 | Forum
Thread | 'You're Not Fit To Wear The Shirt...'
at 17:31 21 Jan 2023
There is a very real danger that we are rotten from the bottom leading upwards within the club. The current playing squad are at risk of undermining the board & fan effort of the past 2 years.
Lack of effort, lack of commitment, lack of leadership... Quigley sarcastically clapping and nodding at the away fans at full time, players running and hiding...
After 100 years in the football league, after a 2 year fight to save the club, after the unification of a fanbase to remain fan-led, today we stare onto the abyss.
At the behest of Tony Pockney last Saturday, I sent an email to him on Monday with feedback and ideas for the club.
Almost one week later, I haven't even received a courtesy 'thanks for your email' response. If the ideas are rubbish, or not welcome, that is fine - but to not even get a simple reply raises questions about motivation and drive that need answering.
I never intended to make this email public, but for the sake of transparency, this is what was sent:
"Tony,
Following on from our conversation on Saturday Tony, I wanted to get in touch about some concerns / feedback / ideas for the retail and commercial side of the club. I take no pleasure in highlighting concerns, particularly following the unbelievable work the board did to safeguard the club from Morton House (which will never be forgotten), but at a time when we are losing £20K per week it is incredibly frustrating to see so many missed opportunities to increase commercial performance — the vast majority of the ideas I will outline below cost nothing other than existing wages, and just require some commercial acumen and forward / joined up thinking. I had a conversation with Simon over LinkedIn on the 2nd December 2021 offering voluntary support or consultancy for the retail / commercial side of the business, as I have ~15 years experience leading retail and omnichannel transformation and performance programmes, but didn’t hear back after the initial messages. That offer still stands today — I want to help.
There are lots of instances that I am aware of where sponsors, potential sponsors and corporate hospitality guests have had difficulty getting in touch with the commercial team. When they have managed to do so, the response has been underwhelming with false promises, long SLAs and generally a lethargic attitude. A few of them very much feel like once the club has their money they are no longer valued, and that is a dangerous position to be in. We need to quickly build relationships with small, medium and large businesses in the Rochdale Borough that have been allowed to lapse. Its frustrating that a smaller sports club in the town (Hornets) seem much more adept at doing this than we are, particularly given the size of our commercial team at present. Rochdale as a town is lucky to have a professional football team — its our job to help people understand that and build relationships so they want to be part of our journey.
Idea #1 — Add value to existing sponsors. Do this by updating all player imagery (social media / scoreboard) with images of their player sponsors (these have recently been added to substitutions which is a huge step forward)... at Barrow they read out the names of sponsors over the tannoy when announcing the squad and substitutions etc. This is a free and easy way to add value to sponsors at zero extra cost, and would help them reach people who may not pay much attention to the scoreboard. Give every single player sponsor a feature on our social media channels — ‘Friends of the club February’ or something similar. Tag them in where we have their profiles, thank them for their support and give a brief piece about what they do. This would add so much value to the businesses we have as sponsors and foster so much goodwill. Most importantly, tell them we are doing it! Let them know how much additional value we are giving them at no extra cost — at a tough time for the club, we appreciate their support.
Idea #2 — Have a huge drive on reengaging with existing and lapsed sponsors. Ask them in a consistent format (survey or similar) how they are REALLY finding their relationship with the club, and don’t be afraid of constructive feedback. Find out what they love about dealing with us, and canvas their opinions on how we could add value to them ahead of them sponsoring again next season. Use this insight to drive our commercial offering in 2023 and beyond… if we are to remain fan led, that needs to permeate throughout the club. Sponsorships should be sponsor led. Executive packages should be people led. Retail should be demand and customer led… you get the idea. If we get this right now, we have time to shape sponsorship for 2023/24 and beyond. As a thank you for their time and feedback, offer them a couple of free tickets for an upcoming match. Have the commercial team on hand to meet them and have a chat with them face to face on the day — this would be so much more powerful than a relationship based on emails or phone calls.
