April 6, 2005

Question:

A fellow member school is researching the possibility of taking an existing staff member and making them a group salesperson. If you have information on this, please take a few minutes to answer the following questions. Your responses can be sent directly to me (bparke@nacda.com).
1. Is there a quota?
2. What is the standard practice?
3. What are the responsibilities besides selling?
4. How are they being trained and what sales methods are they using?
5. Does anyone have any information for us to review (strategies, tactics, etc)
6. Can you provide information on whether or not the group sales program has been successful or not?

Responses:

As someone who has sold both in both the professional and collegiate ranks, here are some of my thoughts on group sales:

1. The market. Is this school in a large market or a smaller one. Any market can be difficult for just one person to handle. Large markets can be very difficult. For example Georgia Tech started a group sales effort two football seasons ago. It was 1 person trying to navigate a city with 4 million people. It was difficult to say the least.

2. What is being sold? A football stadium needing to sell 2,000-3,000 more seats per game is much more manageable for one person than a school that needs to sell 20,000 seats per game.

3. Other duties. If the person is just selling then he/she will be more successful than if they run a sport. Game day duties are fine, but if there are excessive promotional duties during the week then you really only have a part time sales person. This magnifies the challenges of my first and second points.

4. Quotas are very difficult unless you have a great feel for your program. It makes no sense to look at Illinois who sells about 10,000 group tickets a football game and say "we have a similar situation so the quota is going to be 10,000 for us." I recommend a trial year and then forming quotas for the second year if the school continues the program.

5. It is also very important to support the group sales program as much as possible. Especially if there is only one sales person. Information about group sales should be in media guides, in season ticket mailings, on video boards, in PA's at events, on coaches shows, on the webiste etc. Most of this advertising is free and can really boost a new group sales effort.

6. Don't be afraid to start by selling to your own customers. I have heard several people say we need to bring in new fans with our group sales. This is true, but often your season ticket holders belong to churches, bussiness, civic organization etc that are great ways to get your group sales program started.

Please feel free to forward my contact information to whoever is making the inquiries and I would be happy to speak with them.
Hope this helps,

- Cliff Bailey, Indiana


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1. no quota, but bonus if they reach incremented hurdles

2. ????

3. That is it...selling...and implementing their sales (tents, tailgates, fulfillment).

4. Hire someone with ticket sales experience (minor league baseball!)

5. Call our person direct 775/784-6900 x 293 (Meredith Montoya)

6. Already an improvement over no one!

- Kurt Esser, Nevada