What can the LA Clippers teach us about sales?

Extracting Opportunity in Competitive Marketplaces

Whenever I think of competitive marketplaces for sports entertainment, there are no others as competitive as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. And we happen to do business in Los Angeles with several sports teams and their organizations. Some of the organizations we’ve done business with, and continue to do business with, include Los Angeles Football Club (LAFC), the Kings, the Rams, and the Dodgers... We also work with Legends on the new LA stadium project. And we work with the Los Angeles Clippers.

Now, when thinking about what we can learn about selling in competitive markets, I’m reminded of a book called Blue Ocean Strategy(i), by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. In Blue Ocean Strategy, the authors essentially said that this is the strategy of pursuing “differentiation and low cost” to create new demand. It creates an uncontested marketplace making the competition irrelevant. They equate this to being in a vast, deep, blue ocean with uncontested resources. The authors go on to explain that red ocean strategy, however, characterizes the known marketplace. Industry limitations are known, as well as the rules of conduct.  In this situation, the pool and resources are limited. Naturally, as competition grows, profits and growth are reduced. And because the competition is cutthroat, it’s bloody. So, in order to survive in this kind of environment, you must be at the top of your game and ready to go. 

How The LA Clippers Leverage Opportunity in a Tight Environment

Los Angeles just happens to be one of those red ocean marketplaces as it relates to the sports entertainment industry.

The industry in Los Angeles is building new stadiums and growing sports entertainment opportunities. It’s a marketplace that has more pro sports teams than any other marketplace. You’re looking from the Los Angeles Angels to the Dodgers; the Anaheim Ducks to the Los Angeles Kings. You’ve got the Los Angeles Chargers and the Los Angeles Rams. And then you have two soccer teams there, the Los Angeles Football Club, which is a client of ours, and the Los Angeles Galaxy.

Then you’ve got the Clippers. Now here is a team that was a challenger brand in the market to the Los Angeles Lakers for years. And from a competitive marketplace standpoint, consider what they did in the free agency. They were able to bring on Kawhi Leonard and Paul George, and their marketplace got excited about the potential of the Clippers.

Our main customer at the Clippers, our number one fan, is a guy named Jason Green. We've worked with Jason for years. And with how well everything is going with their product and service, the success they’ve had in free agency, and how they've upgraded their product, you would think that sales would be easy.

And sales are easy, at one level. But from a strategic leadership standpoint, with the way the sales team is being managed, they aren’t relying solely on the benefits of their product. Instead, they are leveraging this situation as an opportunity to get to another level of performance and long-term viability.

Lessons Learned About Sales Improvement From the LA Clippers

What can the LA Clippers teach us about sales? First, we have to go back to the adage I rediscovered in Abraham Lincoln's presidential library in Springfield, IL. My son was playing hockey there and I had the opportunity to visit the library. While scanning through some of Lincoln’s collected wisdom, I read, "If my job every day, 8 hours a day, was to cut down trees, I'd spend 3 hours out of that 8 sharpening my axe.”

So, one of the things I see the LA Clippers doing is taking their existing sales team and making sure every team member’s “axe” is sharp, as they understand that they cannot afford to get complacent when their product is in high demand.

How are they doing that? What is the LA Clippers sales team doing that you can implement in your process right now? Well, one of the practices they’ve implemented is to look at micro opportunities in their sales process where they can improve. For example, if a member is conducting a sales call over the phone, they review where they could have taken control of the call and facilitated it better. In their call, before automatically selling something to the prospect, the team member takes time to listen to understand INSTEAD of listening to respond. 

Making small adjustments like that takes time. But it also gives team members the opportunity to make small adjustments in their call process, resulting in constant performance improvements. And constant, small improvements compound over time into big performance improvements. That’s the kind of improvements you want to implement in a saturated, red ocean environment.

(i) Blue Ocean Strategy