Markets, Prospects and Pipeline

The market is a list of licensees

In most business to business markets, finding prospects is a research problem: the buyers are scattered, unlisted and hard to identify. In regulated gambling the problem is largely solved for you. Regulators publish who holds a licence, often with every website each licensee runs. The total number of potential customers in a market is known, finite and public, and so are many of the events (licence awards, market openings, contract migrations) that make a buyer ready to talk.

That changes the job. A supplier's sales team does not need to find buyers so much as to choose among a known set, rank them, understand them and approach them at the right moment. This lesson covers how to segment operators, how to turn public registers into a prospect list, how aggregators and platforms act as channels, and how to run a pipeline with stages and qualification rules that reflect the industry.

Segmenting operators

Operators differ in what they buy, how they buy and how long it takes. A sales plan that treats them as one market wastes effort on prospects that will never buy and under-serves the ones that will. The table describes six segments in general terms; individual operators will not fit perfectly.

Some segments are large and concentrated. In the United States, the American Gaming Association's State of the States 2026 report records that at the close of 2025 iGaming was legal in eight states (seven with full online casino, plus Nevada with online poker only), legal sports betting was offered in 39 states plus the District of Columbia, and Michigan, New Jersey and Pennsylvania accounted for nearly 90 per cent of iGaming revenue. The AGA reported US commercial iGaming revenue of US$10.74 billion in 2025. Tribal gaming is a large separate segment: National Indian Gaming Commission figures reported in July 2026 showed gross gaming revenue of US$46.2 billion in fiscal 2025 from 545 gaming operations owned or operated by 246 tribes in 29 states. Lotteries are another: the North American association of state and provincial lotteries represents 53 government-sanctioned lottery organisations.

Segmentation should also reflect the supplier's own position. A studio certified in ten European markets should rank operators by overlap with those markets; a payments provider should rank by the payment methods each operator's players use. The best segment for a supplier is the one where its licences, certifications and product strengths match what operators in that segment need now.

Regulatory registers as prospect lists

Regulators publish their licensees because players need to check who is licensed. Suppliers can use the same lists.

Great Britain. The Gambling Commission's register of gambling businesses can be searched by name or domain and downloaded in full; it held 2,632 records on 5 October 2026. Its annual statistics give the market context: 2,154 gambling operators at 31 March 2026, and £8.3 billion of gross gambling yield from the remote casino, betting and bingo sector in the year to March 2026. Most of those operators are land-based or small; filtering the register to remote casino and betting licences produces a much shorter list.

Malta. The Malta Gaming Authority's licensee hub lets anyone search the licensee register by name, authorisation status, URL or gaming service, which separates B2C operators from B2B suppliers (useful for competitor mapping as well as prospecting).

Ontario. iGaming Ontario's public directory listed 49 operators and 84 gaming websites in October 2026. For a supplier entering Ontario this is close to the complete addressable market.

New Jersey. The Division of Gaming Enforcement publishes the list of internet gaming permit holders (nine, as updated on 22 September 2026) and a list of approved sites that shows which online brands operate under which casino licensee. Together they map the market's structure: the licence holders who control access and the brands that run on their licences.

Pennsylvania. The Gaming Control Board's page of interactive gaming operators lists the regulated online brands, and its application status reports show which suppliers are licensed or applying, which tells a seller who the competition is.

Brazil. Brazil's Secretariat of Prizes and Bets published a list of authorised fixed-odds betting companies, which became one of the most-used prospect lists in the industry after the market opened in 2025. The page is now titled companies authorised until the Provisional Measure 1.394 of 2026 took effect, following the prohibition described in lesson four. A prospect list is only as good as the market behind it, and registers must be re-checked, not downloaded once.

The method is to combine registers into a single matrix: operators down the side, markets across the top, and in each cell whether the operator is live, whether the supplier is certified there, and whether the supplier already serves that operator anywhere. The cells where the operator is live and the supplier is certified but not yet live with that operator are the immediate opportunities. The cells where the operator is live and the supplier is not certified are the licensing and certification roadmap.

Aggregators and platforms as channels

Many suppliers, especially game studios, reach most of their operators indirectly. An aggregator or a platform provider integrates once with each operator and offers a catalogue of content through that integration. For a studio, signing with a large aggregator can make its games available to dozens of operators at once.

