Background

Founded in 1977, The Bay Club is an active lifestyle and hospitality company with a network of 24 modern country clubs across 10 campuses in California. Headquartered in San Francisco, the growing enterprise serves 85,000 members and is home to 3,400 associates, with anticipated new growth throughout 2015 (including the planned acquisition of golf clubs, country clubs, and swim venues up and down the coast).

The Problem

The Bay Club wanted to become more than just a fitness brand. Their goal was to become a family lifestyle company – a modern-day country club catering to affluent households. The Bay Club’s executives wanted to use a data-driven approach to learn about their customers’ needs and wants. They also wanted better reporting capabilities that integrated data from multiple sources to generate a holistic view of their pipeline and business.

The Bay Club was already using Salesforce, but they weren’t maximizing its value. They were using multiple systems across sales and marketing to manage customer relationships and lacked system standards, leading to data quality issues and lost productivity. In order to meet aggressive growth goals, including increased cross-selling and higher membership retention rates, The Bay Club needed a partner to help them expand use, generate new ideas, and redefine their processes to support scale in the business.

The Solution

Under our yearly managed service model, Bluewolf’s Beyond team set out to tackle The Bay Club’s customer data issues. One of the initial problems discovered was a lack of system governance. Every time The Bay Club opened a new location, the location manager would use Salesforce differently and would enter data in a different way. In order to accurately determine the optimal process needs of The Bay Club's employees, we used our proprietary Rep Rides methodology to identify critical system gaps and inefficiencies, and to outline a new, ideal sales process.

A Rep Ride captures qualitative and quantitative data on how employees (sales, customer service, or field agents) use technology. For instance: How long do they spend with clients face-to-face? How are they entering data into Salesforce or other systems? After shadowing The Bay Club’s sales team, we gathered and analyzed information that guided our implementation strategy. We identified efficiency gaps in employee workflows, prescribed and built solutions that streamlined data collection and integration, and then rolled out a change management plan to ensure employees understood the new system and processes.

The Results

Bluewolf helped The Bay Club understand critical employee and executive pain points regarding customer data, and focused the Salesforce redesign on what the sales team needed to make a positive customer impact. The Bay Club is now using a hybrid cloud approach, integrating data into Salesforce from online surveys, retail and spa purchases, net promoter scores, and member forums to get an accurate picture of who their customer is and what his or her buying patterns are.

Additionally, The Bay Club’s executives now have the data and pipeline view needed to make effective management decisions. The Bay Club can now find the right prospects, maximizing a complex sales process, and increase their customer close rates. The executive team has detailed visibility into the business, which is growing faster than ever before.