Are B2B Ticket Sales Dead?!
183: 14 April 2023
Hey!
Will I see you on Thursday at the FREE webinar: “Filling Your Seats NOW! 7 Ways to Ignite Ticket Sales!”?
I’ll be touching on topics like:
The difference between reactive data and proactive research.
How customers desire for “peace of mind” might show up in your sales and data.
The value equation: Price = Value.
The innovation loop and applying that to ticket sales.
If you can’t make it live, I’ll provide a recording to everyone that is registered. So share this and sign up!
From the premium seats at the renewed Baltimore Arena.
To the Tickets!
No. But it will definitely need to change.
The Big Idea: You can’t make assumptions about what your guest wants or needs from your venue now…you have to do the hard work of talking to your target market, doing some research, and being willing to rethink the entire premium environment.
Lessons from My Work: I’ve spent a lot of time in corporate hospitality and high net worth ticket sales.
I’ve also managed to find myself in the demographic that a lot of this stuff would be sold to.
So, I have lessons that I can share:
The organization’s opinion doesn’t matter. What you and your staff feel is “premium” is irrelevant. The only person’s opinion that matters is the customers and in many cases they are finding the offerings to be underwhelming.
“All-inclusive” is popular and if you dig in…you realize that the premium buyer is often broken into many different areas. “All-inclusive” doesn’t work for all premium guests. In fact, in several markets, I’ve found that the more people spend on the seats, the less they want the all-inclusive option.
The level of service has to be tiptop. You might be happy with the level of service at the Marriott. Your premium buyers are often staying at the Four Seasons. That’s a whole different level of service. TBF, there is a huge gulf in service between different premium brands like the Ritz Carlton and the Four Seasons.
You have to define what you mean by “premium”. You can’t have 10 different definitions. Or, worse, no definition, where no one really is quite sure what “premium” actually is.
Follow your numbers. You have to know what your market looks like and where your customers are coming from. You may have hit a point of saturation with one part of the market, but keep hitting your head against the wall because that’s where you think your sales “usually” come from.
“Everyone” is not doing the same thing. Just like “no one” is a BS excuse for not wanting to go to game.
Sum it Up: You have to know your numbers. You have to have a strategy. You have to throw out your assumptions.
Go Deeper: A webinar on 2 May at 11 AM Eastern time, “Changing Desires of Premium Buyers: 7 Ways to Rethink Your Premium Sales NOW!”
II. Being truly ‘customer-focused’ will help you create opportunities:
Make sure that your idea of “Customer Focused” isn’t just telling people what you think they want to hear.
Major Idea: Too often the idea of being focused on the customer equals, telling the customer what they should want or will get.
This costs folks opportunities.
How?
Not listening to customers, you don’t know what they really value about your events.
Making the purchase path hard costs you sales because people want their ticket purchase path to look more like buying on Amazon, Nike, or other e-commerce apps.
You will create one size fits none experiences for guests. Eliminating special experiences for business guests, families, or dates.
To-Do: Figure out if you are really being customer-focused or just paying lip service to the idea.
III. The BBC Singers provide us another opportunity to learn “You Aren’t the Customer”:
Your opinion of what is valuable doesn’t matter.
That’s the core of the idea: “You are not your customer.”
I’m picking on the BBC Singers here, but just look at the way that so much advertising of tickets is focused:
Paris Opera: There are 100 different ways that I can list right now for why someone would love to go to the Paris Opera. Unfortunately on the Opera’s landing page, we see not a single one. You better know your opera to want to buy from the Paris Opera.
The Angels have the most exciting player in baseball: You’d never know it from the pop-up box for premium seating.
“The Brooklyn Way”: That’s all the personality you can get from the Borough of Kings?! Brooklyn deserves better and if you get to the page and don’t know anything about playoff basketball, you are probably left clueless.
All of these examples point to the underlying marketing challenges of:
Marketing is just the communications department.
We “know” what the customer wants.
The people who don't get it are just wrong.
Here are a few better examples:
Starbucks: Look at the way the benefits are framed.
Sydney Opera House: 'Celebrate the Extraordinary’ is probably banal until you add the video. Then, it pops.
Juventus: If you are a neutral or don’t know what to expect from football, having a high energy landing video like this can definitely give you the impression that football is more than just watching a bunch of guys or girls kicking around a ball for 90 minutes.
These things matter.
What is the first impression you want to have?
How are you opening the door to new customers?
Go Deeper: More examples from many industries.
I also liked the Mavs splash page thanking fans.
La Liga and Barcelona are seeing the danger of building around one player or “winning”.
Give the podcast a listen.
La Liga’s viewership has gone down since Messi moved to Paris. Partly because the league gave too much power to Madrid and Barcelona at the cost of the league and long-term stability.
The other major leagues are combining to fight the Premier League’s dominance. That’s going to be tough to tackle right now, but a good place to begin with each of the leagues developing a position in the market that is about them like Italy used to be about defense and toughness. Be yourself.
Control what you can control. You can’t control the outcomes. You can control the experience. There was a brilliant example of this back in the days with the Florida Panthers. Their B2B landing page had testimonials that had people sharing what they’d achieved using their tickets like new business deals, new business opportunities, and more.
Go Deeper: Join the Premium Ticket webinar!
V. Links:
Celebrity Concierge service sues Goldman Sachs:
I made my reputation in tickets supporting High Net-Worth Individuals and celebrities, so I’m not a stranger to how lucrative it is.
The larger point is that playing both sides of the table is unethical.
But ethics has gone out the door in many cases.
Garrett Nolan breaks down Robert Smith’s argument on ticket fees:
Garrett lays out the entire argument in detail including the optics of having more a $20 ticket become a $42 ticket after fees.
The Dutch are going to fight resale:
I have to say that there is more stuff going on around tickets globally than I ever remember seeing.
Crazy.
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