Idea #3 — Leverage remaining sponsorship opportunities for this season. It was great to see the sponsorship angle with Danny Lloyd, but that quickly lapsed back to normal when we signed Eastwood back. There was no mention of sponsorship on his welcome article — a missed opportunity. Lets look at selling sponsorship for injury time - £50 per match or £500 for the rest of the season. It would cost nothing to add an image onto the scoreboard, and they would be guaranteed to have their business name read out twice per game. Contact lapsed player sponsors and ask if they would be interested in a discounted rate for the rest of the season. Lets start building up an active and engaged sponsorship database ahead of next season — warm leads if you will. I don’t know whether we have an active pipeline software or CRM, but if we don’t then free alternatives are available.
Idea #4 — Have an agreed process for updating the social media headers and fixture board at 15:01 on every matchday. Until 10am this morning we were still advertising Colchester (H) as our next game on social media. It’s a 2 minute job, and just creates a more seamless experience for the occasional attendee. The next fixture should be showing as people walk out at full time, and should be showing to anybody who checks social media during the current game. As part of this, we could be making better use of the billboard on Sandy Lane / Wilbutts Lane. It is still advertising season tickets that went off sale 4 months ago. One graphic showing all upcoming matches that month could be put up as soon as the last game of the current month has finished. This is the only idea I’m proposing that costs actual money, and we could even offer that out for sponsorship — get a company to pay for the print and install and give them a prominent space on the billboard.
Idea #5 — Work smarter not harder with our retail offering. As of now, I literally cannot go onto the club shop website and buy a Dale pen, a Dale mug, a Dale notebook, a Dale water bottle. I appreciate your point about minimum order quantities, but for the items I just mentioned they will not expire. The Hendo merchandise became available a whole month after he broke the record…. If we were thinking commercially, as soon as he was two goals away they should’ve been ordered and in the stock room. The minute he broke the record there should have been tweets ready to go advertising them… how many people would’ve gone to the shop immediately after the Salford game to get a piece of memorabilia there and then whilst the feel good factor was still around? Missed opportunity.
We could be advertising relevant products on every single article on the website. Hartlepool travel? Link to the coat sale we have on because its going to be cold. Fitness in the community programme? Link to fitness wear that we have, as the target demographic may not have sportswear already. Player interviews? Link to autograph books and pens. It is so simple, and it should be easy to track click through & success rates. Fans of the club are a captive audience, but they may never go onto the shop website as it is currently so poor. Link something from there that is relevant to an article they’ve taken the time to read and I’d expect a decent uplift.
Idea #6 — Following on from Idea 5, I’d be interested to know if we have explored ‘direct from supplier’ stockists. If ordering minimum quantities is a challenge and we rarely break even on items, de-risk it by taking a smaller profit from items that are dispatched by the manufacturer. It saves us sitting on stock, and even if we just take 20%, 20% of something is better than the current 100% of nothing. If we are not in the financial position to take risks on lines, lets look at getting the whole online shop running in the same fashion as the personalised section. The recent kit survey was a fantastic idea — we could do similar for our retail offering to shape what we want to do in future… I’ve attached a really simple draft as a starting point.
These are some really simple ideas which, as I outlined at the start, require no funding but do require passion, forward thinking and a joined up departmental approach from the people we employ to deliver on our commercial and retail performance goals. They are in the main simple, free and measurable. You know as well as I do that historically the club has been slated for poor commercial offerings and departments working in silo. Building on the good work you guys have done in terms of accountability and reporting, there is a huge opportunity to make a sizeable and noticeable difference across these areas of the club. I’d be happy to come and have a face to face conversation with you to work through the above in more detail, and discuss more aspirational future ideas such as targeted advertising and endless aisle through our online offering, at a time that is convenient. There is a groundswell of pride amongst the fanbase, and a real willingness from people to help. I’m proud to support a fan owned / fan led club, as are others… we all have skin in the game and a reason to make this work.
Let me know if you have any questions on any of the above, if you want to meet to discuss in further detail, or if I can help out in any way at all."
[Post edited 21 Jan 2023 17:33]
|
| | dalemark
|
Site Scores| Forum Votes: | 53 | | Comment Votes: | 0 | | Prediction League: | 0 | | TOTAL: | 53 |
|
By continuing to use the site, you agree to our use of cookies and to abide by our Terms and Conditions.