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NHL’s Predators Use AI-Generated Leads to Power Ticket, Sponsor Sales

brendan coffey
·5 min read

Nashville Predators vice president of corporate partnerships Jack Burk is proud of his sales team, but last year he realized he wanted help to grab the sales opportunities he could see in the competitive sponsorship marketplace.

“I have a group that does really laser-focused work identifying, negotiating and closing new business deals,” Burk said of his sales team. “But I felt like there was this world passing us by. There are so many non-traditional brands coming into the sports space that I felt strongly we didn’t have enough coverage in terms of volume.”

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One solution might have been hiring four sales reps—but identifying the right people, hiring them and getting them up to speed would take a significant amount of time and budget. But Burk knew a sports marketing executive at Wasserman who had left a 12-year career there for a little known AI start-up. The colleague, Zack Sugarman, had told him how the AI was generating qualified sales leads and setting up meetings for more than three dozen pro sports organizations. Burk gave it a trial and quickly saw results. The AI, Burk said, worked “like magic”—it created about $500,000 in realized sales with $750,000 to $1 million in the pipeline for the upcoming 2023-24 season.

Burk and his team tallied those figures with help from Demand Sports, an arm of six-year-old Demand Inc., which is an AI technology outfit founded by Silicon Valley veteran Derek Rey. Rey, who had previously built companies in internet advertising and web security, had the idea to use AI to generate qualified “top of the funnel” sales leads. As Rey described it on a video call: “We have 40 teams and a 100% success rate on our 90-day pilots on the hypothesis that we can drive value for your team. We have some that are in the several thousand-percent ROI.”

The edge that AI can provide a company is by searching volumes of information faster than a person can. AI, as Demand Sports applies it, does the often-unforgiving heavy-lifting of identifying good potential clients that salespeople do. In part, AI seeks out specific terminology, such as people whose title or job description includes the word ‘sponsorships.’ AI also applies machine learning, or finding statistically relevant connections between pieces of information, to this search process.

Additionally, AI finds companies that typically are willing to spend a lot of money but often aren’t public enough to catch the eyes of a sales rep, including businesses that have venture capital funding or perhaps are preparing for an IPO. Many of these are the non-traditional companies that didn’t exist a decade ago, in areas such as financial technology and education technology.

Beyond just identifying companies to approach, Demand Sports goes a step further and figures out contact information for each of these companies. If a client wants, Demand’s human staff will reach out, confirm interest and schedule a call on a sales rep calendar. That’s the magic Burk mentions: in the past year he estimates the Predators sales team has gotten 400 meetings through Demand Sports.

“The lifeblood of how we drive revenue, and the hardest part of the job, is continually developing top of the pipeline contacts,” Burk said. “For me to be able to deliver that to my reps and for them to enjoy that sort of magical experience of a qualified lead meeting just landing on their calendar without lifting a finger is very valuable.”

Sugarman—who served on the executive leadership committee at Wasserman as senior vice president of properties, working with leagues and teams including the Predators—made the leap last spring to Demand to help promote Demand’s sales magic to the sports world. “If we can handle all this upfront grunt work that right now isn’t being run in the most efficient manner, we bring value to the table,” Sugarman said on a video call. “Everything we do is white label, no one knows we exist… we’re truly an extension of the team and just making sure all their sellers get to close more money.”

While it may seem AI is threatening to replace sales people in teams’ offices, Rey disagrees. “We’re seeing the teams we work with have greater efficiency in the top of the funnel, which leads to job creation,” he said. It’s also probably easier to for sales heads like Nashville’s Burk to argue for more budget to bring on staff to do highly skilled work as a result of the sales leads—closing deals and exploring new ways of revenue creation—than to bring in bodies to do the grunt work Demand can handle.

The Predators aren’t the only NHL club that has seen success with Demand’s AI. The Minnesota Wild closed revenue of more than $4 million in five months on sponsorship and premium ticketing. In the NFL, the Los Angeles Rams have publicly said their return on investment with Demand is more than 1,000%. Live Nation used Demand to secure a naming rights partner for its amphitheater in Tinley Park, Ill., a deal worth about $1.1 million a year for seven years. “This is ground-breaking AI for any sales team,” said Sam Shechtman, director of regional partnership strategy and business development for Live Nation, in a testimonial provided by Demand Sports.

The sales leads come at a price, of course, with Demand generating its revenue two ways. One is a subscription fee of a ‘few thousand dollars’ a month, which comes with a base guarantee of work. The second part is some sort of performance fee—effectively a bounty for a specific meeting Demand secures or a percentage of closed revenue from deals. Terms vary by client, according to Sugarman.

While AI often comes with a black box reputation, Demand Sports says they don’t hold back anything from their teams, working with organizations to build out their rolodex of contacts to their specifications, while improving their own AI with every job. Ultimately, the partnership, they say, is simple, even if the math is hard.

“The core soundbite is this is professional sports using AI to unlock new revenue channels,” said Rey.

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