April 6, 2005
Question:
I am interested in what experiences others have had in staffing a ticket sales staff. Did you use a third party telemarketing staff, interns, grad students, volunteers...? How satisfied are you with the sales results?
Thank you,
Cliff Bailey, Indiana
Responses:
Hey Cliff,
We are in the process of hiring some unpaid interns who must do a sales internship to graduate to sell group tickets for us. I will let you know how it goes......
- Sara Fetzer, Purdue
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An issue to consider when going down this road is utilizing a third party for-profit company when dealing with National and State Do Not Call Lists. After much debate, we ended up using our internal call center because they had the ability to scrub prospect lists against the do not call lists.
- Bill Chaves, Baylor
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We are in a similar boat...you should contact tickets.com...they have some ideas that might be worth considering.
- Kurt Esser, Nevada
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I have heard some good things about http://www.universitytickets.com/.
We use our campus Central Ticket Office, and we are fairly satisfied.
- Ari Avishay, UCLA
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We are one of the few schools in the country that has a sales staff devoted to outbound calling for season and group tickets. I have been here at UM four years and we have been very happy with the results. It is a lot of work and requires a great deal of supervision.
My sales people are paid hourly, plus commissions on new sales in football, basketball and baseball.
- Dick Sapara, Miami (Florida)
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Cliff-
We have used both approaches (internal and third party). There are advantages and disadvantages to both. For the past three seasons we have used a student hired ticket staff, which is commission based. If you get highly motivated ticket sellers, this approach can work very well. They know the team very well and are interested in making some money. However, you need good lists to call off.
This year to boost sales, we experimented with a 3rd party. The 3rd party was also effective in our limited use of them. They had a very professional approach and were able to check our lists against national and state do not call lists.
Certainly the student approach is a lot cheaper and you will get results. For somebody trying it for the first time it is the route to go. I would contact your general counsel's office to make sure you are in line with Indiana state law. The bottom line is what type of lists will you be using. It is important to work closely with alumni and your ticket office to develop solid lists, and than it won't matter who does the calling.
- Craig Pintens, Marquette
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Clifford:
Unfortunately I cannot offer an work experience from UMass Boston as we do not sell admission tickets to our home games.
However, I suggest you contact professional sports organizations - Indy 500, Colts, Pacers, minor league baseball & ice hockey, etc. in your area for their insight. They all have ticket sales staff - see what success they have with what they do.
- Patrick T. Burns, Massachusetts-Boston
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We used a temp agency- Adecco that signed on as a sponsor cash and trade sponsor. We used 2 telemarketers through them.....The 2 telemarketers were making cold calls in our ticket office and marketing supervised the operation. They worked for 16 weeks, 8 hours a day and brought in 606 new season tickets and over $50,000 in revenue. Great results.
- Travis Comer, New Mexico
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