The Principles of CRM 

Winners’ approach to the use of CRM and data, and the basis of our course, is founded on several key concepts and principles that we believe are as relevant to the biggest rights owner in the world (IOC or FIFA, depending on who you ask) to the smallest NGB or club of our most niche sport. However, as our work focuses on digital engagement and digital transformation, if a rights owner doesn’t at least have a website then our approach isn’t for them.

We take the approach demonstrated by pureplay companies such as Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify, and frame it for the unique opportunities and challenges of the sports industry – but the foundational concepts and principles are the same.

A few of these are:

• Strategy, data, technology, process, and culture play an equal role in implementing CRM – each area must be given focus and consideration to enable a data-driven environment.
• A CRM pyramid represents your most passive fans at the base and fans who advocate for you at the top – the objective of CRM is to move these stakeholders up the pyramid, constantly adding more into the base. This is achieved through acquiring data about those in the pyramid, analysing that data, then using that analysis to determine how to increasingly engage with those stakeholders.
• The holy grail of data management is the creation of a centralised database that holds all the data you have about your stakeholders – known and unknown. It will include who they are, how they behave, their interests and their needs.
• Once you have your centralised database you can create customer personas. These are manufactured representations of the different groups of stakeholders based on the information you have in your database. Customer personas will help you plan, market and communicate more effectively and efficiently and are tailored specifically to your organisation and it’s aims.
  
  

In module one of our course, we look at each of these in detail to help you understand the relevance to the specific use cases of the sports industry. We also introduce the concept of customer journeys and take a quick look at the CRM tech stack, both of which are then covered in greater detail in later modules.

Across the seven modules of our course, we expand on these concepts and principles and show you how we apply them to data-driven marketing, data analysis, and data visualisation. Our modules also include a look at business change, data and the law, and as it’s such an important area for rights owners, we look at the role of CRM and data in sponsorship.