The Trusted Advisor in Amateur Sports

As the Founder & CEO of Placement Loop, I am intrigued by the growing demand for advisors in the amateur sports market. In amateur ice hockey, these advisors are commonly referred to as “family advisors” and they build relationships with coaches and players to help them get what they want. The type of advisor/customer relationship I support requires an understanding of customer intent, but in context that is relevant to surrounding conditions, limitations, and values. As I see it, advisors shouldn’t rely strictly on customer intents, rather, they should proactively suggest actions that hadn’t occurred to their clients.

Coaches and athletes only have 24 hours in the day and one of their growing needs is to increase their ROI — return on investment. If coaches and athletes had a trusted advisor who knew their objectives and could help them sift through decisions-to-be-made, they would get far more value per unit of investment (e.g. time, travel, hospitality, and other expenses). With the advent of big data, sophisticated analytics, social software, and cloud computing (just to name a few of the enabling technologies) the value propositions surrounding trusted advisors are expanding.

In the future, the real winners in amateur sports will be those who are working with trusted advisors whose focus is on improving an athlete’s pursuit of well-being, not the outcome. The outcome is sufficiently unpredictable and therefore can not be foreseen accurately enough to make the outcome the focus. However, advisors traveling down the path of helping others improve their pursuit, are truly going to earn the trust and deep collaboration that increases, the most, the probability of a successful outcome.

So, how is trust and collaboration built and preserved over time?

Trust comes in part from the realization that some advisors know coaches and players as an individual broadly and deeply, not just as an acquaintance with an intent. Capturing intents is the easy part, given the new technologies that are increasingly powerful and cost effective at compiling and analyzing large amounts of data related to what coaches and athletes are looking for.

The real challenge is creating a collaboration experience that assures information and data is being used to serve an athlete’s best interest during a pursuit of development and outcome. However, new technology is significantly reducing the cost of delivering this advice-in-context and curating it. The result is that service is likely to be satisfaction-based and increasingly affordable to a large segment in the amateur sports market. And that is good for all participants.