■ Name an area where the PGA Tour excels in helping tournaments:
— New initiative by the tour to objectively analyze sales efforts and action steps for improvement.
— Player involvement. Their program that allows us to have players visit parties, tents, etc., is valuable.
— TV negotiations.
— Advertising and brand awareness.
— Golf course preparation and rules administration on-site.
— Providing sponsorship dollars from their official marketing partner relationships.
— Scoring, stats, media, rules, running the competition of the tournament.
— Getting home addresses for players.
— Best practices and PGATour.com content.
— Securing title sponsors.
— Communicating what other tournaments are doing.
— Sales and promotional strategies, inventory development, and consultation on staffing and organizational structure.
— Financial benchmarking using similar market events.
— Prize money.
■ Name an area where the PGA Tour could improve:
— Getting players to play in every event over some reasonable period of time, like once every four years.
— Strength of field; player recruitment.
— Year-round communication.
— Market analysis that focuses on media and sales support.
— Continue to encourage players to be accessible to sponsors.
— Spreading marketing dollars from the official marketing partners among more events.
— Getting players to commit earlier.
— Purse increases are tapped out and meaningless; send new dollars to tournaments for operations, charity and title sponsor value.
— Sales resources at tournament level.
— Fully open sharing of tournament sales in all categories, like NBA’s TMBO.
— Smaller fields.
— Being honest and upfront on all or most changes about to take place that may or may not affect a player or tournament.
— Customized digital sponsor ROI material.
