Shortly after Lebron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh signed as free agents with the Miami Heat, the organization made a significant but much less covered "decision" that caught my eye. They decided to fire their ticket sales staff. Click here to read the article. From my vantage point, many NBA organizations are the leaders in proactive ticket sales models, staff development and training, innovation and strategies planning. Our ticketing department at Utah is based on an NBA model with a few tweaks to fit the intricacies of college athletics. With that said, I’ve read more than a few criticisms of the Heat’s decision by my fellow ticketing professionals and they make some great points.
For the 2nd consecutive season we have the good fortune of selling our entire football season ticket allotment at Utah. With our move to the Pac10 conference next season, there’s a strong possibility that ticket demand will remain high for the next few years.With ticket demand where it is, you might think that we may take a similar approach to the Heat and look to downsize our proactive ticket sales operation. The funny thing is I’ve spent more time thinking about potentially adding to our staff and downsizing hasn’t crossed my mind.
Here’s why:
Our ticket sales guys are revenue generating specialists
In football you can’t have enough speed on your team and in athletic departments there’s no such thing as having too many good revenue producers. If you are selling out, there is significant interest in your product. If you have a staff of professional sellers that have existing relationships with your season ticket holders, you are perfectly equipped to upsell your fans to other items of interest surrounding that sport. Here’s one specific example. We are constantly striving to grow the tailgating culture surrounding Utah football. We have a good base of tailgaters at Utah but we are always looking to find ways to make tailgating bigger and better. There are very few original ideas in college athletics and we borrowed the idea of selling Tailgate Tents from Iowa St.We created an area that we call “The Pit.” It’s a large grassy area adjacent to our biggest tailgate lot and beginning last season we sold reserved 20x20 spaces in the Pit on a game by game basis and this season we are selling the spaces as a season package. With three weeks to go before the opening game we have sold 66% of the spaces and are hopeful to sell the remaining spaces before the season begins.When we sell out “The Pit” we will explore other revenue generating ideas surrounding our football games and our ticket sales staff will lead the way in developing, promoting and selling the next piece of exciting inventory.
We value relationships
Never take a sold out situation for granted and more importantly never take your season ticket holders for granted. One of the most important things our sales staff does is service their accounts after they make the initial sale. We want our fans to have a relationship with their account representative. When they have a question or a concern about Utah athletics, we want them to feel like they can call someone in the department directly that they trust, that they have an existing relationship with and who will listen to their concerns. Those relationships aren’t possible if the season ticket holder is talking to someone different every time they call the ticket office.There will be times in the future where we may need to reseat our season ticket holders, or explain the rationale behind a season ticket price increase and our ticket sales staff will continue to be an invaluable component in any communication with our season ticket holders.
Sellouts are not diamonds- they don’t last forever.
In college athletics, to achieve long term success, championship teams never take the status quo for granted and stop recruiting. I think the same holds true in ticket sales. As soon as you begin to think you can just show up (send out season ticket renewals) and win (sellouts will follow), its just a matter of time before you get a rude awakening.
