The Real-Time Content Engine Behind Pro Sports (Mark Keaney)

Full transcript

Welcome back to the podcast, guys. Today we are joined by Mark Keiny, a chef revenue officer at Greenfly. Mark, welcome to the podcast. >> It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. >> Could you share a bit about Greenfly and what do you guys do? >> Yeah, so Greenfly is a sports technology platform. We work with the world's biggest sports leagues and entertainment companies, powering what's called their short form content ecosystem. So we just came through the Olympics as one great example. Most of those athletes were getting content from Greenfly in real time. So as the US hockey team won gold and the kid lost his teeth, those highlights were being shared across the NHL's social channels and the individual athletes social channels in near real time. Just kind of a fun niche technology business in the sports and entertainment space. and you've had a long run across media and sports and social martekch. Looking back, were there any big career chapters that shaped how you lead the revenue teams today? >> That's a great question.

It's funny for me, my whole journey has been about the people, both the mentors that I had and the teams that I led. Ironically, my very first sales leadership role was at CBS radio in Boston. So Viacom, big big parent company, but CBS was our radio division and my boss Mark Hannon was my mentor. Probably taught me more about being a servant leader than any book has taught me in the in the 20 years since. And that team, that staff that I worked with, I just actually reached out to my very first hire as a net new manager. And she is now incredibly successful. She is an SVP of sales. She just got announced yesterday that she's on the board of a company. So I reached out to her out of the blue. But it's one of those things I think when you think about sales leadership and how it takes to sell a company. The biggest lesson that I learned back then was having the right bosses, right leaders to report to and building the right team of people uh to kind of follow in that in that journey. That's how you scale and get to the biggest heights.

use a lot of those principles now in my current life >> and sports and media are obviously right now a digital first platform. What has changed the most in the last couple of years in how teams think about content and creators and distribution? >> Yeah, it's a great question. It's funny because when you think about the revenue for sports, it was always about the broadcast rights. So these multibillion dollar broadcast rights to air the Olympics or to air Premier League football. Nowadays when you think about the earned media value of what you can do in the digital space, what you can do across social, I think the big shift is that a lot of these leagues and teams are recognizing that the players have the largest and most engaged audience. So, what we're seeing and and what my company specifically helps these leagues do is build a distribution model. I'll use the NBA as an example. The NBA is one of our biggest customers.

There are four leagues within the NBA ecosystem that use Greenfly across 68 teams. 11,000 people are getting content distributed in real time, highlights, videos, fan UGC. And what ends up happening is the aggregate total of the earned media that's generated from all of the players sharing content versus just the social team sharing content. There's real value creation and also monetization because the sponsor valuation and the earned media valuation that goes along with that. You're talking billions of revenue. And when a league or a sports organization adopts Greenfly and they join Greenfly, what's the clearest before and after? Where do they feel the biggest impact in your opinion? >> Oh, that's a great question. I'll stay on the Olympic themes because in addition to US men's winning gold in hockey, the US women's team won gold for hockey as well. The Professional Women's Hockey League was new two years ago. There was a brand new league that just launched. And when we met with them, they had a two-person marketing team and they had six teams and they were trying to build a brand, launch content, launch a social media strategy.

They didn't have the bandwidth to do anything. And I think the before and after in this particular case is that they were able to use our platform and basically take two people and create an ecosystem that included six marketing managers for each team. And I'm going to make up the number. Let's say 6* 20 120 players who now all have access to content. They were able to build a social audience in near no time. So new league, new season, boom. They had one of the largest social followings in sports. They had an interactive engagement content strategy around their social media handles. They were able to grow both audience for the clubs and the league, but also the players became celebrities in their own right. And I think the lightning in the model for them is that as their league was successful, so was women's sports on a global stage. So they had this great blueprint of incredible athlete ambassadors basically taking their brand to market at scale now globally which is super exciting. >> And as Greenfly is AIdriven how do you use AI specifically inside of Greenfly.

It's I'm laughing because we acquired a company called Miro AI and it was a best-in-class sports technology for AI and we were pitching it to Major League Baseball and I kept saying best-in-class and the woman who was our customer was like well okay Mark what makes it best-in-class and I was like a crap I don't know the answer to that let me find out why it's bestin-class. the company we acquired when they think about AI for athletes and how we use AI there are basically four major things that we're looking at so facial recognition is one part of it their name and number on the back of the jersey is the second part of it their team logo and their color scheme would be the third part of it and then the fourth thing which is very unique is scene detection so when you think about hockey it might be one of those things that we can identify the player the team he or she is playing for, the game that they're playing in, and oh, the guy just shot a goal.

