OAKLAND A’S CHANGE THE GAME
Most Innovative Franchise in Major League Baseball Chooses NetSuite for Sales, Marketing and Order Management
SAN MATEO, CA (August 05, 2004) – NetSuite, Inc., today announced that The Oakland Athletics baseball team has chosen NetSuite to automate sales, marketing and major account order management operations. The A’s are among the first sports franchises to use on-demand software to automate their corporate sales processes. NetSuite’s award-winning product offerings include NetSuite, NetSuite Small Business, NetERP, NetCRM and NetCommerce. For more information about the Oakland A’s and NetSuite, please go to www.netsuite.com/athletics.
As with many other businesses, “selling” means much more than managing a forecast to the Oakland A’s. Selling means being able to take the order — whether that order is to process thousands of invoices for season ticket holders, or to sell corporate sponsorships. Selling is about understanding the inventory of seats available to create special promotions that drive incremental group ticket sales throughout the season. And selling is about generating new opportunities through innovative marketing campaigns.
After carefully evaluating a number of software packages to accomplish their selling objectives, the A’s ultimately chose NetSuite. Only NetSuite combines order processing with robust CRM capabilities to handle all season ticket sales, group ticket sales and sponsorship sales in a single system. In addition, the integration of past purchase history tied to the customer information enables the A’s to easily target promotions to fans based on past purchase history. Finally, NetSuite’s unique customization technology will help the A’s work seamlessly with Major League Baseball (MLB) and tickets.com, which is used for single-ticket sales.
“The philosophy we took to building the A’s into a winning franchise is very similar to NetSuite’s approach to software – apply new ideas to an old problem, and deliver a better product at a much lower cost,” said Michael Crowley, president of the Oakland A’s. “We manage our team based on facts, and NetSuite will now let us manage our business in the same way.”
“The Oakland A’s are recognized as the most innovative sports franchise in baseball, and we are very excited to partner with them,” said Zach Nelson, CEO of NetSuite. “The A’s revolutionized how you create a great baseball team. By choosing NetSuite, they will revolutionize how you manage the business of sport.”
In the same way the A’s pointed out that the economics of baseball were out of whack, NetSuite shows how the economics of software are out of whack. The software applications utilized by most companies do not allow business processes to run seamlessly across front and back-office functions. These companies run their business on separate, expensive software packages – one for accounting, one for warehousing, one for sales force management, one for marketing and one for customer support. Additionally, the ongoing cost of running the software and integrating data from such multiple incompatible systems has been high.
Source: NetSuite