The Hunk of Plastic

On Saturday afternoon I received a text from a friend that read, “Rough week for the hunk of plastic.” Attached was a screen shot of a tweet stating that only 11% of respondents to a recent poll said they would like a phone call after attending a team’s game. 

This text came days after a lively debate on LinkedIn over a Forbes article which stated that, “phone sales aren’t dead, but they are clearly on life support.” This same article suggested that season tickets and memberships are easy enough to understand and can simply be purchased online and we should not try to, “control or manipulate the buyer.” 

Last night I read an article from an industry professional for whom I have a great deal of respect. The article seemed to suggest that we not call our single game buyers to discuss ticket packages, season tickets, memberships, or groups. There is some nuance as to how we sell and the nature of relationship building, but none the less the article called for inside sales to not call single game buyers, because inside sales should be a place to “grow and develop.” I’m not sure I know what that means. 

I felt compelled to write on this topic because I have seen first hand how dangerous these well-intended suggestions and beliefs can be. 

When I arrived in Salem as Vice President of Ticket Sales and Service with the Red Sox we were an organization suffering mightily. Our attendance had been in a steady decline and the market as a whole was looking for answers. In May of that first season, just weeks on the job, I asked a member of the sales team at the time if he had contacted all of his groups from the prior season about returning. The response was, “We generally don’t want to bug people like that. If they want to come back out they will call us.” 

This was not the first time I had heard this sentiment. Early in my career, as an Account Executive with the August Lynx, I was at a sales training event for a handful of ECHL teams. During the session a member of my club’s senior leadership said, “In Augusta our philosophy is that anyone who wanted season tickets would have already called us for them.” That horrifically misguided statement was made roughly 60 days before the Lynx became the first team in ECHL history to fold during the season. 

What I am hearing now and what I hope is just a hot topic for the week and not a trend seems to be covering for people and organizations that are either unwilling or unable to pick up the phone. I am an analytical person and try to make decisions based on data. However, without context data can be incredibly dangerous. If you look at a data set that tells you what “is" and you build a plan based on what “is” then you will end up with the same result and your next poll will reinforce your original decision. 

The poll in question asked, “If you attend a team’s game & then are on their prospect list, what is the best way for them to engage you to try and sell you a larger package?”

As I said at the beginning, only 11% said to call. What’s interesting is that this is being presented as new information. Has there ever been a time in human history where the consumer would have said overwhelmingly, “YES, please call and sell me your product!” 

Of course not. No one wants to be sold. No one wants to be “controlled or manipulated.” And that kind of language shows the lack of understanding of what the best sales programs and organizations do. We don’t control or manipulate. We build relationships. We connect and listen. We do all the things that are suggested in last night’s article, but what we also do is ASK FOR THE SALE. That is our job. Good feelings and engagement don’t fill our buildings. Digital ads and SEO don’t build long-term, loyal fan-bases. People do that. 

The topics discussed this week are endemic of a marketing culture seeking to avoid any semblance of sales, because sales are gross. 

We have an obligation to our owners, to our team mates and to our communities to sell our product. In the six seasons since we refocused our outbound efforts in Salem we have seen group sales increase 500% and season tickets increase 1000%. With five to ten sell-outs each summer, guest satisfaction and enjoyment has also visibly increased since 2013.

Ask the hockey fans in Augusta, Georgia if they would have preferred a sales staff that called to sell season tickets and groups to being just another Southern market that “couldn’t support hockey.”