Talking Tickets 11 June 2021: Pricing! The Champions League Final! The Boss! Foreign Secondary Markets! And, More!
Number 88
Hello!
How are y’all feeling this week?
I’m hyped, I’ve got tickets to see Foo Fighters in the concert to re-open concerts at the Garden for next Sunday. A few things I love all in one shot: NYC, MSG, concerts, and the Foo Fighters.
If you like the newsletter, do me a solid and share it with friends, colleagues, or folks that would enjoy or benefit from it. It is crazy that I have folks that read from as far away as New Zealand and Australia, Hong Kong, Paris, Bordeaux, South America, and more!
Check out the ‘Talking Tickets’ Slack Group as well. Lots of people in the group. Though most of the action seems to happen in my DMs.
Also, the 2021 nominations for the Thinkers’ 50 are open! I’m not saying you should nominate me, but I’m not saying you shouldn’t either!
If you are in sports business, I need a favor because I’m doing some research on the current ticket sales environment for sports teams. I’ll create a report out of it at the end and share it with the people that helped me out. It will take about 2 minutes.
To the tickets!
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Big Ideas:
Moving the Champions League Final two weeks before the match required flexibility and planning.
Technology boosted UEFA and SecuTix’s ability to deliver the event in an entirely different country due to the changing circumstances around COVID travel restrictions.
We should all have a Ph.D. in adaptability by now.
If the Spurs ever play in a big match again, sigh!
This is a cool story and I have been watching it for the last few weeks because I dig soccer even when the Spurs aren’t in the match.
I lead off the week with this story because it really highlights the need to embrace flexibility and the reality that the technologies we have available today can help us react quickly to circumstances that are likely to be fluid for the next year or so until the world has hit herd immunity from the coronavirus.
Three things I like in this case study:
The flexibility showed by UEFA in rapidly moving the Champions League Final due to the challenges of British fans getting to Istanbul.
The speed that the new event was created and sold with.
The use of technology to make things easier for the fans.
If you aren’t familiar with the Champions League Final, imagine the Super Bowl with a bigger global audience.
Years of planning go into each event, just like the Super Bowl, to make sure that a great experience can be created.
Obviously, the pandemic has created an environment where all of our best-laid plans are irrelevant. We’ve seen the NHL and NBA adapt with bubbles. We’ve seen the Premier League season go on without fans. We’ve seen the NFL have an almost normal season with fans in a lot of places.
But we didn’t see a championship game swapped out so quickly and so seamlessly until now.
The success of this shift comes down to:
Planning: Which played out by using lessons learned from previous events in Porto.
Decisiveness: This is on display in the way that previous ticket sales plans were scrapped for a simpler solution due to the compressed time frame.
Adaptability: You see this in the way that SecuTix moved fast to rebrand their app, tweak it to meet different needs in Porto, and roll it out so that fans that had tickets could be comfortable that they were getting authentic tickets.
For all of us, keep these factors in mind as we move into the next phase of the pandemic and the various ups and downs that we will have even if you are starting to see an endpoint like we are in the United States.
First, plan for contingencies.
Throughout the pandemic, we’ve gotten jammed up by always planning for the best-case scenario and then having the pandemic have a mind of its own, setting us back again.
It happens.
What shouldn’t happen is that you are caught flatfooted because you didn’t plan for how you were going to deal with a hiccup.
It doesn’t have to be perfect because a lot of times when you are confronted with a crazy situation like this, there may not be a playbook. But what you do need to have in place are the action steps that you can and should take immediately when dealing with a situation outside of the norm. So that you don’t just spin your wheels and then fall into panic mode.
In the case of UEFA and SecuTix, they had plans in place from previous situations where they needed to pull an event together quickly and with restrictions.
Second, be decisive.
I’ve witnessed so many people and businesses struggle due to their inability to just act.
Be decisive and take action.
The biggest issue that seems to catch people off guard in these instances is that they feel like they have to have the perfect answer or action.
You don’t.
In the case study above, we saw that the typical ticket sales plans had to be discarded due to a compressed timeframe.
But because they had to sell the tickets, the tickets went on sale and folks bought them.
I’m sure we’ve all been in a situation like that where we just had to throw caution to the wind a bit and take action. I’ve been there a few times over the year actually.
I don’t want to sound like Tony Robbins here or anything, but if you take decisive action built on even the roughest sketch of a plan, solutions start to open up for you. They may be different than you thought, but you figure stuff out.
“An object in motion stays in motion,” to quote science!
Finally, be adaptable.
If we all haven’t gotten doctorate-level education in flexibility and adaptability at this point it is because we aren’t really trying.
Think about how nuts this whole case study is from the point of view of taking the biggest championship match in the world and picking it up and moving it with two weeks until the game.
That’s crazy!
But it had to be done.
This is an example we might all need moving forward. We may want things to be one way or act another, but that might be out of the realm of reality. So you have to deal with the situation the way it is and not the way you want it to be.
2. The Boss returns to Broadway!
Big Ideas:
The Boss probably doesn’t need our help selling anything. The rest of us need to come up with a strategy.
Resources will be tight. So we have to plan accordingly.
Know that the shape of the market has probably changed in some ways, don’t guess at this, follow the research and the data.
BRUCE!
I’ll have to make my way to the City to see this!
This is an amazing thing for the return of Broadway and New York City!
You combine this with the return of concerts at the Garden on June 20th with Foo Fighters, the big concert in Central Park on August 21st, and all of the Broadway shows throwing open their doors and it is a great sign of life in NYC.