So when we think about organizing content, if let's say a major sponsor paid for a sponsorship for the goals that happened in a specific league, all of a sudden all of those goals could be organized in a gallery and delivered in real time so that Adidas is leveraging the right content for the right commercial and getting extreme value out of the content itself. So longwinded short, those are the four kind of markers on our our AI. The value proposition for us is that content happens in real time. If our AI can find it, organize it, and put it in a gallery for distribution, now all of a sudden that content of the goal sponsored by Adidas or Toyota or Gatorade is routed to the Gatorade activation team that is now pushing it out in a paid social ad. So, you're getting real time value uh monetization of the content. Yeah, the scene detection seems very interesting to me. >> It's super cool. Yeah, we do it across most sports. Some are harder than others.

American football is a great one where we've got touchdowns and interceptions, quarterback sacks. Here's an interesting example, kind of off the thing, but arrivals. So, when you think about as a team arrives at a stadium, they come off the bus, they walk down the aisle, they're dressed in really cool clothes with Oakley sunglasses. That's all sponsorable content that can now be captured and with the help of AI, we could identify that a hockey player is arriving at the stadium, they're wearing Oakley sunglasses. That's a a really unique way for us to think about how do we break up that inventory for a league partner? >> And as a CRO, what are the two three things you've seen consistently drive predictable growth in this industry? It's a great question and I would look at that kind of more broadly just thinking about like running a sales organization, running a SASbased sales organization in tech. I would say the first thing is is making sure that you've got the right metrics that you're measuring the right metrics. In the last probably decade of my career, they've become called the metrics that matter.

So if you've got the right metrics, these metrics that matter and you're using technology to help map your sales team to that to understand are we building the right amount of pipeline? Do we have the right amount of meetings? Do we have the right amount of deals in the right space within their deal cycle? Those metrics that matter kind of give you that repeatable dashboard. I think the second thing is really taking that concept into the future and with the help of AI, you've got a variety of different tools that not only will help you track it, but also help coach your team on doing the right things within the process. We call it a deal cycle. So, if there's a deal cycle and you're trying to qualify a deal with certain measures within the deal, using AI that can help remind an account executive, we don't really know what their budget is. That's a question you need to ask in the next call. You can identify deal gaps and coach your account executives to actually run better deal cycles.

The third thing I would say is a combination of inspecting the process. So you've got the right metrics. You're using AI to organize those metrics, but the inspection of the process. Do you have a good one-on-one mechanism in place with your leaders executing good one-on-ones with their salespeople and infield coaching? So having a one-on-one where you're basically drilling in and making sure that you and your team are out on calls in field getting off call and saying, "Hey, how do you think that call went?" and and asking the right questions to really get your reps to uplevel their game. Those are probably the big three that I would say you scale. >> And is there anything that looks good on paper but doesn't actually move revenue? >> Yes, I love it. And it's one of those things like, have you ever heard of the term medic or medpic? Any of those deal qualification type formulas? >> I think medic I've heard before. >> Everyone's kind of heard of medic where medic it's a simple methodology for deal qualification.

To answer your question, I would say if you're just looking at pipeline volume and you're not using MedPic or Medic, like a deal qualification system to make sure that your pipeline is qualified and moving through a deal cycle, you're just going to be sitting on a lot of opportunities that may or may not be real. So, it's really that next layer of if you've got good pipe or if you've got a high volume of pipe, making sure that that high pipe becomes good pipe through deal qualification. That's super important. >> So, really making sure that the opportunities doesn't stall. >> Correct. Yeah. And when you think about medic, it's an acronym that means things. So the first thing it um when you think about uh it's how they measure success I think is the M. E is the economic buyer. D is deci decision maker. So, it's basically like using that tool to make sure that your salesperson has each one of those letters kind of checked off and that's how you kind of qualify a deal in and that converts high pipe or a lot of pipeline to good pipeline that's qualified that's moving down in the pipeline process. >> Mark, if we fast forward maybe 12 months, what would be a big win for Greenfly?

>> Oh man. Yeah, that's a great question. I'll go back to my initial question about like thinking back to my very first management job. Like I have such fond memories of this guy Mark being a great mentor and this woman Kelly being my first hire. I think 12 months from now like what success looks like is we are celebrating at our company offsite an incredible year where not only did GreenFly hit its revenue targets and kind of crushed it and then another high growth year but that we have a team of people that celebrate their contribution to that like having clearly communicated goals and having that unified vision from a leadership perspective like those are the types of things I think we all look back at our career and say you know I really love that time in my career year. I learned so much. I grew so much. I earned so much. I think being successful with my team 12 months from now at an offsite in Southern California would be awesome. >> Perfect. Mark, pleasure to meet you.

For people listening who want to learn more about you or Greenfly, where should they go? >> Find me on LinkedIn. That's I probably spend way too much time on LinkedIn, but it's a big part of my external brand. So, love to talk to you and follow us here and uh look forward to the conversation. >> Great. Thank you guys for watching. We'll see you in the next one. >> Awesome. Appreciate it.