Powering Data-Led Marketing at a Global Sports Technology Leader
INDUSTRY:
Sports Technology
TECH STACK:
Salesforce Pardot
Salesforce Tableau
Salesforce CRMA
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
A global sports technology leader—serving bookmakers, international sports federations and media companies—needed to professionalise and scale its demand generation and reporting. The organisation ran multiple regional campaigns using Salesforce Account Engagement (Pardot) and had also subscribed to additional lead capture and automation tools. Yet despite significant investment, the firm struggled to extract value: delivery was inconsistent, expertise rotated frequently, and reporting remained labour-intensive at month-end.
Ennovision was brought in to stabilise delivery and unlock the customer’s Salesforce subscriptions. We assembled a twin-track team: a consistent on-site function to design and execute campaigns, paired with an offshore R&D and engineering hub to standardise data flows, automate reporting, and prototype improvements at pace. Within weeks we delivered an automated pipeline that captured all new prospects created in the previous month, identified those assigned as leads, and synchronised the result set into Salesforce for real-time dashboards, scheduled email summaries, and repeatable month-end reporting— all with markedly less manual effort. The result was higher campaign velocity, better insight, and the organisational confidence that comes from stable, well-run operations.
THE CLIENT AND CONTEXT
Industry. The client operates at global scale in sports technology, collecting and analysing sports data to power bookmaking, federation integrity and competition services, and media products. Precision, timeliness and trust are existential requirements. Campaigns target distinct personas across geographies—rights holders, operations leaders, trading leads, content executives—requiring nuanced messaging and robust segmentation.
Marketing stack. The global marketing team uses Salesforce Account Engagement (Pardot) to build and run campaigns and relies on Salesforce CRM and analytics tools (including Tableau and CRM Analytics) to monitor pipeline performance. Over time, additional tools had been layered in for web forms, lead capture and process automation, each with its own data model, admin surfaces and quirks.
Symptoms. Campaign operations were inconsistent and person-dependent; vendors rotated resources who could “take orders” but not lead best practice. Monthly reporting was a scramble—copying CSVs, reconciling counts, and rebuilding the same metrics again and again. Meanwhile, leadership sought clearer, faster, and more accurate visibility into acquisition performance across regions.
OBJECTIVES
1. Stabilise execution—provide a dependable team that can design emails and journeys, enforce standards, and coordinate with regional marketers.
2. Exploit existing investments—catalogue all Salesforce subscriptions and related tools, identify under-used capabilities, and coach teams to adopt them.
3. Automate reporting—replace ad-hoc monthly reporting with repeatable, auditable, and near real-time dashboards in Salesforce.
4. Reduce manual effort—eliminate swivel-chair tasks, free up marketers’ time for content and strategy, and reduce error risk.
OUR APPROACH
1) Build a blended team We placed a junior engineer focused on day-to-day campaign build (email assets, journey wiring, list management) and a mid-level Salesforce specialist embedded with global marketing to lead on platform utilisation and process design. They were backed by our offshore R&D squad to prototype improvements and implement automations without interrupting campaign cadence. This blend ensured both operational steadiness and platform uplift—the latter often neglected when teams are stuck firefighting.
2) Catalogue & rationalise the martech estate Within the first sprint we created a lightweight catalogue of the client’s Salesforce subscriptions and adjacent tools, mapped who used what, and highlighted opportunities to consolidate duplicative functionality into Account Engagement and Salesforce. We captured data lineage from lead capture through to CRM, spotlighting breakpoints and inconsistent field usage that hurt segmentation and reporting.
3) Standardise data flows We established a canonical prospect-to-lead flow: new prospects (by creation date) would be automatically identified, deduplicated against CRM, and classified according to assignment rules and campaign source. The ground truth for month-over-month reporting became a single, scheduled export from Account Engagement—transformed and synced to Salesforce for analysis, rather than fragmented spreadsheets.
4) Automate the “last mile” of reporting We delivered a scheduled process that captures all prospects created in the previous month, joins them to ownership and campaign metadata, flags which ones were assigned as leads, and synchronises the dataset into Salesforce custom objects for durable, queryable analytics. We then layered dashboards and monthly email summaries with top-line KPIs and trends for stakeholders.
SOLUTION DESIGN
Architecture snapshot (marketing data loop)
• Capture — leads enter via Account Engagement forms and connected sources.
• Classify — prospects are tagged with campaign, region, product interest, and channel metadata.
• Schedule — a monthly job selects all new prospects from the previous month and marks those assigned as leads as per sales routing rules.
• Synchronise — data is synced into Salesforce—writing to custom objects and fields optimised for analytics.
• Analyse — Tableau and CRM Analytics dashboards present trendlines, conversion rates, and segment performance in near real time.
• Notify — automated email summaries go out to product owners with highlights, exceptions and suggested follow-ups.
Technical scope (key elements)
• API integration between Account Engagement and Salesforce with strict idempotency to avoid duplicate records during retries.
• Monthly automation scheduled to align with fiscal calendars but flexible enough to run on demand for re-stated periods.
• Prospect retrieval logic formalised as version-controlled code: date windows, segment criteria, and assignment detection.
• Salesforce configuration using custom objects/fields to persist monthly snapshots, with governance to prevent accidental edits.
• Automated email notifications including headline KPIs, trend deltas, and links to the relevant Salesforce dashboards.
DATA AND ANALYTICS
Making numbers trustworthy
• Control totals — count of prospects and count assigned as leads for each cycle.
• Segment distributions — by region, product and channel.
• Reconciliation checks — cross-verify Account Engagement and CRM counts.
• Exception reports — anomalies such as missing campaign tags or unmapped sources.