The scale of these channels is visible in filings. Light & Wonder reports that wagers processed through its Open Gaming System, its iGaming distribution platform, rose to US$109 billion in 2025. Channels can also concentrate risk: Games Global's 2024 listing documents explained that it distributed games both directly and through B2B resellers, including Apricot, which also resold its games to Apricot's own operator customers, and that this single relationship accounted for about half of its revenue in the period reported.

The sales implication is that a supplier has two pipelines. The channel pipeline (aggregators, platforms, resellers) decides availability. The operator pipeline decides activation and promotion, because availability through an aggregator does not mean an operator has switched the games on or given them a place in its lobby. Lesson six covers how partner managers run the first; this lesson's methods apply to both.

Triggers: why now?

Operators are not equally ready to buy at all times. A good pipeline is built around triggers, events that open a buying window:

• A new licence or market launch. An operator awarded a licence in a new market needs certified suppliers there, quickly.
• A contract renewal. Supplier contracts have terms; a renewal is the moment to be considered. Listed suppliers sometimes disclose migrations: Kambi's 2025 annual report, for example, named two partners whose planned migrations from its sportsbook would continue to weigh on its revenue in 2026, which told every competing supplier where a buying decision had been made.
• An acquisition or new ownership. New owners review suppliers.
• A platform migration. An operator moving platform must re-integrate its content and services, and often reconsiders them.
• A regulatory change. New technical standards, affordability rules or payment rules create demand for products that meet them.
• New leadership. A new chief product officer or head of casino often brings preferred suppliers and a mandate to change things.

Each trigger should be a field in the CRM, tracked for every account on the target list.

Pipeline stages with exit criteria

A pipeline is only useful if each stage means the same thing to everyone who uses it. Define stages by what must be true to leave them, not by activity.

The final stage is the important one for this industry. Many software pipelines end at "signed". In iGaming, a signed deal that never goes live earns nothing, so "live" belongs in the pipeline and in the sales team's measures.

A qualification scorecard

Qualification decides where the sales team spends its time. A simple weighted scorecard keeps the decision honest and comparable across accounts. The criteria and weights below are an example to adapt, not a standard.

Each criterion is scored from 1 to 5, multiplied by its weight and divided by 5. In this hypothetical case, operator A is a clear priority: strong market overlap, a live trigger, and an easy integration route. Operator B has a real need but no integration route, so the next action is technical, not commercial. Operator C looks attractive on paper but has no confirmed need and no access to decision makers, and should not appear in the forecast however large it is.

A threshold, for example 60, decides what counts as qualified. Reviewing scores every month, and removing deals that fall below it, keeps the pipeline honest. Forecasts built on unqualified deals are the commonest reason sales teams miss their numbers.

Keeping the pipeline honest

Two habits keep a pipeline useful as well as accurate.

One record per operator, with its markets. Large operators run several brands under several licences, sometimes through different legal entities and platforms. A CRM that holds each brand as a separate account will double-count opportunities and send three salespeople to the same buyer. Hold the group as the account, with its licensed entities, brands and markets beneath it, and link each opportunity to the markets where it will go live.

Separate the commercial close from the go-live. An opportunity can be won commercially and still be months from revenue. Record the signature date and the expected live date per market as separate fields, so that a sales review can see at a glance which deals are waiting on the supplier's own licensing, certification or integration work, and which are waiting on the operator.

Record why deals are lost. Price, product gaps, an incumbent's renewal, an operator decision to build, a missing licence: the reasons, gathered over a year, are the most useful input the product and compliance teams receive from sales, and they show which segments the supplier should stop pursuing.

Use public results to size accounts. Listed operators report revenue by market and product. Even a rough estimate of an operator's casino or sportsbook revenue in a market tells the seller what a given share of it would be worth under each commercial model in lesson three, which in turn decides how much effort the account deserves.

Pipeline arithmetic

Finally, the pipeline must be big enough. If a supplier's history shows that about a quarter of qualified opportunities reach signature and four in five signed deals go live within a year, then to add ten live operators next year it needs about fifty qualified opportunities, which may require two hundred targets. Those ratios are hypothetical; every supplier should measure its own and use them to set prospecting targets. The registers make the target list finite: if the addressable market in a region is fewer than a hundred operators, a supplier can plan to know every one of them.

The next lesson covers what to offer them: the commercial models suppliers use and how a deal looks from each side of the table.