Better Business Conversations

Success Stories

OnPath Helps NHL Franchise Club Drive Record-Breaking Sales and Revenue

While hockey fans in Ottawa, Canada, are fanatical, the city's population of less than1 million makes it one of the smallest franchise markets in the NHL. The Ottawa Senators NHL hockey club knew that, to meet its aggressive 10-year goals, it would have to efficiently and effectively target, communicate with, and sell both season's tickets and corporate properties. Of particular importance would be the city's 25,000 local businesses, which contribute roughly 80% of the team's revenues.

The Problem:

  • Target, communicate with, and sell to approximately 25,000 businesses comprising 150,000 contacts.
  • Establish programs, processes, and technology to manage and coordinate sales and marketing activities and to optimize a sales team of  25 inside and outside sales reps.
  • Ensure complete market penetration for the season's ticket drive.
  • Establish an effective customer relationship management (CRM) solution. The solution would have to be right-sized and easy to use to ensure adoption by the Senators aggressive sales team, which was accustomed to using GoldMine Contact Manager.
  • Integrate the new CRM solution with an existing ticket system.
  • Apply a complete database of all local Ottawa businesses and contact them all.
  • A three-week window - the start of the season ticket drive was looming.

The Solution:

  • OnPath chose the SalesLogix CRM application as the most viable option to meet the Senators' business challenges.
  • A phased implementation approach, beginning with a proof of concept, was designed to support the pending season ticket drive immediately, later tackling other sales and customer service challenges.
  • A Simple Business Conversation Program was combined with emails to extend the sales teams' reach during this critical period and drive opportunities deeper into the sales funnel.

The Result:

As a direct result of OnPath's conversation programs, the Ottawa Senators achieved:

  • Top 10 ranking in the League for:
    • Average attendance
    • Corporate sales
    • Group sales
  • Record season-ticket sales for the season
  • 33 regular-season sellouts

In addition to these quantitative results, the Senators have also benefited from:

  • A very successful CRM implementation that is popular among the sales team.
  • A new, clean database of all local businesses migrated from purchased lists and de-duplicated against the existing GoldMine database.
  • Reports that allow the management team instant visibility on ticket renewals, sales activity and pipeline progress.