By persisting each month’s snapshot into a dedicated object, we made trend analysis straightforward and ensured analysts weren’t rebuilding the same queries every month in spreadsheets. Dashboards in Tableau and CRM Analytics expose funnel stages, velocity, and performance by region and persona, enabling both global and local decision-making.
Segmentation and lead hygiene
We standardised picklists, introduced validation where feasible, and guided marketers to avoid free-text fields for critical attributes. This improved both targeting precision and the signal quality in analytics
Operating model and ways of working
Clear swim lanes
• Junior engineer — executes campaign builds, QA of email assets, maintains templates and brand consistency.
• Mid-level specialist — owns platform utilisation and process improvements; partners with regional marketers; triages enhancement requests.
• Offshore R&D team — builds and hardens automations, runs POCs, and maintains the reporting pipeline.
Rituals and governance
We set a two-week cadence with demos to global stakeholders; a shared backlog prioritised by impact; and change notes for each release so marketing and sales are never surprised. All automation code and Salesforce configuration changes were version-controlled and peerreviewed, improving quality and knowledge sharing.
Experience design for marketers
• Reusable templates for high-frequency campaign types to accelerate build time.
• Naming conventions that make assets searchable and analytics consistent.
• Error-proofing prompts for missing campaign tags or UTM parameters.
• Help by design — dashboard links embedded in the monthly summary emails take stakeholders directly to curated views.
Security and compliance
• Least-privilege access for automation users; no shared credentials.
• Audit logs retained for all scheduled runs and data writes.
• Field-level security applied so sensitive attributes are only visible to authorised roles.
• PII handling aligned to internal policies; exports minimised by keeping analytics within Salesforce/CRM Analytics where possible.
Outcomes
Operational stability
The client moved from reactive, person-dependent operations to a stable, reliable cadence. Campaigns shipped on time, and the team could plan peak periods with confidence. The reduction in ad-hoc fire drills translated into more time for content quality and testing— work that directly lifts conversion.
Reporting in minutes, not days
Month-end now runs on a scheduled, repeatable job feeding Salesforce dashboards and automated emails. Manual reconciliation and spreadsheet wrangling are largely eliminated. Stakeholders view up-to-date metrics any time, rather than waiting for a monthly pack.
Better decisions, faster
With trustworthy, persisted monthly snapshots, marketing leaders can compare like for like across regions and segments. Experiments—subject lines, send times, offers—are easier to evaluate. Sales sees lead assignment clarity earlier, improving speed-to-contact.
Efficiency and morale
By removing error-prone manual steps and introducing templates, we reduced rework and context switching. Marketers report higher confidence in the data and less operational fatigue at month-end.
What made the difference
Prospect selection logic
• Windowing — default to the previous calendar month, with support for custom windows when accounting cycles differ.
• Filters — exclude test sandboxes; enforce required attributes (region, campaign code) and flag exceptions.
• Assignment detection — cross-reference CRM assignment rules; capture owner and team at the time of first assignment to preserve history.
• Idempotency — runs can be re-executed safely; the pipeline writes only deltas or overwrites the month’s snapshot atomically.
Salesforce data model extensions
• Monthly Prospect Summary (custom object) with fields for counts, conversion rates, and segment distributions.
• Prospect-to-Lead Snapshot (child records) for drill-through analysis and audit.
• Calculated fields and roll-ups that power dashboards without heavy runtime joins, improving responsiveness.
Dashboards and alerts
• Global overview — prospects created, leads assigned, month-over-month trend, and conversion by top regions.
• Segment drilldowns — persona, product interest, and channel performance.
• Exception panels — missing campaign tags, unmapped sources, high bounce rates.
• Email summaries — succinct narrative with highlights, deltas and links to dashboards.
Risks and mitigations
• Data drift — mitigated with validation rules and exception reports reviewed weekly.
• Ownership ambiguity — clarified with a RACI for campaign build vs. data pipeline vs. dashboard governance.
• Over-customisation — preference for configuration over code to avoid maintenance debt.
• Change fatigue — phased adoption and hands-on enablement kept stakeholders on side.
Measurable impact (illustrative)
• Significantly less manual effort in monthly reporting activities (freeing time for campaign optimisation).
• Improved reporting accuracy and consistency across regions.
• Faster stakeholder visibility through real-time dashboards and scheduled summaries.
Lessons for global sports technology firms
• Centralise the truth — persisted monthly snapshots beat spreadsheet archaeology.
• Standardise metadata early — region, campaign and persona tagging unlock better targeting and analytics.
• Automate the boring, amplify the creative — free humans for message and audience craft; let pipelines do counting and reconciling.
• Pair stability with improvement — a dependable run-team plus an R&D bench produces compounding gains.
• Govern like engineering — version-control, peer review and release notes work just as well for marketing ops as they do for software.
Roadmap
1. Always-on dashboards — expand to near-real-time operational views for in-flight campaigns.
2. Attribution refinement — standardise UTM usage and multi-touch attribution models in CRM Analytics.
3. Enrichment at source — introduce firmographic data (where permitted) to improve segmentation.
4. Experimentation framework — bake A/B test instrumentation into templates; automate significance checks. 14. Data quality observability — surface pipeline and tagging health alongside performance KPIs.
Why Ennovision
Ennovision blends application engineering, cloud engineering and quality assurance with deep Salesforce know-how. We mobilise stable teams that deliver daily operational reliability, backed by engineering capacity to automate, integrate and scale. In this engagement we converted existing subscriptions—Account Engagement, CRM and analytics—into a cohesive, automated, and auditable marketing system that delivers insight on time, every time.