It is impossible to build a winning sales culture without first establishing a set of clear, overall organizational principles, said panelists at the SBJ/SBD Ticketing Summit. Lightning COO Steve Griggs outlined the hockey team's overarching rebuilding process both on and off the ice, a process that ultimately left it better prepared to boost season-ticket sales from fewer than 4,000 full-season equivalents to more than 10,000. "Without having those core principles of what your organization stands for, you don't have anything to sell," Griggs said. "We had to change everything we do, and then sales resulted from there." NBA VP/Team Ticket Sales & Team Marketing Operations Murray Cohn outlined his five core traits of a successful ticket salesman: positivity; a pursuit of greatness that believes good is the enemy of great; honesty and integrity; a strong work ethic; and teachability.
QUICK HITS:
- Panel moderator Bill Sutton, Founding Dir of the Univ. of South Florida Sport & Entertainment MBA/MS program, said three reliable backgrounds of great ticket sellers are bartenders, female soccer players and fraternity rush chairmen. With regard to the latter, Sutton referenced one of the most famous fictional fraternity rush chairmen, Eric Stratton from "Animal House."
- MSG Sports VP/Ticket Sales & Service Drew Cloud, on the need for employee recognition within a sales team: "Our salesmen deal with a lot of rejection. Our best salesmen fail 93 percent of the time. In baseball, players go to the Hall of Fame if they fail seven times out of ten. But our close rate is 2, 3, 4, 5 percent. So recognition is very important, and it's critical we create a culture where we're always rooting for each other."
Read the
event blog for more from Miami.
