Attendance: A Growing Concern and How to Fix It

In my last blog, I discussed how fans are waiting longer than ever to make their buying decisions.  This trend is negatively impacting the sports & entertainment market and beginning to make teams/venues look at how they are approaching the customers.

If you really want to affect change and reverse this alarming trend, here are three (3) of things you MUST be evaluating:

1. Pricing

Are your price points for tickets keeping buyers away?  In the aftermath of one of the worst financial crisis’ in the history of the United States, what did you do to show the customer you truly cared about them?  Are your prices in line with other competition in-market?  What about your prices in comparison to your counterparts in other cities?  Fans are savvy; they are looking for the best deal and will search high and low to find it, regardless of where it may be.  If your fans aren’t complaining about pricing then you are lucky, and in a good position to be successful.  If, on the other hand, your pricing is causing heart-burn with potential customers, it’s time to reevaluate your price model or come up with some solid fan incentives.

2. Staffing

Ticket sales are the core of your business, every sports team/venue understands that (if you don’t, you better re-evaluate your business model, and fast).  In order to sell tickets, you need a competent, competitive and driven staff to do so; and not just two or three staff members.  The largest department in your office should be your ticket department.  You need people to make sales calls, you need staff to handle the ticket operations needs of your facility (ticket printing, mailing, invoicing & CUSTOMER SERVICE).  Your ticket office staff should not be expected to do both sales & operations, but each representative should be able and competent to handle responsibilities for each.  Each operational representative should understand the importance of, and the need to, sell, up-sell and re-sell customers.  On the same note, each sales rep needs to understand the importance of exceptional customer service, and of not over-promising and under-delivering; this will surely push future sales away. 

How many reps are right for your team/venue?  Well that is a tough question to answer.  In my opinion, any good sales department for a team/venue with less than 30,000 seats, will include four (4) sales-oriented representatives and at least one (1) manager that is also expected to sell.    The number of reps increases as your number of available seats increases.  For comparisons sake, I work at a venue with 130,000 seats and feel that to effectively manage this number of seats eight (8) sales reps is the correct number.  While there is no magic number to staffing your ticket office, the one thing you cannot do is leave it short-handed.  If you do, you will learn quickly that is was the wrong decision and you will be scrambling to correct your mistake.

3.  Sales Plan

You can have the lowest ticket prices in the country and the largest sales staff ever created and it will all be for naught without a calculated sales plan.  Forecasting ticket sales for an upcoming season (in any industry) is a crapshoot to say the least.  No one can predict the future; injuries, market woes, poor weather conditions, work-stoppages, etc.  So the question is, how does are staff hit their budgeted goal for the year.  The first thing you need to do is break your larger forecast into smaller, actionable pieces.  Where do you want to be, or better yet, where should you be twelve (12) weeks into your selling season?  How about at twenty (20) weeks?  When you are a month away from your event, where should sales be then?  These are goals you need to determine, put on paper and track.  If you fall short of one goal you may want to re-evaluate your forecast; otherwise you better get your sales reps to kick it into high gear and start closing some business. 

Sales deadlines aren’t the only goal you need to outline in a sales plan.  Who are you going to target, and for what specific programs?  Where and how are you going to generate new business this year?  Are you going to renew the majority of last years fan base?  If not, why not?  And if you aren’t, what are you going to do this year to ensure next year your fans do renew?  Unfotunately, none of these questions have an easy answer; and none of these questions can be answered the same for multiple teams/venues.  You have to look at your business model, your facility, your event and create your own actionable sales plan; one that puts you in a place to be successful with the pricing and staffing you have in place and allows you to hit your forecasted sales goals.

While I understand that the three items above shouldn’t be new to anyone, they are imperative to the success of all teams/venues and everyone needs to be reminded of their importance from time to time.  If any one of these items is lacking, then you are already failing and facing an uphill battle.  If you are behind in two or (hopefully not) all three categories, stop everything else you are doing right this minute and get your business in order.  Success is earned it’s not handed to you.  Success may not come cheap either, by putting the right plan, staffing and pricing in place, success will be recognized with packed grandstands and happy, returning fans.