Overhauling a 12-Year-Old SaaS Engine: How I Delivered a Record-Breaking Sales Month
Golf membership marketing is the core offering at Play More Golf. It is a fantastic business—a leading flexible membership SaaS provider that helps traditional golf clubs fill their empty tee times and generate predictable revenue. But even the best software models hit a plateau.
When I came aboard as their Fractional CMO, the challenge was clear: drive aggressive portfolio and membership growth within a highly constrained funding environment. Oh, and try to convince traditional, committee-led golf clubs that adopting a modern, tech-enabled subscription model wasn’t a threat to their heritage, but a massive commercial opportunity.
The Strategy: Stopping the Guesswork and Listening to the Data
When funding is tight, your database becomes your best friend. I immediately dug into our HubSpot CRM data to look for the hidden leaks in our funnel.
We completely restructured the marketing operation across a few key pillars:
- Strategic Realignment: We stopped trying to pitch to every course in the country and strictly re-prioritised target golf clubs to optimise our B2B acquisition efforts.
- B2B Demand Generation: We built a dedicated outbound B2B lead generation programme—using direct email, educational webinars, and strategic partnerships with industry bodies like the PGA and GCMA.
- Web & Funnel Rebuild: We completely overhauled both the B2B and B2C websites to remove user friction, completely redesigned our web content based on data insights, and built highly automated email workflows to nurture leads properly.
- Commercial Monetisation: We launched brand new revenue streams by setting up exclusive partner offers inside our member app with premium golf brands like J.Lindeberg, Payntr, and Vessel.
The Results
By restructuring the internal marketing team and injecting some serious operational rigour into our digital spend, the golf membership marketing engine finally clicked. We added 26 new golf clubs to the Play More Golf portfolio. On the consumer side, our data-led execution delivered the highest sales month in the company’s 12-year history, completely smashing our previous highest membership sales record by 54%.
Not bad for a temporary gig!