A hugely successful presentation of TeePanel, a new business intelligence system for golf courses and hotels developed by specialist golf course and resort marketing consultants GolfenRed, was made during the Spanish Association of Golf Managers conference in September. Managing director Antonio Conde reveals some of the key features that make this an exceptional and essential support system for management.
“TeePanel,” he says, “is an administrative tool for golf course and hotel managements which will change the way golf clubs’ marketing and operations are managed. TeePanel is designed to facilitate decision-making with a control panel that can connect multiple information systems via a unique interface created to provide access to the business’s key data.”
TeePanel’s philosophy is highlighted by two concepts: “Attribution” and “Conversion”. “The first of these,” he says, “is based on attributing to each marketing or sales channel the importance it has in generating sales for our business. Until now, even during boom times, we have been running blind when it comes to knowing what has prompted an increases in sales. The second concept involves identifying those groups of clients or channels that have the greatest buying potential, in order to steer our marketing actions in the right direction.
“The key is in cross-checking data generated by different systems to enrich the information provided by them. Sales results recorded during a specific period at a golf club might be affected by weather conditions or marketing campaigns run by us or our competitors. TeePanel enables us to have all this information, and much more, in a single control panel, to simplify management and save time in decision-making.”
Conde notes that when he began working on GolfenRed 10 years ago in the world of golf, “the need already existed for a system that would better help us organise and understand all the information gathered by a golf club, especially that related to our clients, our sales channels and the relevant reasons why our sales increased month after month and year after year.” At that time, the technology and information systems used at golf clubs and hotels did not enable us to provide a solution such as TeePanel, a tool capable of connecting all the business’s sources of information, and displaying it in a unified, simple and quick format, “which is essential to be able to make effective decisions”.
The GolfenRed managing director believes it is indispensable to “identify those of our markets with the greater potential when looking to increase our sales and thus boost our business figures”. In this respect, he points out that the data provided by website analysis, cross-checked with the results obtained during each period, shows very clearly which are the countries with a high rate of conversion, “so they should be where we focus our efforts.
“It is not necessary to enter our management system,” he says, “in order to check if this month we’ve reached our objective, access our email marketing tool to see if our campaigns have worked, check our social networks to monitor our followers or search our emails to find out if the latest request we received from a client has been dealt with. All this information, and much more, we can control via one single management programme: TeePanel.”
Much of the data offered by TeePanel has been obtained until now by golf club managers through complex Excel sheets that are difficult to maintain and require a great deal of time. “Our tool not only provides much quicker access to information,” says Conde, “but also ensures that this information arrives enriched by data from other information systems. In addition, each control panel advises us if our ratios are lower than the values and rates recommended for our market, so we can react quickly and avoid unnecessary budget losses, and increase the efficiency of our actions.”
GolfenRed is working on new functions for TeePanel. On the one hand, its integration with availability and airfare services, to immediately identify any decreases in the cost of transport communications with our client source markets, so that each golf club or hotel can be ahead of its competitors when presenting its best offers to a potential client. On the other hand, control panels more orientated towards optimising management operations will be added, specifically those that measure client satisfaction at each centre of golf club and hotel business, by integrating client assessments in the booking process and provider service, so they have a complete image of their experience.
“Information,” concludes Conde, “is only data from different sources, but it’s the people who make the decisions, and that’s why TeePanel helps us better understand what’s happening, and presents this in a visual, simple and effective way so that we can make quick and correct decisions.”
