BH Live’s “Phenomenal” Transformation with Keepme

A Strategic Move Towards Digital Transformation

It has been a journey of transformation for BH Live, a pioneering UK leisure operator and charitable social enterprise across Bournemouth, Poole and Portsmouth. They embarked on a partnership with Keepme to redefine member engagement, operational efficiency and sales visibility with help from an intelligent suite of smart automation and predictive tools. 

As operators of a number of leisure centres and cultural venues, BH Live is dedicated to elevating community health and wellbeing, striving to deliver unparalleled services. Despite their unwavering commitment, the organisation encountered significant hurdles in optimising prospective member engagement and refining their sales processes. 

BH Live prides itself on impressive retention performance, with members at the lower end of the ‘length of stay’ scale typically remaining for 14.9 months, and others staying for an impressive 22.5 months. Given these strong figures, the early stages of their collaboration with Keepme focused on refining the initial stages of the member journey - specifically, the acquisition phase. This strategy aimed to maximise their successful retention landscape, boosting revenue by attracting new members who would join the ranks of their loyal community.

The Challenge: Before Keepme

BH Live struggled with several key issues:

• Protracted Lead and Membership Sales Processes: The lack of an integrated system resulted in overly manual and time consuming lead management affecting conversion rates.

• Limited Prospect Insights for Personalization: Without access to comprehensive data, personalizing lead engagements was a challenge.

• Reactive Lead Strategies: Identifying and converting best fit and at-risk members was difficult without an effective early warning system.

How it started

The BH Live team confronted various challenges within their retention and membership sales frameworks, affecting every facet of their acquisition and member engagement strategies. These ranged from managing their lead generation and conversion rates to obstacles in monitoring and optimising team performance, as well as issues in community engagement.

One key challenge was the fragmented nature of lead management.

To address these issues, the senior BH Live team initiated stakeholder engagement sessions to assess their daily operations, pinpointing digital transformation needs. They identified processes ripe for automation and those deemed business-critical that were missing from their existing capabilities. This analysis led to a vision for a revamped member acquisition process, starting each day with clear targets and goals, leveraging lead analysis to empower the teams to make data-driven decisions, and efficiently engage with leads based on prioritisation signals - lead scoring by another name. 

The approach aimed to complete the acquisition cycle with proactive outreach activities based on intent signals, integrated into the daily lead generation routine.

This strategic integration would allow the sales and marketing teams to tailor their communication and offers more precisely, ensuring that every interaction would be relevant and timely. By focusing on intent signals, the team would be able to prioritise leads that show a higher propensity for conversion, therefore optimising their efforts and resources. This would not only streamline their lead management process but also enhance their customer experience by providing value at every touchpoint. 

Furthermore, this approach would not only elevate the efficiency of the acquisition cycle but also foster stronger relationships with potential members, significantly boosting the likelihood of turning them into long-standing, valuable members of the BH Live community. The end result would be a more dynamic and responsive lead generation system that would align closely with the needs and behaviours of their target audience, driving improved outcomes for the team.

"I would always be looking to optimize the workflow by leveraging the more senior sales team members with duties such as team sales updates and the day-to-day management of team activities/performance," Darryl Dewar, Group Sales Manager

Their exploration confirmed a pivotal gap: sales team members lacked access to crucial data and the insights they’d need to prioritise and personalise lead responses and they lacked the appropriate tools to transform that initial interest into consistent sign-ups.

The absence of a unified lead scoring or early warning system meant reliance on disparate data sources, which created inefficiencies and missed opportunities for conversion at critical moments. The team's efforts to manually bridge these data silos were time-consuming and often too late to capitalise on the highest intent of prospective members.

The old way of managing leads was negatively impacting team productivity as well as their morale. Not getting the right insights or available time they needed to have meaningful face-to-face customer interactions, or react to timely cross-selling opportunities was difficult.

This fragmentation hindered the team's ability to consolidate business intelligence in real-time and prevented the operationalisation of a consistent, personalised follow-up process, allowing potential revenue growth to slip through the cracks. The lack of reliable data analysis tools meant that assessing the average lead to sale conversion rate and optimising campaigns for impact became an exercise in trial and error. While the team had a good understanding from one legacy system around what stage of the lifecycle a lead had reached, the disconnect from other platforms made it too time consuming to act efficiently.

Why BH Live Chose Keepme: A Solution to Transform

Darryl and the team chose Keepme for its ability to offer a centralised platform for data management and its business intelligence capability to empower them to enhance prospect engagement and build operational efficiency across the prospect lifecycle.

How it’s going

Since embarking on their partnership with Keepme June in 2023, BH Live has quickly experienced the transformative advantages of consolidating their data and sales operations. Over the course of eight months, they successfully established a 'one source of truth,' markedly boosting operational efficiency throughout the organisation and driving their sales team to achieve a consistent 40% conversion rate on leads every month.

This pivotal integration not only streamlined their processes but also set a new standard for data-driven decision-making and operational excellence at BH Live.

