Bill Sutton recently retired after a long career educating students at the University of Central Florida and the University of South Florida in ticket and corporate sales.Courtesy of Bill Sutton
The sports and entertainment consulting firm formed by ranking executives from the San Francisco 49ers, Harris Blitzer Sports and Entertainment, Ticketmaster and Oak View Group will add a career development arm that will offer training across all levels of the sports business.
Elevate Sports Ventures — a partnership between 49ers President Al Guido, HBSE President Scott O’Neil, Ticketmaster President Jared Smith and Oak View Group CEO Tim Leiweke — will launch Elevate Academy, with plans to offer introductory seminars, mid-career training and online sales education.
Recently retired sports marketing professor Bill Sutton will serve as “dean” of Elevate Academy. Sutton, who straddled the line between industry and academia through 35 years as a professor, master’s program administrator and consultant, retired as founding director of the sports business graduate program at the University of South Florida in June.
“Dean is the right role for me, because it keeps it in the educational context,” Sutton said. “That’s where I want to be. I want to make sure I’m delivering value and helping people like I’ve always done. If I didn’t think it would be that, I wouldn’t do this.”
The first Elevate Academy event, scheduled for Sept. 26-27 at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, will be a two-day overview geared toward introducing college students and prospective career changers to the sectors and roles of the sports business and explaining paths into the industry. Priced at $299, it will include a career-orientation breakfast with Buffy Filippell, founder and president of search and placement firm TeamWork Consulting.
Future events and training seminars will focus on specific areas of the business, such as corporate sales.
“We know that there’s a need to develop people that could be corporate sellers,” said Sutton, who trained students in both ticket sales and corporate sales while at USF and the University of Central Florida. “When you’re selling tickets, you’re in a smile-and-dial mode and or maybe now smile-and-text. You make a sale and you get to go ring a bell. Corporate sales are not that way. It may take six or nine months to get a deal. There’s been no real mechanism for developing people to do that.”
While seminars and training sessions will be conducted live, Sutton said Elevate also plans an online sports sales course that can be delivered to universities. Taught by sports sales executives, the course would be priced similarly to what a school would pay an adjunct to teach a class on campus.
“If you want to have a sales course, you should have somebody that has sold teach the course,” Sutton said. “Learn from a seller, rather than looking at it just in an academic way. There’s value to be had there.”
