The Blazers' organization says it was able to meet its sales quota largely because of Onyx Software Corp.'s Front Office, a line of customer-relationship management products that automates sales, marketing, and customer functions.

"In the long term, CRM software buys us efficiency. As a new business, we need to track ticket sales, customer-service issues, and marketing campaigns very effectively," says Sandi Bittler, VP of business operations for the WNBA, which operates under the umbrella of Portland Trail Blazers Inc., in Portland, Ore. The WNBA division used Onyx's CRM software to store the names of people who had bought Blazers tickets and might be interested in the WNBA team.

The Blazers also used names from outside marketing lists and from Ticketmaster Corp., and obtained key demographic information from the fans themselves. The team then stored that information in the Front Office database and used it during the sales campaign.

Without such tools, the sales effort would have been much less efficient, says Tony Cesarano, database marketing manager with the Trail Blazers. "In the past, we would have manually keyed the WNBA sales information into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, which would have been time-consuming and could have introduced inaccuracies into the database," he says.

Like many businesses today, the Blazers have invested heavily in CRM tools that automate and unify business processes. The Aberdeen Group estimates that the CRM market generated $7.8 billion in revenue from software packages, software-vendor licenses, integration services, and peripheral and hardware sales for 1999, with CRM software sales making up $3.8 billion of that total. By 2002, the market-research firm says, the market is expected to grow to $18.5 billion, with CRM software accounting for $9.4 billion of that amount. Within the CRM product groups, sales software is expected to grow the fastest, followed by customer-service software.

This growth is largely the result of the proliferation of E-businesses, says Donovan Gow, a senior analyst at the Aberdeen Group. "As the Web evolves, power is quickly shifting to customers," he says. "Switching costs are decreasing for customers, and companies are realizing they have to improve their sales and marketing services and increase their customer support in order to retain their customers."

Today, the Blazers are facing a new game. As competition increases for consumers' discretionary income, sports franchises and entertainment organizations are stepping up their efforts to foster customer loyalty and retention. "These days, the entertainment dollar is stretched very thin," says Bittler, adding that customers have more entertainment choices than ever. "We need to make sure we provide a good product with great service to keep our customers coming back."

Customer retention is a paramount concern for most businesses. The Harvard Business Review estimates that it costs three to six times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one. So it's no surprise that more companies are fine-tuning their sales, marketing, and customer-service organizations to keep clients satisfied.

That was the case in April, when the Blazers implemented Front Office. Before that, the team relied on TeleMagic Enterprise software to keep up with sales leads and customer information. But as the team began to expand, it realized it had no infrastructure for consolidating lists of potential prospects in the database; running database queries; profiling or segmenting customers; mining sales leads from other systems; or enrolling customers in special seminars or advertising campaigns. The Blazers had to reach individual customers to sell season tickets and business customers to sell corporate sponsorships.

In addition, some salespeople didn't even use the TeleMagic software, opting instead for their own custom databases or Excel spreadsheets. Others kept their customer information stored in paper file folders. As a result, 40 to 50 sales and marketing employees ran their own processes and focused solely on their own set of customers. Information sharing was virtually nonexistent, says Cesarano. "We often had multiple salespeople calling one customer," he says. "No one was on the same page."

When the Blazers implemented Front Office, the goal was a shared database and shared processes across the organization. To achieve that, the Blazers conducted three-hour training sessions with all users, teaching them the basics of the new system. Initially, about a third of the 50- to 60-person sales force was reluctant to switch to the software. But once they saw the benefits of automating their processes, most accepted the new tools, Cesarano says.

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Illustration by James F. Kraus
Photo of Blazers staff by Shane Young