Marketing-wise, the French tennis market is mainly driven by tennis coaches and clubs.

Beyond media buying, coaches are the ones to recommend the products to their players, driving sales to online and wholesale retailers. As such Wilson invests in those coaches and clubs to turn them into brand advocates, creating three three-party contracts directly dependent on our distribution policy.
These sponsorship agreements consist of free products endowments for the top tier coaches and clubs and heavily discounted product for the other types of contracts. A typical contract comprises a significant number of items (rackets, shoes, strings, shorts, t-shirts…)
Previously, all contracts had to be manually typed in SAP… a real hassle taking about 3 months almost full time for 2 people.
The goal of the project was to create an operational system to avoid these manual orders in SAP, avoiding any typing mistakes and gaining man-power while limiting these uninteresting tasks that carry no-added-value.
Therefore, we created a platform to manage these orders, but the real hard work was the rights management side… Re-creating the very unique process tennis coaches follow before they are actually allowed to place their orders (and creating some marketing automation rules along the way!)

Our response was the creation of an e-commerce platform (with Paybox payments) that not only enables our coaches & clubs to order their products online (then creating a CSV file that’s still manually uploaded into SAP but creating all orders at once, gaining us months of work), but that also helps us manage our relationship with our advocates.

Clubs and coaches had different needs and the way they ordered on the platform had to be different.
On the one hand, we created a step by step order, making mandatory the selection of certain products (for coaches), on the other hand, we created a basket system for a wider selection of products for our clubs.

The coach is then enlisted in the online advocacy program where he wins advocacy point whenever he advocates for a Wilson racket and his partner retailer makes a sale.
This system is quite simple but helps us track the sales performance of our coaches among other metrics (social media digital print, reputation, ranking…).

The goal for the coming year is now to help our field sales agents draft all contracts directly online, taking a step further toward the full automation of the platform and helping them manage their marketing promotion budget more easily.