Tough Mudder’s Global Challenge: 10 Countries, 2.5M Participants, One Unified View

Since its inception in 2010, Tough Mudder has seen growth that’s not for the faint of heart — to date, over 2.5 million people have participated in more than 200 challenging events. The event also went global at breathtaking speeds, expanding across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

But while Tough Mudder participants run 10-12 miles through 500,000 gallons of mud, it’s difficult to say who has the bigger challenge — the Tough Mudder participants, or the people behind the scenes managing their growing global business.

Organising a high-volume, global, and growing event (while raising more than €12 million for global charities) wasn’t easy — and some obstacles have been harder to overcome than others. As Tough Mudder has grown, one challenge has proven particularly messy: managing data for a business with multiple events per week across the globe.

The Challenge

The Approach

The Tough Mudder team knew they couldn’t solve all their data woes on their own. It was a complex problem — but one that was critical to the continued growth of their business. As such, they turned to Eventbrite to develop a solution.

“Eventbrite has, collects, and retains our data,” Ken says. Using an open API (which empowers organisers to link other apps with their registration data), Eventbrite can sync with multiple data management and CRM platforms.

Working closely with the Tough Mudder team, Eventbrite’s engineers built EventbriteSync, a seamless integration between Eventbrite and the leading CRM solution, Salesforce. EventbriteSync is a free extension that can be used by all organisers using Salesforce to simplify their work by automatically pulling data and generating reports.

“EventbriteSync is an enterprise level connector,” Ken says. “It scales for our business, and we see future enhancements. Now we can reap the rewards.”

Saving time and reducing room for errors

With EventbriteSync, Tough Mudder’s registration data is synced with Salesforce automatically. This way, there’s no fear of distributing inaccurate data — and team members who aren’t Salesforce whizzes can still get the data they need.

“Every single piece of information we get from Eventbrite goes into Salesforce,” Ken says. “We use Salesforce as our centralised repository to analyse information and react.”

The team effortlessly accesses automated daily reports in Salesforce, gaining granularity into different regions and events. Now that reports are automated, employees across the company have hours freed up to focus on more important tasks.

“Marketing Analytics was spending 2-3 hours a day reporting how well we’d done, grouping tickets under various promotions, crunching the numbers and sharing critical reports with departments in multiple offices” says Alexander von Rosenbach, the Senior Business Analyst at Tough Mudder. “Now many reports can be viewed in Salesforce dashboards, and the Marketing Analytics team is freed up to do more high-impact work.”

And Marketing isn’t the only team saving time. The sales and finance analysts can focus more on the tough challenges they were hired to solve. As a result, the team is more agile and can plan more proactively. EventbriteSync has given the team more time to focus on their job, instead of procedures.

Running a global business confidently

With events in ten countries worldwide, Tough Mudder needs a global view of their business. EventbriteSync gives them automatic reporting in Salesforce of daily sales for every region they target.

“Everyone tends to report on their respective areas, but the visibility into total and individual event sales is significantly enhanced,” Ken says. On a global scale, “our team can now instantly see which event is selling well.”

Informing the marketing process

A key benefit of streamlining data is being better able to understand your customer. With EventbriteSync, Tough Mudder seamlessly imports event data into Salesforce to track their customers through events and marketing campaigns.

“We now have a 360-degree view of our customers,” Ken says. “We can see someone who contacted customer service about a problem, whether they came in through corporate sales or a sponsor, how many events they’ve done, and if they opened a recent email campaign. Every interaction can be tracked.”

One interaction Tough Mudder is striving to better understand is their purchase process. Now that they have access to more data, they’re working to increase the percentage of people who view their registration page that sign up — especially on mobile.

“We’re seeing 50% of sales coming in from mobile devices,” Ken says. “We want to make sure we’ve optimised our user journey, and we want to maintain our brand identity on the registration page. Eventbrite understands that’s important to us.”

To convert more interested individuals into participants, Tough Mudder uses Eventbrite’s streamlined, mobile-optimised purchase process and custom branding on their registration page. They’ve also used their new data system to get more personalised with their marketing.

“Using EventbriteSync has really changed the way we capture and analyse our data,” Alexander says. “It’s changing how we email our customers, because we can see their level of interest in us and reach out in a personal way. It’s improving our speed and automation around email, and we’re going to leverage it for social, mobile, and an enhanced loyalty program.”

While their participants face increasingly demanding obstacles — from “Funky Monkey” greased monkey bars to the “Electroshock Therapy” sprint through 10,000 volt-charged dangling wires — the Tough Mudder team is just beginning to test the potential of their new data system. Equipped with new insights and their registration partner on their team, they’re ready to face even the most complex challenge head on as they scale their global business.