Long after the fans have gone home and the cracker jacks have been cleaned up from Fenway Park, the game’s still on for the CRM team. We don’t make plays on the diamond, but with the data flowing behind the scenes.
I’m the Senior Manager of CRM for the Boston Red Sox, and my team is responsible for delivering actionable data across the Red Sox and Fenway Sports Management organizations. Our most important benchmarks are data quality and timeliness. We have a wide variety of data pipelines from web forms, social media, and our website that are solely focused on ticket sales. To help fill seats on game day, our team has to provide our colleagues on the sales and service teams with reliable and accurate data in a timely manner. These colleagues are serving Red Sox fans, so it’s critical they have trustworthy, relevant information while a lead is still warm.
Striking Out with Self-managed Pipelines
For years, the CRM team struggled to deliver relevant info to our sales team in a timely manner. We were working within a fragmented system and didn’t have a strong grasp of our pipelines from various platforms. In some cases, the data was literally out of our hands, as we relied on a third-party partner to manage pipelines.
Even the pipelines we managed in-house came with a fair amount of technical debt. If the sales team wanted to launch a new web form, it wasn’t easy or intuitive for us to create that pipeline on our own. Relying on others meant waiting weeks, if not months.
Our lack of control caused big delays in moving data from our enterprise data warehouse to Salesforce. Some leads took nearly two hours to reach a salesperson, and by that point, they may have gone cold. Our inability to deliver useful information in real time was costing us countless missed revenue opportunities.
A new ETL Solution Gives Us Home Field Advantage
The CRM team wanted to take control by bringing all our data pipeline management in-house. If we had an easy way to update our applications, we could make our data work for our needs without delay. The turning point was learning about Integrate.io.
Choosing Integrate.io as our ETL platform was one of the easiest decisions we’ve made about our tech stack. The platform has so many integrations out of the box, which is rare for an ETL tool. With so much riding on our Salesforce integration, these ready-to-go integrations were key. The platform’s ease of use would also help us shorten the time to create new pipelines.
“The move to Integrate.io singlehandedly transformed our sales process. Taking control of our systems freed us to move our data where it needs to be, fast.”
Ben Nickerson
Senior Manager, CRM
Another reason for choosing Integrate.io was for their excellent customer support. Throughout our early conversations, we felt the Integrate.io team was as invested in our success as we were.
Our success managers confirmed those impressions during onboarding. We discovered the learning curve wasn’t as steep as expected for an enterprise ETL. We gave the Integrate.io team our use cases, and they offered the guidance and direction necessary to get us up and running.
Integrate.io gave us greater control and visibility into our pipelines, the data we’re sending, and our data consumption from Salesforce. Bringing our data processes in-house enabled us to consolidate existing pipelines and efficiently create new pipelines without third-party support.
Knocking Expectations Out of the Park
The move to Integrate.io singlehandedly transformed our sales process. Taking control of our systems freed us to move our data where it needs to be quickly. We replaced our old data pipeline for web form leads with a live data stream that delivers information to Salesforce within 15 minutes, an 88% reduction in latency and up to 8x faster than previous delivery times.
Think about what that means for the Red Sox sales team: Within 15 minutes of someone connecting with the organization, a sales rep can get back to them via email, text, or phone. At that point, the form they completed is likely still fresh in their mind, and they’re potentially much more eager to act on it than they would be two hours later. In the first eight months of using Integrate.io, we increased our inbound ticket inquiry conversions by 15%.
“In the first eight months of using Integrate.io, we increased our inbound ticket inquiry conversions by 15%.”
Ben Nickerson
Senior Manager, CRM
Just as important as increased conversions is the time we’ve saved by building pipelines ourselves. We’ve gained autonomy while shortening the launch time to days, not weeks (or months). Time is a currency you can’t get back, so these savings are especially significant.
A byproduct of having improved data accuracy and shorter timelines is that our entire organization has much more confidence in our data. From our sales team to our business strategy and analytics unit, everyone has experienced the improvements firsthand. Any way you look at it, Integrate.io has been a success, and we’re ecstatic with the results.
Touching All the Bases with Integrate.io
I can’t say enough good things about the Integrate.io team and their responsiveness. They update us with new platform features as soon as they’re ready, and they’ve been fantastic when we’ve needed enhancements or answers to our questions. There’s even a live chat in the platform, so I can get immediate answers without interrupting my work.
“We’re constantly doing more with less on our team. Considering Integrate.io’s ease of use and ability to solve significant business problems, it’s the obvious path forward.”
Ben Nickerson
Senior Manager, CRM
We’re constantly doing more with less on our team, and Integrate.io makes that possible. We’d wanted to move our eternal ETL process back in-house for quite some time, and partnering with Integrate.io empowered us to make that vision a reality.
By owning our data pipeline, the Boston Red Sox CRM team has helped the club react faster and build stronger relationships with our fans. And that makes for a much better ball game.
If you are looking for automated pipelines to optimize your data stack, get a demo of our true low-code platform that offers fixed-fee pricing with unlimited usage.
