A word with Sweetspot

PROMOTION – SWEETSPOT

A word with Sweetspot

Founded in 2016, Sweetspot is a market leading, data driven, revenue management platform designed to help golf facilities around the world reach their full potential. The company’s Per Svensson and Gustav Andersson explain.

Sweetspot’ s business concept

is to build a business platform that collects and ensures accurate data on all transactions and in addition delivers insights and functionality that increase golf facilities ’ revenues with the help of Revenue Management.

Revenue Management means selling the right service, to the right person, at the right price, at the right time, optimally packaged. This means that you need to know your customer ’ s perception of the value of a service and optimise your pricing and availability for tee times accordingly, offering it to the right customer segment.

In practice, this means that the golf facility ’ s

focus is shifted away from working with Volume –i.e. more members, more guests or more partners –to increase its revenue. Instead, facilities should focus on which target groups they have, which they want to attract and how they can optimise revenue towards these customer segments.

Here are four different steps a golf facility can take to significantly increase its revenue.

1. Make sure that green fee prices are high on attractive tee times

The right pricing at attractive tee times creates financial incentives to pay the annual fee to the facility and creates a large membership value. Members do not have to play many rounds on these tee times if the price is high on green fees to justify paying the annual fee. Low prices and discounts on attractive tee times create the opposite effect and drive members away from annual memberships.

2. Set the right price for less attractive times

High prices for attractive tee times also creates demand

for less attractive tee times with

lower prices. Green fee guests will move away from the best times and towards tee times with lower attractiveness to get a reasonable price. This in turn creates great accessibility for the club members to these attractive tee times. At most clubs, members are the most important customer and should be prioritised in terms of accessibility to attractive tee times to increase the value of membership. Filling these tee times with green fee guests reduces the possibility of reaching the number of rounds I want to play and makes it difficult to justify my annual fee and willingness to pay decreases.

3. Charge for the accessibility you create

Each golf club has a small group, 10 15% of members, who are play at the club (about 50% of the attractive tee times). By limiting the current full membership so that it contains a maximum limit of the total numberof bookingsatthebestteetimes,youcreatebetteraccessibilityandenablemore peopletotakepart in these tee times. This ensures that members who usuallydon ’tgettoplayasmuchnowremainasfulltime members since their number of rounds goes up on expensive, attractive tee times. Their willingness to pay remains.

However, the willingness to pay and the demand forgolfisthehighestamongthose whoplayaloton attractive tee times. By introducing new memberships where you are offered better accessibility than before, more rounds at attractive times, plus a few other benefits, the club can now charge substantially more of this target group.

4. Strictly limit the number of simultaneous bookings

By severely limiting the possibility of booking several attractive tee times in advance, you open up better accessibility for all members. There is a great demand for more simultaneous bookings and you as a club can also take advantage of this demand, thereby increasing your membership income. By diversifying memberships based on how many simultaneous bookings are included, the club can increase its revenue and offer something that some target groups consider important. Membership withseveralsimultaneousbookingsrequiresahigher price, while less active members can choose a membership that fits their level of play better, with less numbers of simultaneous bookings included in the offer to perhaps a lower price.

MORE INFORMATION

Are you interested in knowing more about how Sweetspot analyses your data, serve it in best in class business intelligence dashboards and combine that with uses of strategic revenue management to help golf facilities reach their full potential? Contact Per Svensson or Gustav Andersson. e. per@sweetspot.io t. +46 708 58 40 50 e. gustav@sweetspot.io t. +46 709 65 33 95