Purdue's Data Clean Up Improves Sales Efficiency and Fan Experience

It’s time for renewals and you start at the top of the season ticket holder list only to find multiple accounts for that fan. Are they the same person or is this multiple people with the same name? You’ll have to go through each record to determine that and then build a comprehensive account history for them as well as decide which record to use. This is a challenge that many universities struggle with, including Purdue.

The Challenge: Duplicate Accounts Wasted Time and Frustrated Fans

According to Purdue’s Brian Fordyce, Assistant Athletics Director – Business Strategy, they had an “astounding” amount of duplicate accounts. That was adding 2-3 minutes of work before a sales call which was probably happening ten times a day for each rep. That’s a lot of sales productivity down the drain.

Furthermore, Purdue’s data issues were creating frustration for donors. John Purdue Club (JPC) donors couldn’t buy exclusive tickets because their donor accounts were separate from their ticketing accounts which would result in an unnecessary support call.

Purdue’s athletic department is in the business of creating amazing fan experiences. But poor data quality was sabotaging both sides of the equation—wasting internal resources and souring the fan experience from the start.

“You look up a name and see ten accounts for someone. That kind of thing just clogs everything up.” - Paul Carenen, Director of Ticket Operations, Purdue University

The Solution: Paciolan MDM Provides a Crystal Clear View of Fans

Purdue University’s vision for excellence as a championship level athletics organization extends beyond fields and courts and into the back office. In this pursuit, Brian and his colleague Paul Carenen, Director of Ticket Operations, saw the potential of how clean data could improve sales efficiency and fan experience. They tried to tackle it with another partner but were never able to get the data to a place where they trusted it. When they heard about Paciolan Master Data Management (MDM) they were excited by the potential.

Together with Paciolan they implemented MDM on their fan account records. The software based algorithmic process identified the duplicates within their Paciolan database and merged them into a golden record in their Salesforce CRM so every fan has a consolidated history of their ticket purchases and donations. And now, Paciolan MDM runs its clean-up process multiple times per day so their accounts are always up-to-date, preventing the database from sliding back into chaos. Exception-cases where a merge shouldn’t have been done are easily identified in a dashboard and then flagged to be reversed. This work also allowed Purdue to clean up their platform’s database and vastly improve reporting clarity across the Paciolan suite.

The Outcomes: Significant Operational Efficiency Gains and Fan Experience Improvements

After implementation, Purdue reduced their account database from 157k records to 95k. This crystal-clear view of their fans provides positive downstream impacts to sales efficiency and fan experience.

Sales Impact - Removing 2-3 minutes of research that happens ten times a day is clawing back up to 120 hours a year per rep for more selling. Further, the sales process for renewals is improved with actionable data insights. Purdue leveraged their deduped database and is working with their Paciolan iQ analyst to build a season ticket utilization report that shows whether season ticket holders attended games, transferred tickets, or sold them on SeatGeek. This will arm them with the ability to quickly make the case for renewal by showing season ticket holders that they received value out of their investment. Prior, the duplicate accounts would have made this a tedious task.

Fan Experience - All of this has positive impacts on the fan experience because Purdue’s sales reps trust that they have the full story on the fan and can provide service much more efficiently now that they don’t have to look through multiple accounts. On the donor side, JPC members don’t have to call in to a helpline because their donor activity and ticket purchases are on the same account. And this project has helped to tie all post-game/post-season surveys to the right fans.

“I absolutely recommend Paciolan MDM. We tried to do it by ourselves and the accuracy wasn’t there. Now the dashboard shows us everything we asked for.” - Brian Fordyce, Assistant Athletics Director – Business Strategy, Purdue University

Purdue’s Athletics Department found the right formula: strategic vision plus Paciolan MDM. This allows them to leverage account data in order to drive operational efficiency in sales and streamline the fan experience so it doesn’t detract from the big game.