By Allan Maurer
FALLS CHURCH, VA – Many companies spend a significant amount of cash to woo customers, partners, and excutives with tickets to the big game. Spotlight Ticket Management Solutions helps firms determine if all that money spent on hospitality suites, baseball, football, hockey and basketball tickets is delivering any return on investment.
Founded in 2007 as the Corporate Events Group, Spotlight is an Internet portal designed ot track, report and justify–or not–corporate sports marketing expenses.
Company Vice President Joe Greiner tells us the company’s software helps centralize and automate everything to do with corporate event tickets and events.
Automates previously manual process
“It helps companies move from a manual process to a much more efficient automatic process,” he says.
“We determine some sort of ROI a company can look at,” he explains. “We can tell them, you used 85 percent of your Yankee tickets, 65 percent for your top clients. They helped influence or drive X amount of revenue. Or, you spent $100,000 on Yankee’s tickets and they influenced revenue of $10 million.”
Conversely, we might say you spent 85 percent on internal use for negligible benefit.”
One thing Spotlight finds, he says, is that many companies are at risk of leaving as much as $100,000 of tax benefits on the table, or spending money on wasted tickets.
Partly that’s because many companies use a manual process–often no more than an excel document–to track what they’re doing with their sports marketing.
Some clients saved $1M
Grenier says Spotlight has helped some clients save $1 million in tax savings and employee time alone.
Spotlight is expanding its efforts to work with teams, leagues and venues as well as corporate clients. It currently has more than 200 corporate clients and is working with 25 teams and venues.
The subsection of the market Spotlight sells to is worth $5 billion a year.
Internally funded with no outside investors, the company, which ranges from 15 to 20 employees, is one of 60 innovative firms presenting at the fourth annual Southeast Venture Conference at the Ritz Carlton in Tysons Corner Virginia, Feb. 24-25 (see: www.seventure.org for more information).
Online: www.spotlighttms.com
