Salesforce.com gives the Western Bulldogs a helping hand

On-demand service provider Salesforce.com has deployed Salseforce Enterprise Edition to Melbourne-based AFL Club, The Western Bulldogs.

The Western Bulldogs is one of the 32,300 companies of all sizes, industries and geographies that comprised the salesforce.com customer base as of April 30, 2007. Revenue and subscribers will be recognised as the service is delivered.

The move comes as part of an overhaul of the Club’s business operations in order to transform the sporting organisation into one of the most sustainable and profitable businesses in the AFL industry, said Bruce Kaider, general manager business development and strategy at the Western Bulldogs.

“To maintain a highly streamlined level of operation, Clubs need to model themselves on the corporate world. Having full visibility into sales pipeline and revenue targets is crucial to running a sustainable business and therefore a sustainable Club,” he said.

The Western Bulldogs Football Club is using Salesforce to manage its rapidly growing database of sponsors and commercial relationships which include LeasePlan Australia, WorkSafe Victoria and EzyBonds Global Payments.

The Western Bulldogs previously used a spreadsheet system to track and manage a data base of more than 14,000 contacts. After more than three years of 20 percent annual growth this process was becoming increasingly complex.

“Spreadsheets are the common language for sportspeople and teams but as our sponsor base grew our existing processes became more and more disjointed,” said Kaider.

“We had multiple spreadsheets to track and manage sponsors so it goes without saying that there were duplications and inefficiencies. There was also no mechanism to set reminders or track calls and obviously no single view into the sales pipeline.”

In order to grow its sponsorship and commercial relationships – and therefore grow revenue – the Bulldogs’ needed to take a more sophisticated approach, he said.

“Sporting clubs don’t normally invest time in reviewing CRM packages,” said Kaider. “But we had immediate buy-in from the board as our Chief Operating Officer could see that an enterprise-class solution would help us get ahead of the competition.”

The Club reviewed five different CRM packages and considered custom-building its own system, but Salesforce stood out.

“Salesforce required low up-front costs and minimal new infrastructure. It could quickly and easily scale as the business grew and integrate seamlessly with our existing applications,” said Kaider.