Selling Premium Seats in the Future (and Now)
Working remotely was bound to happen eventually; Covid just made it happen sooner.
I can only imagine you are reading this from your home office. Yes, it might be an old folding table located in what is normally your kid’s toy room (personally, I am sitting at a bar counter with my back to said toy room) but it is where you found a way to be productive since March. With the first vaccine shots going into arms over the past several days, there is light at the end of the tunnel. We are going to need to start closing some premium business. Can we do that by brushing aside a few Legos and knocking out some calls or do we need to be in the office dressed to impress? Does it even matter?
Before diving too deep into what is a question in the heads of salespeople and leaders throughout the sports world, it probably makes sense to do a quick temperature check on where we are as a premium sales industry. Under more familiar circumstances, we in large part would sell premium products to companies that would achieve various business objectives through using the tickets or the space. We would do that by meeting with execs from those companies, mutually crafting a plan to leverage the investment to produce a desired result, and signing an agreement.
Since March, the vast majority of companies are not buying seats as they have adopted “policies” to prevent them from doing so. In layman’s terms, they do not want to take on the risk of having something they cannot use or their clients do not want (for safety reasons). This conundrum has forced premium sellers to go the transactional route of selling to fans. These salespeople are hoping that some person, with the means to do so, feels more comfortable in a suite surrounded by people they know rather than with the reduced-capacity masses.
Could this possibly be the future of premium sales? If so, who cares if I am in the office or at home!
Side note- for those of you concerned that businesses will never reverse these policies, relax. For far too long the return on objective has been too great when conducting business at major events. Businesses will be back in sports venues but the way we need to sell to them may end up being very different.
As a last gasp for 2020, I challenged myself to read one more book and settled on one called Post Corona, From Crisis to Opportunity – thanks for the recommendation Ashley Thiedke. I have not finished it yet so you will not get a full review from me. Something that stood out in my reading thus far, the author opines that the nine or so months we have lived in a pandemic-altered world has pushed the way we do business forward 10 years. Pretty scary thought when I remember that 10 years ago I was downloading my first apps in the App Store for my iPod Touch.
We need to sell like it is 2030. In my mind, ten years from now, you have to be equally adept at working from inside the office as you are outside the office. Your technology has to be second-to-none for communicating, visualizing, and selling your value proposition. You have to be comfortable moving through the sales process from a distance just as easily as in a prospect’s office- especially when the exec you want to close decided against sloshing through the snow to get to her mid-town Manhattan office building and is working remotely from Key West for the winter.
The next time you are distraught over how poorly you conducted your discovery on your last Zoom meeting, understand that rise of remote work - being collaborative and available anywhere (in our case socially distant) - probably would have happened anyway in time. It simply happened sooner.
You need to invest the time and energy to become better at it. Just like selling tickets is different than selling premium seating, selling virtually is different than selling face-to-face. Put the effort in to develop those skills to succeed.
When I have run premium departments in the past, I have made sure to tag along on a bunch of meetings with salespeople. The goal is to interject as little as possible (enough to not make it awkward) but to keep the salesperson from running off course. What normally happens, is the salesperson does not say a lot in the first few meetings but continues to contribute more and more as there are more repetitions. Eventually, I stop going on meetings with that individual because the seller no longer needs support.
Is anyone having an expert on virtual selling joining in on the sales appointments with their reps to make sure the meeting goes well? If not, might be time to start. If you need help, let me know.
Probably best to end with a note that this will be the last post of 2020. In a year unlike any other that I have experienced, it helps to put things in perspective. It has helped me figure out what is most important to me, what I enjoy most, and how I can be the best version of myself both personally and professionally. Here’s to hoping that you have found some silver lining in the madness that has been 2020 and are prepared to tackle what lies ahead.
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Evan Gitomer is a contributor to The Strategic Sports Group newsletter.