How Lincoln City FC turned Microsoft Teams and AI into a Revenue Engine
A League One club with Championship ambitions needed its commercial operation to match. This is how they built it.
About Lincoln City Football Club
Founded in 1884, Lincoln City have built a reputation that extends far beyond their league position. Known as The Imps, they consistently rank at the top of English football’s Fan Engagement Index. They run a charitable foundation across Lincolnshire and operate the LCFC Innovation Lab, a hub for testing new ideas on and off the pitch.
In a division where nearly every club loses money, Lincoln City have chosen to work smarter rather than fall behind.
The Challenge
The infrastructure could no longer support the level of scale and consistency that the commercial team were aiming for. Notes and follow-ups were being managed in a variety of ways which worked for a smaller team but became harder to maintain as the level of outreach increased and the team required a consistent view of what had been said, to whom, or how opportunities were progressing.
When Bobby Copping joined as Head of Commercial, he built on the club’s commercial foundations: more disciplined prospecting, clearer targeting, and an outbound strategy designed to reach businesses across Lincolnshire, the UK, and internationally. The problem was that the club’s tools did not support this way of working.
The Solution
The workflow is now straightforward: prospect lists and campaigns live in HubSpot. Solgari provides click-to-dial calling within Teams, showing the contact record and full CRM history in one view. As every call is captured automatically, Solgari Copilot transcribes, summarises, and logs sentiment, with everything being written back into the HubSpot timeline.
When a team member picks up the phone, they see the last conversation, the tone, the key points, and an AI-generated summary of what matters most to that prospect. HubSpot’s Breeze AI reads the conversation history and surfaces each prospect’s priorities.
For Bobby, the recordings and transcripts became coaching tools. He can review calls, sharpen approaches, and build consistency across the team.
LCFC kept the systems they trusted. Solgari made them useful.
The Benefits
The changes were immediate:
- Up to 5 hours saved per person per week
- Up to 30% more calls per day
- Zero conversations lost
Beyond the numbers, the team no longer rely on memory or scraps of paper. Every touchpoint is logged. Coaching is grounded in real calls, not anecdotes. Both Teams and HubSpot now run on better data.
This is phase one. LCFC plan to bring inbound fan and community interactions into Solgari, then add WhatsApp, SMS, and social, so every conversation sits in one place.
Summary
Most League One clubs lose money. Lincoln City are showing what happens when commercial discipline meets proper use of familiar tools. They built a structured outbound operation on top of technology they already owned, connected it with Solgari, and took a clear step toward sustainable growth – without losing the human touch that defines them.