As a revenue operations professional deeply immersed in the intersection of technology, data and sports, my focus is on optimizing operations to maximize revenue growth. These principles come to life within the unique structure of professional sports organizations.
From both a career perspective and a best practices standpoint, one of the great things about revenue operations is that it’s truly industry agnostic. You’re not limited to working within a single industry. You can build your expertise in software, financial services, or any other field. Personally, I’ve been able to draw on all my previous experiences to thrive in my dream job in professional sports.
Professional Sports Organizations
Business revenue generation in professional sports is much more than selling tickets. It’s a complex ecosystem, involving game day operations, sponsorships, media rights, merchandise, and much more. This structure is supported by various specialized departments working together to fuel the organization’s financial engine. And each department has its own systems, processes, and data – an abundance of different, structured data.
Sports Revenue Ecosystem
Why Revenue Operations?
The biggest surprise for me when I first joined professional sports management was discovering all the many channels of revenue. Importantly, the success of each revenue stream relies on the seamless collaboration of multiple teams working together within a revenue operations framework. For example, the sales, service and marketing teams are essential for driving game day and sponsorship revenue, ensuring fan engagement and delivering value to corporate sponsors. Figuring out how to put this all together in a streamlined way can be a real challenge, and oftentimes needs creative solutions.
Revenue operations is what ties all these efforts together. Revenue operations is a strategic approach that aligns and centralizes functions, processes and technology across sales, marketing, customer success and other revenue generating teams. Its primary goal is to eliminate silos, streamline operations, and create a unified system that drives predictable and scalable revenue growth.
The Cost of Inefficiency: People, Data & System Silos
Along with analytics, revenue operations plays a critical role in supporting every revenue stream, ensuring each function has the data, systems and processes needed to work efficiently. Centralizing and aligning efforts drives streamlined, data-driven decisions – fueling sustainable growth. Companies with aligned sales, marketing and customer success teams report a 19% faster growth rate and 15% higher profitability compared to those with siloed operations. This is why revenue operations is such a critical function within any sports organization.
Value of Centralization
Unified Data & Systems – One source of truth ensures consistency across teams and drives seamless collaboration
Streamlined Processes – Efficiency and alignment reduce redundancies, allowing teams to focus on strategic growth.
Real-time Insights – Centralized analytics power faster, data-driven decisions for scalable revenue growth.
Why Revenue Operations?
- Aligns teams under shared goals, KPIs, and frameworks
- Standardizes workflows for consistency and efficiency across departments
- Provides a single source of truth and actionable insights
Turning Data into Action with Analytics
In professional sports teams, we have so much data available to us. It’s a challenge to know what is valuable, what is useful, and what we should act upon. It’s much like flying a plane without instruments; you’re flying blind.
Especially with access to this massive amount of data, analytics has allowed us to be more intelligent and better target prospects. It has taken us out of the “spray and pray “approach to marketing, where you’re just hoping for the best. Instead, analytics tells you where to target, which is so much more efficient and cost effective. You’re spending far less money.
Analytics is also incredibly important in operational efficiency. It’s had an enormous impact on our organization.
Building on a Solid Foundation
Data operations is the foundation layer for all revenue operations and analytics to be built upon. Look at it like the roots of a tree. If the roots are not stable, everything above them is going to be shaky; the tree is going to fall. Similarly, in an organization with an unstable data foundation, everything is going to be inaccurate.
Foundation of RevOps
It’s really important to have the foundational layer, your data operations built out and set before you build any other systems on top of it. If you don’t have that foundation set, you are not going to be successful.
For the Rams, DataGroomer has been a huge contributor to accuracy and the stability of our data layer. They are a central partner. DataGroomr’s ability to streamline data deduplication, ensure accuracy, and maintain hygiene in our CRM has saved us countless hours and avoided costly errors. It’s the number one tool I bring with me to any organization I join. If you’ve got 17 Jane Doe’s and 26 Bob Smith’s sitting in your CRM, you’re not doing rev ops right and your analytics is going to be a mess.
Changing the Culture of RevOps
I think it’s important and critical to discuss that in order to change a business culture, you need a strong leader at the helm. It all starts at the top. You need a good leader who understands what revenue operations is and the value that it brings to the table.
The perfect executive sponsor has experience in revenue operations and in a few of the departments so they can speak everyone’s language and get everyone on board. This leader needs to have a mindset to bring everyone together and then trust their staff and trust the departments to do their jobs. Leadership is critical.
Of course I’m not saying that if you don’t have this leader, that you can’t operate in a coordinated manner. You can still be collaborative and work as one team, even if different functions report to different leaders. This is very common. Very few organizations are fully set up with a centralized revenue operations model.
The Impact of Unified Data
Across the board in the different industries I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of, I’ve seen how a trusted, single source of accurate data can have tremendous impact. I’ve also seen firsthand how revenue operations then unites departments aligning around the same data, the same language, the same goals.
When everyone is working from a single source of truth, the silos come down, collaboration flourishes, and the resulting impact transforms everything. I’ve had the privilege of witnessing this change at multiple organizations. It’s incredible to see how this not only drives efficiency, but also fosters a sense of shared purpose. It’s one of those moments that truly brings a smile to your face, knowing that lasting impact is there and this organization is going to be much better off in the future for years to come.
