6 Ways to Streamline Your Sports Sales & Activations
5-Minute Read
There are generally two main types of sports fans in the world:
- The casual, uninvested viewer, or;
- The “highly identified” or “forever” fan.
Turns out, there’s a lot of psychology behind highly identified sports fans. These fans view their dedication to a specific team as an extension of their identity. In fact, highly identified fans are scientifically proven to have:
- Higher social self-esteem ⬆️
- Lower levels of loneliness ⬇️
- Hormonal changes similar to the athletes playing ⛹🏽♀️
- Increased positive emotions following a win 😀
- Increased negative emotions following a loss 😡
Another area that’s impacted by the emotions of highly identified fans?
Consumerism. 🤑
Rolling Stone reports that 66% of highly identified fans take action after seeing a team’s sponsorship.
Science and data make it very clear that partnerships in the form of sports sponsorship are mutually beneficial for both the team and partner brand. When growth is on the line, it’s vital to accurately position your value out the gate.
So, how is your team streamlining your sponsorship and ticketing sales to win big, faster? If you have room for improvement, we’re here to help with six modern ways to expedite your sports sales and marketing activations.
1.) Up Your Branding Game at Each Touchpoint
Miscommunication is a frustrating thing to navigate in any area of the buyer journey. Putting yourself in the shoes of your potential sponsors and ticket buyers will reveal gaps and areas for improvement within your team. If they’re receiving conflicting messaging at various stages in the sales process, it could be a major turnoff from moving forward with their next major partnership activation.
Collaborate with your teammates at every stage of the sales process to ensure your messaging, branding, and timeline are consistent. Details can quickly get lost in the weeds between different departments and roles, so take the time to ensure everyone is on the same page for a better client experience. Sports leaders love using the Master Deck feature in DIGIDECK to pull all their assets from one centralized location and keep everything on brand.
2.) Use the Same Tech From Prospecting to Onboarding to Recap
Historically, the onboarding process for new clients can be jarring if it feels like a different world than the sales process. One way to alleviate this discomfort is to utilize the same tech in every stage— from prospecting to onboarding to recap.
Consider delivering pre-sales information, onboarding materials such as specs + timelines, and post-sales recaps ALL from the same source of “tech truth” for an advanced take on this approach.
Hundreds of sports teams love using DIGIDECK to streamline every step of the sales, onboarding, and renewal process in one user-friendly and engaging presentation platform.
Teams like the New York Yankees, Chicago Bears, and Seattle Seahawks among others have developed sophisticated, on-brand, and dynamic presentations using the DIGIDECK platform at all stages of partnership conversations.
3.) Integrate All Your Apps
Salesforce. Hubspot. Microsoft Dynamics. Canva. YouTube.
What sports sales or marketing team doesn’t rely on at least one of the above tools? Ignoring integration capabilities is likely adding hours of unnecessary busywork to your sales team’s plate each week. 👈 Read that again.
Take advantage of integrating your most-used tools together wherever possible. This is another area where DIGIDECK excels as a presentation platform. Integrate or add connectivity between your presentation platform and your CRM and other scheduling, design, and video tools you rely on each day.
With integrations, you can spend more time crafting your pitch and less time flipping between tabs and doing (seemingly endless) copying & pasting.
“One of the greatest benefits of using a web-based presentation platform like DIGIDECK is all the interconnectivity it offers with other valuable web platforms and widgets. Connecting other business tools to your DIGIDECK extends the capabilities offered by the platform, allowing you to take advantage of a nearly endless number of engaging web experiences for your viewers.”
Scott Bishop
Technology Leader
SaaS Industry
4.) Take Advantage of Automation
Feeling like there’s not enough time in the day, but hiring another teammate isn’t a possibility? It’s time to automate.
Although automation and AI can both provide time-saving benefits, automation differs as it uses rule-based and follows set instructions. Automation can move data from place to place to help you avoid that endless, mind-numbing copying and pasting and ensure nothing falls through the cracks.
Leaders in the sports sponsorship space turn to tools like these leverage automation:
- Selenium
- Cypress
- Appium
- Katalon
- Playwright
Plus, utilizing DIGIDECK for your presentations allows you to create automated rule sets so that you can save time when engaging with new and existing partner brands. The DIGIDECK Rules Engine automatically adds or removes slides based on information about a prospect, including:
- Location
- Age
- Job title
- How soon they plan to make a purchase decision
- And more!
Embracing automation helps streamline your sports sales process by allowing more time for pitch preparation, direct client communication, and prospecting.
5.) Use Data to Personalize Your Pitches
Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all pitches. Potential sponsors and ticket buyers can smell a generic presentation from miles away. If anyone is going to contribute money to your organization, your team needs to make them feel heard, understood, and cared for.
The best way to accomplish this emotional reaction? Letting the data do the heavy-lifting.
Use data insights from your CRM and marketing efforts to personalize your presentations and follow-ups. If you know a prospect’s pain points out of the gate, you’ll achieve a more impactful presentation when you provide specific solutions right away.
This can be difficult in traditional presentation platforms like PowerPoint or Google Slides, but with DIGIDECK, leading sports brands that leverage the platform get access to valuable analytics, including:
- Who viewed your presentation
- When they viewed it
- How long they spent on each slide
Pro Tip: For advanced efforts, create custom questionnaires that your prospect is required to answer before entering the presentation. Then, allow their answers to trigger automatic rule sets in order to deliver a 100% personalized experience without rep interaction.
6.) Visualize the Opportunity
65% of the population are visual learners, so why should your sales process be any different?
Instead of telling a potential sponsor where their logo will show up in your stadium, show them! DIGIDECK users can automatically input a prospect’s logo onto all the applicable activations in just a few clicks.
The same goes for ticketing. Instead of telling a potential group sale or new season member about how awesome your private suites and season-long experience are, show them.
Teams like the San Diego Padres have 360 pano views from each suite within Petco Park directly in DIGIDECK enabling them to sell more efficiently by immersing their audience right in “game day.”
“We are using DIGIDECK’s panoramas feature to give a better representation of our suites and hospitality spaces. We have several hospitality locations that are literally on the field for entertaining where you can catch a home run. It was tremendous to show those places in a way that did not look like a long flat space… that was really big for us.”
Chelsea Dill
Manager, Corporate Events & Hospitality
San Diego Padres
GAME ON: Win Big Sales With Cutting-Edge Tools
In the fast-paced and competitive era of sponsorship sales, old-school and static tools like PowerPoint and Google Slides blend in with average performers. If you’re ready to improve your sales process by leveraging automation, integrations, analytics, and immersive stadium capabilities, join the 500+ organizations already utilizing DIGIDECK to shorten their content creation time while increasing revenue simultaneously.
See for yourself how DIGIDECK will streamline your sports sales process with a free 30-minute demo.
