Art of Cloud: How Leeds data firm is helping Premier League clubs and rugby giants to increase revenues

Data is increasingly king for top sports clubs as teams make ever-increasing use of analysis and statistics to maximise the performances of their star players on the field.

Now Leeds firm Art of Cloud is playing a leading role in helping the nation’s sporting giants make gains off-the-pitch through the improved use of data to increase revenue.

The business is a consultancy specialising in the Salesforce CRM (customer relationship management) platform and has been working with the likes of Tottenham Hotspur, Everton and Crystal Palace in the football world, along with Leicester Tigers and Northampton Saints in rugby union and the LIV Golf organisation.

While Art of Cloud also works with many other clients outside of the sporting world, it is pushing forward its ambitions in that area through the recent hiring of Daniela Forsyth as a Strategic Consultant.

Daniela, who has previously worked in senior commercial roles for the likes of Wasps, Leicester Tigers and Warwickshire CCC, says sports organisations are increasingly waking up to the commercial potential of better understanding and organising their data to reach supporters and sponsors – albeit not always at the same pace.

"Some clubs and some sports are better than others,” she says. "On the whole, the commercial element of 80 per cent of the sports industry is still stuck in the past because at the end of day what brings fans to the stadium is what is on the pitch. So investment generally gets shunted into the performance side and making sure players have got what they need on the pitch and making those incremental improvements.

“It is understandable that is where the majority of the funding goes but part of my job is to have those conversations with the clubs and say the investment you need to make on the sporting side is massive in comparison to what you need to invest in the commercial team with a simple CRM. The impact and return on investment of that is going to be a lot higher.

“When it comes to success, the key one is the revenue and the ROI coming back. We pride ourselves in having that in Year One as a minimum. You’d like to see it within a couple of games of coming in. The bit I love is when you get the users from within the organisations where we have put the CRM systems in ringing me up and saying ‘This is amazing’ and ‘I didn’t realise I could do this’. Once they get to grips with it, they realise how they can make themselves better and ultimately make the club better.”

Daniela says her first experience with Art of Cloud was working with them to introduce such a CRM platform at Leicester Tigers.

"One of my first priorities was we needed a solid database and sales platform that my team could work off. We had a demonstration from Art of Cloud and they blew me out of the water. They loved sport and you could tell there were shared values and an investment there beyond just a client-supplier relationship. They wanted to get involved and understand how they could make Leicester Tigers better.

"What we had was very much aimed towards understanding our fans better from their interests to how they were interacting with us on a day-to-day basis. It enabled us to be more strategic as a sales team but also when you have sponsors you are potentially targeting, if you understand your audience to that level of detail it makes it an easy sell. It is an easy story to tell a potential sponsor ‘we know our users and what matters to them and we know your brand aligns with that’.”

She says sports teams are up against a huge amount of competition. "We live in an age of TikTok and YouTube and so many different ways to access sport and entertainment. We are competing for £50 in a person’s pocket at a weekend which they could be spending on the cinema, a bowling alley, a live music event or be sat at home on TikTok Shop. That’s where a CRM can enable you to capitalise on almost micro-actions that you are seeing within your fanbase. When you are pulling all the data into one space, you get a 360 degree view and you can get the edge on all your competition, not just other sports clubs.”

She says at Leicester, the club moved from “loads of data spread across tonnes of different spreadsheets” into the Salesforce platform which allowed it to identify clear spending habits and proactively target clients to increase purchase rates and reduce conversion times. Daniela says it led to commercial revenues being 20 per cent higher than budgeted for in the first year of operation.

"It was unheard of and way beyond everything that we’d anticipated. It is not just about getting customers to buy but also being able to keep my team motivated and give them the tools they need to be successful because they could see where the success was coming from.”

Art of Cloud is also in the initial stages of exploring international ambitions in sports like cricket. "I was having conversations last week with contacts that have got stakes in Indian Premier League clubs and that translates to The Hundred and Major League Cricket in the States,” Daniela says. “Private equity firms and investment firms see sport as a huge opportunity but they want insights, data quality and data integrity and you need CRM for that. We’re just starting to have those conversations.

"We’re looking heavily into women’s sport at the moment, things like netball, rugby and football. Those organisations are now starting to operate as their own entities. Before the women’s side would be bundled into the men’s portion of a club, they’ve now got a whole commercial set-up just for them and women’s teams are often a lot more open to implementing new ideas because they are newer themselves. It doesn’t really feel like you are reinventing the wheel which you sometimes do feel like when you are dealing with the men’s side of things. The opportunities are massive. They are certainly keeping me busy.”