams (at a competition level)
- Professional dancers and gymnasts or their associated teams
- Gym or sports facilities, clubs, recreation centers
If your sports organization needs a CRM system, understanding the standard features found in one can help you make an informed purchasing decision.
Common features
A few common features you’ll find in a CRM include:
- Customer portals
- Payment processing tools
- Internal customer management tools
- Business tool and application integrations
- Marketing capabilities
- Time-saving automation features
- Employee collaboration capabilities
- Document and image storage
- Communication channel management
- Data and key performance indicator or KPI tracking
These standard features are the cornerstone of providing your sports organization with the benefits you can hope to receive from implementing a CRM.
Benefits of using a CRM for your sports organization
With the right features and effective use, your sports organizations can reap many benefits from an industry-tailored CRM system. A few of the primary benefits include the ability to perform the following:
- Build a qualified lead database: A CRM allows your sports organization to track, manage, and understand your fans so that you have more details to build a qualified lead database. To enable more informed decision-making in your marketing, sales, customer service, and publicity departments, make sure you mine as much data as possible.
- Sell more tickets: With more qualified leads, you’ll sell more tickets to games and publicity events. Using the information stored in your CRM, you’ll know who to reach out to and what communication channels they prefer. You’ll also know what types of deals, discounts, and bonuses work best to incentivize your fans to purchase tickets.
- Manage your team’s reputation: CRMs come with customizable forms and social media integrations that simplify tracking, maintaining, or fixing your team’s reputation. As public figures, players and their respective teams need to maintain a strong positive reputation to broaden their fan base and increase ticket sales.
- Attract more sponsors: Sponsors help fund your team’s paychecks, events, and equipment. However, they may have high standards and increase their requirements each year. A CRM can be utilized to obtain quantified return on investment or ROI information based on historical data and current performance. This will help attract more sponsors and let everyone know what to expect from the partnership.
Keep these benefits and the features necessary to achieve them in mind when looking at the best sports CRM.
The best sports CRMs
No two sports CRMs will offer identical features and pricing; unfortunately, some options don’t live up to the high standards of the sports industry. If you’re looking for a robust, capable CRM system for your sports organization, these are the best options:
- Team Sideline: This is an industry-specific option with helpful features like free team site hosting, integrated game scheduling, and registration management. You also get unlimited customer support by phone or email and website graphics support at no additional charge. However, prices start at $499 yearly, so this isn’t the most affordable option.
- Jersey Watch: This CRM makes it easy to create team schedules and launch your organization’s website. There are also a lot of great security features. Unfortunately, Jersey Watch is more tailored toward youth sports, so it might not work for high-level teams.
- Upper Hand: Upper Hand provides all the features you need to successfully run a fitness center or sports organization. It offers client or fan management, data tracking, and online scheduling, among other features. However, Upper Hand’s options start at $95 per month, so it is not the most affordable option.
- monday sales CRM: monday.com’s sales CRM offers all the features you need in a sports CRM. You can learn more about the sports-specific options available in our CRM below.
monday.com’s sports CRM options
monday.com’s CRM provides key features that can make managing your team or organization easier and more profitable. You can use customizable forms to track work or project requests and gather feedback from your fans, employees, or players. All on one page, you can create detailed customer profiles for each fan and aggregate this data on customizable dashboards that show the information you need to make informed decisions.
Running a sports organization or managing a team takes a lot of time and effort, making it crucial that the CRM system you choose is as time-effective as possible. That’s why monday.com offers many business tool integrations to reduce the time spent opening new applications between tasks. In addition, automation capabilities also help cut down the time you spend on tedious tasks and processes.
By now, you likely have a solid understanding of sports CRMs and how to choose one for your organization. However, we’ve answered a few FAQs below to increase your understanding even further.
FAQs
How is a CRM used in sports?
A CRM is used in sports to help manage the fan base for individual teams or venues for professional or casual sports organizations. A sports CRM can help you manage customer profiles, understand how fans pay for their tickets, and determine how large the fan base truly is. It can also help you make decisions regarding merchandise, events, and charitable actions.
What are some benefits of a sports CRM?
Using a sports CRM, you can build a qualified database of leads for game or performance tickets and help the sales and marketing teams determine the best way to sell those tickets. It also provides reputation management features, helps you attract more sponsors, and helps guide your decisions related to publicity.
Any sports team can build a loyal fan base and increase profits using monday.com
Any sports team can benefit from using a sports CRM to build a loyal fan base that regularly purchases game and event tickets, thus increasing profits.
When the fans are happy and the profits are high, the sponsors also stay happy. monday.com’s sales CRM has all the features you need to support those efforts plus so much more.
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