Keepme has enabled increased efficiency in the management of our lead generation along with enhanced team and customer engagement. Significant improvements to reporting and team performance are also very apparent," remarked Darryl, highlighting the immediate impact of the platform.

Intrigued by these improvements, we reached out to Darryl for deeper insights into how daily operations have evolved for the team post-Keepme adoption.

"They can track progress and better collaborate with teammates, ultimately driving better sales and marketing outcomes. On average, I would say each team member is saving around 2 hours per day!" Dewar shared, underscoring the efficiency gains and enhanced collaboration capabilities. This has not only streamlined workflows but also empowered the team to effectively prioritize and engage with leads, improving their potential to convert.

Dewar further elaborated on the significant strides in communication and operational synergy enabled by Keepme, "Along with a tangible empowerment to manage and react to incoming leads based on their likelihood to convert, we've found a renewed ability to communicate more effectively with wider teams. This provides invaluable marketing-sales enablement to optimise our acquisition activities and ROI."

"Keepme's impact on revenue and performance is measurable by its ability to streamline the sales process, provide data-driven reporting, enhance lead management, and foster new team collaborations which all contribute to increased efficiency, higher conversion rates, and improved revenue generation."

Prior to Keepme, the absence of an efficient reporting tool significantly challenged BH Live's sales initiatives. Now, Dewar says the team appreciate the precision and time-saving benefits the platform introduces, "Keepme reporting allows for customizable reports that meet our specific needs, and this flexibility saves time by providing relevant insight without the need to sift through unnecessary data."

The Results

BH Live has seen a notable enhancement in their revenue generation capabilities, a testament to the strategic alignment and operational efficiencies gained through this collaboration. 

The team, led by four sales managers, collectively secures an average of 740 new memberships each month, with each membership contributing £34 in average yield. This concerted effort translates to a significant monthly uplift in revenue. This figure even excludes the wealth of direct online sales BH Live are recording via their engaging new website.

BH Live and AI: Transforming Member Engagement and Retention

In the rapidly evolving landscape of the fitness and leisure industry, BH Live has positioned itself at the forefront of innovation by embracing artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. Darryl emphasises the critical role of AI in today’s world, urging organisations to adopt a forward-thinking approach towards automation.

“AI is huge in the world now. Everyone should be moving towards it or, at a more basic level, having a full automation roadmap. Where things were being done manually before, we would be manually communicating with every single customer. We’re constantly looking at ways to move away from that manual approach. So this is always the aim of BH Live, to work towards more digital, automation and AI processes where we know it can elevate the work of and make life easier for our people. With such clever automation tools in Keepme, gives teams more time to improve on the customer experience side face to face,” Darryl explains.

This shift towards AI and smart automation systems is more than just a technological upgrade; it's a strategic move to enhance customer experiences. Darryl sees these advancements as essential to elevating customer service to unprecedented levels.

The introduction of Keepme represents a significant milestone in BH Live's journey towards a more integrated and efficient member retention model. Darryl highlights the challenges of operating with disparate systems and the benefits of consolidating these tools under one umbrella. “What Keepme can do represents a new phase for our membership retention model, the NPS and the personalized communication is just the start. We have had so many systems in our organisation historically, but they don't always talk to each other. So where we can remove all the different platforms we've got and have them all under one roof like this is a massive step forward.”

The impact of Keepme on BH Live’s operations can be distilled into two critical outcomes: visibility and productivity. These elements have revolutionised how the team approaches the membership sales cycle and the overall member journey. “The two words I’d say get used so often about Keepme are visibility and productivity. Whether that’s visibility of our membership sales cycle, our process, the productivity that team managers and members are producing. We didn't have that before. That for me is a vital part of any member journey, identifying clearly where the opportunities are coming from, what your people are doing to support the automated elements and praising them for it along the way.”

It's evident that BH Live's partnership with Keepme is not just about leveraging technology for the sake of innovation. It's about strategically utilising AI and automation to forge deeper connections with members, streamline operations, and ultimately, foster a culture of excellence and recognition within the team. This approach underscores BH Live's commitment to not only keeping pace with industry trends but leading by example in the quest for superior member engagement and retention.

Final thoughts from Darryl: 

What’s Next For BH Live

BH Live's adoption of Keepme marks the beginning of an extensive digital transformation journey, highlighted by a strategic gold integration partnership with their Leisure Management System (LMS), Gladstone. The goal is clear: to leverage the vast pool of membership data at their disposal to develop a model with over 95% accuracy. This model will proactively identify potential risks and opportunities for revenue among existing members, allowing for preemptive action well before any issues come to fruition.

Furthermore, BH Live is committed to enhancing the remarkable progress achieved in member retention. Darryl shares, "We have one site in particular that has reached 22.5 months Length of Stay as due to its size it supports retaining members much easier. Our continued collaboration with Keepme aims to sustain these exemplary performance metrics across every BH Live Active site across the organisation."

This proactive and data-driven approach underscores BH Live's dedication not just to preserving but also to advancing their leading position in member retention, ensuring the organisation's long-term success and member satisfaction.