Background
AGF is a football club located in Denmark’s second largest city Aarhus, and the stadium CERES Park Arena is among the largest as well with a capacity of 20,000. Founded back in 1880 it is among the oldest clubs in Denmark and holds a very strong brand throughout Scandinavia. The club is one of the most successful football clubs in Denmark with five domestic championships and nine cup titles (which is record).
The club’s greatest achievements in Europe were back in 1961, when they were eliminated in the quarter finals by SL Benfica in the Champions League, and back in 1989 when they lost to FC Barcelona in the Cup Winners Cup in the quarter finals as well.
The challenge: A successful business calls for more structure
In recent years, AGF has experienced an increase in business, and the club now has more than 400 sponsors, but the large number of sponsors also brings some significant challenges.
At AGF we have many sponsors and thereby a lot of data. One of our challenges has been how to handle and get an overview of those sponsors, and where our account managers used to administrate some of this sponsor data in Excel spreadsheets while others used Microsoft Outlook.
However, suddenly we discovered that the data were scattered across our organisation, we did not share this information, the knowledge about our sponsors was very limited, and we had some serious challenges regarding when to resign sponsorships.
Among other obstacles were managing pre-game events as well as the handling sponsor exposure i.e. via fixed boards or LED boards in our stadium. We had numerous difficulties gaining an overview of how many of our sponsors would attend the pre-game events and which sponsors to expose thorough various banner ads.
The solution
Digital transformation with an industry specific CRM solution
Clubtimiser is an industry specific overall solution for professional sports clubs. It is developed on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform and helps solving challenges and “pains” experienced by sports clubs regarding value chain management. It can easily be integrated to existing systems like ERP, webshops etc.
“After the implementation of Clubtimiser we have taken a huge step towards transforming our business digitally. We now have a complete overview of our sponsors, as all data are handled and stored in one system, and we are able to share that information across our organisation. Furthermore, we have obtained more knowledge about our sponsors and their various types of sponsorships. We know exactly when to resign the sponsorship agreements, and with Clubtimiser how manage their sponsor exposure during matches.
Moreover, we have overcome all the logistical challenges regarding pre-game events. We now use a marketing automation tool in Clubtimiser to send out invitations prior to events, where our sponsors can log on to a portal and sign up for the event. In that way we know exactly how many people will attend and how much catering that we need to buy for each event, and thereby optimising our logistics and reducing the costs,” concludes Torben Nygaard from AGF.
Benefits
Digitalisation
Sponsor Management
Organising matches
Financial management
Capacity management
Digital Transformation – is the right word to use after having implemented Clubtimiser. We have gone from numerous manual processes to having automated large parts of our value chain. We now have an overview of our sponsors, we know them better and know exactly when to re-sign sponsorships. Our sales staff have more time for selling. And after having Clubtimiser, we have seen an increase of 40% in new sponsorships just within 12 months.
Torben Nygaard
Sales Director, AGF / Aarhus Elite