The proposal had failed three times. So I stopped pitching technology and started pitching the fifteen questions nobody could answer.
How the WTA went from being the only major tennis property without enterprise analytics to a £160k board-approved investment.
The situation
Every other major tennis property had enterprise analytics. The ATP had a partnership worth several hundred thousand with Infosys. Wimbledon and the US Open both ran substantial programmes with IBM. The WTA was the only major tour without one.
The case for fixing that had been made before, more than once, and had stalled every time. Not because anyone disagreed, but because the proposals were technically framed. They described platforms, licences and capabilities to an audience that was being asked to sign off a six-figure sum without being told what it would let them do.
Meanwhile the underlying data was worse than anyone believed. Duplicate page view events. User ID firing at tag position 19 instead of at initialisation. Missing Consent Mode, which was quietly destroying attribution on iOS. Missing data layer parameters starving the CDP the organisation was already paying for. On top of GA4 Standard sampling that ran as low as 0.5%, major paid media decisions were being made on numbers that could not be relied on.
What I did
1 Rebuilt the pitch four times until it landed
The version that worked abandoned technical framing completely. I went back through what the Chief Digital Officer had actually asked over the preceding months and pulled out fifteen questions we could not answer. Then I built the deck around those: each question, the decision it blocked, and the pound value sitting behind that decision.
Nobody had to understand what Looker was. They had to recognise fifteen questions they had personally asked and not been given an answer to.
I anchored the ask with a benchmarking report positioning £160k as an appropriate investment for the maturity stage the organisation was at, at roughly half to two thirds of what comparable properties were spending. That reframed the number from an expense into a competitive gap being closed cheaply.
Approved at board level. GA360 and Looker Enterprise.
2 Established the gate before anyone spent the money
An analytics investment on top of broken tracking buys you faster wrong answers. So I did the forensic work myself, in DebugView and the browser console, and documented the four foundational failures corrupting the data.
Then I made the fixes a hard gate on all downstream spend, and turned the findings into vendor briefs with acceptance criteria and a definition of done, sequenced by true dependency rather than by which workstreams could run in parallel. In the meantime I shipped an interim workaround so user identification was not blocked while the vendor fixes were commissioned.
3 Made an existing investment work before asking for a new one
The organisation already ran a CDP at £75k a year and was getting under a fifth of the value from it, because the events reaching it carried none of the enrichment personalisation needs.
With three hours before the final tracking call, I established the event standard the platform documentation actually required, chose the specific event to carry the enrichment on evidence rather than convention, and pushed it through both agencies as a non-negotiable requirement with firing rules and timing constraints attached.
The results
- £160k enterprise analytics investment approved at board level, closing a competitive gap against every other major tennis property.
- Four foundational tracking failures identified, root-caused and gated, so the new investment would land on data that could be trusted.
- A £75k annual CDP investment unblocked by setting the event architecture that feeds it, validated by the vendor and made binding across both agencies.
- 40+ hours per month of manual reporting waste quantified and costed, which became a central pillar of the approved business case. Automation delivery was gated on the vendor fixes at the point I left, so the claim is the quantification and the approved case, not delivered savings.
- An identity federation specification authored to implementation depth, designed provider-agnostic before the counterparty had chosen their platform, and holding without rework when they did.
- A decision-ready handover covering six initiatives with named owners and the three gating decisions explicitly flagged.
What this engagement is really about
Technically correct proposals fail in rooms that do not speak technical. The content of the fourth version was not materially different from the first. The framing was. If you cannot state your investment case as questions the person signing has already asked, you do not have an investment case yet.
Do not buy analytics on top of broken tracking. The most valuable thing in that programme was the sequencing: fixes first, gate everything behind them, then spend. It is unglamorous and it is the difference between an investment and an expensive mistake.
Make the existing investment work first. Fixing the CDP the organisation was already paying for cost nothing and made the case for the new spend far easier to make.
If you have an investment case that keeps stalling, or an analytics stack you suspect is producing confident wrong answers, that is the work I do.