Director, Business Strategy & Analytics

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About Us
Chicago Fire Football Club is a Major League Soccer team that was founded in 1997. Under new ownership, the Club recently returned to Chicago's iconic Soldier Field, opened a new 50,000-square foot office in the heart of the city, and will unveil a premium state-of-the-art Performance Center in January 2025. With tremendous growth and expansion, the Club is laying the foundation for an audacious and ambitious vision that will transform the brand and the company in the coming years.

At Chicago Fire Football Club, we're on a mission to entertain, serve, and unite Chicago by delivering excellence on and off the pitch to ensure a world-class experience. As a club we let our values guide everything we do: we uphold uncompromising integrity, show respect for all at all times, never settle for less, constantly innovate, and hold ourselves relentlessly accountable.

Position Overview
The Chicago Fire Football Club are looking for a new Director of Business Strategy & Analytics. This individual will lead the team responsible for driving data-informed decision-making across the organization and will play a critical role in supporting the future growth of the organization. Their primary responsibility will be working cross functionally across our Marketing, Ticketing & Corporate Partnership teams to drive revenue growth & optimization. This role requires an individual that can blend technical skills (including data manipulation & analysis) with strategic skills and stakeholder management.

Ultimately, the role focuses on three key challenges:

1. How do we make sure that we have access to the right data, and that we're managing/ storing it correctly?
2. How do we use that data to drive the growth of the business? (especially with regards to lead generation, scoring and nurturing, across ticketing & corporate partnerships)
3. How do we use this data (and data visualization tools) to build dashboards for departments across the organization, for both reporting purposes & for providing insights that drive action from functional leaders.

The right candidate will be equally as comfortable managing a team as they are with managing data, and must be comfortable moving fast, working on multiple projects simultaneously and sometimes operating in ambiguity.

Job Responsibilities

• Team Leadership: Lead a team of 2 Analysts and a Data Engineer in driving progress against everything below. This is a player/ coach role, but overtime the hope is to develop the team and take on more of a strategic leadership role.
• Data Strategy & Management: Own our Data Strategy, including our Data Warehouse (Snowflake). Ensure that we're getting the data that we need into the warehouse effectively, and that we're utilizing that data to help drive future business growth.
• Lead Generation: Oversee the identification of leads for corporate partnerships, & ticketing (primarily membership & premium leads) using our data, data append technology (e.g. Zoom Info or Live Analytics data) and other relevant technologies/ sources (i.e. Zoom Info Scoops).
• Lead Scoring, Distributing & Tracking: Play a key role in identifying leads that ticketing team should focus on, distributing leads to reps/ leadership teams, and tracking success against different lead types/ campaigns.
• CRM: Own our CRM relationship (Salesforce) and ensure that our revenue teams are following CRM best practices.
• Data appends: Ensure that we're systematically appending data to our known contacts (from a variety of different sources) to help increase our understanding of who is in our database and prioritize contacts as leads for Corporate Partnerships or Premium Seating.
• Optimize Revenue Teams Performance: Monitor sales pipeline hygiene across Corporate Partnerships & Ticketing and build dashboards & visualizations to allow leadership of these teams to effectively report on their pipeline, and coach their reps on best practices.
• Modeling & Forecasting: Build models & forecasts to help us predict performance of single game sales, membership efforts, retention etc.
• Corporate Partnership Asset Delivery Tracking: Ensure that our Salesforce instance is customized to allow our partner marketing team to better track, report and communicate the delivery of assets in contracts
• Corporate Partnership Insights: Provide business, brand & industry insights to Corporate Partnership team to use in new business efforts.
• Gameday NPS: Working with Operations/ Game Entertainment team on gathering data around gameday NPS & insights to increase fan satisfaction.
• Dashboarding: Ensure that the team is working with Data Visualization Tools to build dashboards for stakeholders across the organization, that allow us to understand performance of departments, progress against key initiatives, and provide insights that drive decision making from stakeholders.
• Digital Marketing Technical & Analytical Support: Supporting our Digital Marketing team as needed, primarily in SFMC and Google Analytics. Partner with the team to track performance of lead generation campaigns, understanding eventual ROI but also drop off points throughout the sales journey.
• Custom Research Projects: Work on custom research projects as required from key stakeholders across the organization (i.e. valuation exercises for corporate partnerships, pricing exercises for ticketing etc.)
• Technology: Constantly be looking at the technological landscape to understand if there are tools that can help us be more efficient or impactful against all of the above.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience: With a proven track record of success in business strategy, analytics, or a related field, ideally within sports, entertainment, or consumer-focused industries.
• Data Driven Growth Expertise: Experience managing data strategy for an organization and using that data to drive measurable growth for the organization.
• Technical Skills: Ideal candidate will be familiar with Data Warehouses (ideally Snowflake) and Data Management best practices (including data engineering tools, ideally Prefect, Docker), CRM experience (ideally Salesforce) and Marketing Automation Platforms (ideally SFMC).
• Analytical Skills: Strong analytical skills (the ability to analyze complex data and extract actionable insights - including familiarity with SQL and/ or Python) and Experience with data science and statistical software (Alteryx, Python, R, SAS). Ideal candidate will have experience leading complex, data-driven projects.
• Communication Skills: Excellent verbal and written communication skills, including the ability to effectively communicate initiatives & insights clearly to both technical and (more importantly) non-technical stakeholders.
• Highly Collaborative: Proven ability to work collaboratively with various stakeholders, including the executive leadership team, across the organization.
• Strategic Thinking: Ability to think strategically and develop long-term plans to achieve business objectives.
• Leadership & Accountability: Demonstrated leadership skills in managing high-performance teams, being proactive and owning projects from start to finish.
• Background: Our ideal candidate will likely have some experience working for a sports team, but we're open to candidates with no sports experience if they can demonstrate that they have the required skills.
• Education: Bachelor's degree in business administration, strategy management, finance, economics, business analytics, or another related field.

Please note:

• Chicago Fire FC is committed to fostering, cultivating, and preserving a culture of diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion. Our diversity initiatives start with the recruitment and selection process; therefore, we'd like to welcome all diverse candidates to apply to opportunities within our Club.
• CFFC is committed to providing equal employment opportunity and maintaining a workplace for employees and applicants for employment that is free from discrimination. The Company does not discriminate in employment opportunities or practices on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, ancestry, ethnicity, citizenship, age, veteran or military status, disability, sexual orientation, sexual orientation or expression, marital status or any other characteristic protected by law. This policy governs all aspects of employment, including hiring, promotion, compensation, discipline, termination, and access to benefits and training.
  • If, because of a medical condition or disability, you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the application process, please contact the People and Culture Department at [redacted] to let us know the nature of your request and your contact information.

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