How Club Champion Leveraged Real-time Data & Performance Analysis With Wolf Data Solutions Partnership

The key to their success is providing a unique in-store experience that uses leading technology to fit golfers for a club that perfectly suits their swing. The process is completely customized – from allowing customers to schedule an appointment that aligns with their schedule to providing them with a detailed analysis of their strokes and putting performance in the fitting bay.   

“We went from a local Chicagoland studio to a national brand, fast,” explained Brian Burke, CFO of Club Champion. “We’re changing the way people buy golf clubs by customizing clubs tailored to each person’s swing.” 

Challenge

As Club Champion continued to grow, the management team realized they needed to optimize the performance of existing stores to fuel growth and not rely solely on expansions into new markets. They needed further insight into the business drivers behind the performance data that they were seeing, and Salesforce – the platform they use to capture customer data and manage sales – only took them so far.  

“We were able to see the numbers and to see store performance, but we couldn’t see the why,” recalled Burke. “We really needed to be able to dive deeper into our data and metrics to understand what was happening on a store-by-store basis.”  

At the urging of their private equity partners, in 2019, CCG began seeking out a data solution that would not only provide access to core business metrics, but equip them with the analytical insights to understand their data and help them manage growth. Enter InsightOut by Wolf Data Solutions.     

Like many other businesses worldwide, Club Champion was served an unexpected challenge when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Having engaged Wolf Data Solutions in March 2020 – just as COVID was becoming a heightened concern – they chose to delay the project for several months.  

Soon after, Club Champion began to reopen stores nationwide, following local guidelines. This coupled with the appeal of golf as a socially-distanced sport and the growth of the golf industry meant that they needed to quickly return to maximum capacity. Access to advanced metrics and improved data analysis would prove crucial for helping CCG to ramp back up and manage demand. 

“It was really about getting to the why,” explained Burke. “We needed the ability to start analyzing things like average ticket and conversion rate in order to find the reasons behind some of the trends we were seeing.”   

Analytics on fitting bay utilization across stores was also important in this process, given that unused space was a lost opportunity for capturing sales and generating revenue. Additionally, with limited visibility into marketing channel performance, Club Champion sought insight into their receipts, leads, and conversions by source.   

Wolf Data Solutions took these requirements and implemented them into a custom version of InsightOut, providing the CCG team with newfound analytics capabilities. “We were completely blown away by the demo,” Burke stated. “We started having visibility into metrics we had never even seen before.” 

For a business generating thousands of fittings and high volumes of weekly sales, having access to real-time data on a daily basis has become a major asset. “InsightOut is the first thing we open and the last thing we close each day,” said Burke. “We refresh it all the time and are addicted to it.”  

It’s a tool that has especially benefited Club Champion’s Chief Store Officer and General Managers, who oversee cross-store management and ensure optimal store performance. “They now have a tool that helps them analyze associate performance by company average, by market average, by store average,” explained Burke. “It’s had an immediate impact because, without these insights, they would have each been trying to garner their own Salesforce reports or reaching out to other people for all sorts of information that would have taken time away from their work.”   

CCG’s store managers also have access to the platform, providing visibility into team performance on a day-to-day basis. In fact, CCG has found that using InsightOut has helped improve fitting bay utilization across stores. Each manager can see their open bay space and suggest that fitters schedule customers from the waitlist.   

“We now have much more real-time actionable intelligence,” remarked Burke. “InsightOut has helped us look at our business in ways we didn’t think possible in real-time and allowed us to make immediate decisions to improve performance.” 

Result

InsightOut has also provided greater visibility into lost leads – or customers who show an initial interest then drop off. In fact, CCG worked with Wolf Data Solutions to better define their conversion rate metric. “We looked at how we were calculating our conversions in Salesforce and realized that it wasn’t accurate,” stated Burke.   

After testing multiple scenarios to uncover false conversions, Wolf Data Solutions developed an improved, more accurate conversion rate metric, which helped Club Champion discover that their lead-to- conversion ratio was actually lower than they had realized. As a result of this finding, the marketing team adjusted their efforts to close the margin by proactively reaching out to lost leads.   

“It used to be so anecdotal,” said Burke. “There was so much data but it was hard to see or analyze things. The InsightOut dashboards have been so beneficial for analyzing and drilling down into the data in order to improve performance.”  

While custom fit clubs certainly come with a price tag, Club Champion recognized the benefit of outfitting every golfer, no matter their background or income, with the right equipment, so they sought to broaden their reach. CCG partnered with Synchrony Bank to offer an 18-month interest-free financing program that would allow users more payment flexibility. “But we never really knew before how many people were using the program, or which fitters were offering it,” remarked Burke. 

With InsightOut, Club Champion can now see the percentage of receipts that include Synchrony and which fitters are using this financing option with their customers. In providing visibility into the adoption of this plan across their buyer base, InsightOut has helped CCG challenge existing customer assumptions and reach a new group of buyers.   

In fact, by improving the process and making it easier for fitters to use Synchrony, CCG’s incremental financed sales have increased from 2 percent to 8.5 percent. “This finding has facilitated a drastic improvement in metrics across the board, including conversions,” explained Burke.