As with everything, we do have to keep an eye on a few things here:
Supply as tons of seats and events go on sale at once.
Corporate policies and personal comfort moving forward.
I’ve been doing a survey with sports business folks from around the world to prep for my speaking sessions in Las Vegas.
While there are signs of life and there are success stories, the overall story is one of things not going in a straight line for a number of reasons:
Reduced headcounts on sales and marketing staff.
The difficulty of finding the right decision-maker during the sales process.
Corporate policies that are more conservative than government restrictions.
I bring all of this up because I want all of us to never lose sight of the idea that reopening and recovery are different and recovery will need long term commitment to focusing on strategy, marketing, and sales consistently over the next few years. A few things to keep in mind so you are prepared to deal with them:
Objections:
There are always objections and in the before times, I’m guessing the majority of them for most of y’all were around price.
Why?
Telling a salesperson that something is “too expensive” is the easiest objection to throw out there when someone doesn’t want to make a decision or isn’t sure of the value.
Now we are going to see a lot of talk about “safety” and it’s not always a knee-jerk response, but one of the challenges everyone is going to need to deal with is figuring out how to help folks feel comfortable returning and understanding that the value is still present.
Doing more with less:
Again, the Boss sells himself.
But a lot of folks, even folks that are typically big draws, they are seeing that the demand they hoped would be there hasn’t materialized in the same way that they hoped it would.
Couple demand that has been slow to return with reduced resources in the form of staffing, advertising budgets, and time for sales, and you get a challenging sales environment.
This elevates the importance of strategy before tactics because each decision will need to have a bigger impact, if only because of a lack of resources.
Finding the right buyer:
A talk I used to give around strategy included a line about not spending too much time with folks that can only tell you “no”.
As we are still unsure about what the future of the office is really going to look like, we are going to struggle to know the right person to make the decisions or the person to sell to in the offices.
Some of the hype about the death of cities might be overblown. Time will tell.
But the key thing we do need to know is that we can’t expect that the same buying habits or purchase patterns will exist. We have to do our research.
Again, I’ve mentioned this before but a team I work with has seen their purchase habits change significantly since they’ve been able to bring back fans. Making the weekends easier to sell when previously weeknights were the hot ticket.
So keep these ideas in mind as you move forward, Bruce Springsteen probably doesn’t need to do anything differently.
The rest of us, probably want to make sure we don’t leave things to chance.
3. Tixel raises some money for a different kind of secondary market in Australia and beyond:
Big Ideas:
Tixel is an interesting case study on a few trends going on in tickets.
Control of the customer experience is going to take on a new relevance in the after times.
Life happens and our sales and marketing practices need to keep up.
Did you think you’d escape me talking about Australia today?
Wrong!
This story combines a lot of my favorite things:
Australia
Tickets
Secondary Market
(I’m seeing a pattern here: I like a lot of things! Who knew?!)
A lot of times folks ask me about the secondary market in other countries as a way to look for opportunities. Totally fine, but I also have to tell people that the resale market in other countries is different than in the United States.
There are a few reasons for that including:
Perception of the practice of ticket resale
Industry practices differ from country to country
Lack of awareness of the role that resale can play in certain markets
That’s not scratching the surface, but…
I’ve heard stories of ministers of federal agencies calling up ticket professionals in countries, getting ready to sic the police on resale sites because they didn’t understand resale.
I’ve heard it all at this point.
In looking at the Tixel story, I see a few lessons that are applicable to all of us:
Recognition that most events don’t sell out.
Understanding that for people life happens and their plans change.
A desire to control the experience the fan has.
Let me explain:
70% of shows don’t sell out:
I don’t have the handy statistic for the rest of the world, but I’m sure a few folks will share relevant statistics with me.
I do know that in the States, we have a pretty big empty seat problem in a lot of places. I’ve also had this observation about other markets as well.
This matters because if you aren’t selling out, you need to diagnose what the problem is:
The product?
The strategy?
The marketing?
Your position?
In working with a startup a few years ago, we did some market research and found out that the discovery of events was the biggest issue customers had with buying tickets to shows. They’d love to go to shows, events, games, whatever, but they often didn’t know about something until the event had passed. In fact, at the time we were doing this research, I found out I missed Tom Petty at the 9:30 Club…so it really hit home with me.
Having more tools that are effective in aiding event discovery is useful.
This gives room to organizations like Tixel and others to offer a solution for event discovery and demand building.
Life happens:
30% of people need to resell their tickets after purchase. This is likely a greater challenge once events start going on sale with longer lead times.
If you talk with the team at Booking Protect, one of the biggest drivers of refunds is the fact that work commitments get in the way. You know things like business travel, new schedules, or relocations. These same sort of issues drive a lot of people to resell their tickets.
For all of us, we’ve seen how easily life can get in the way over the last few months. So having a tool that offers up resale opportunities is just smart business, especially if you aren’t allowing exchanges and refunds.
Tixel is one solution, but you see all kinds of these solutions all over the world.
The big key is recognition that people make plans and God laughs…or however the saying goes.
The importance of controlling the customer experience:
One of the core attributes of the Tixel platform is the ability to cap resale prices at 10% of face value. Their conversation focuses on giving fans the tickets they want at the prices that the artists want to charge and that’s all well and good.
(The discussion on whether or not folks should be able to do with a ticket what they choose discussion is for another day.)
For today the conversation will look at the bigger focus on controlling the customer experience as much as possible. Or, giving the customer an experience that fits into your vision of what a good experience should look like.
In general, I’m all about the customer experience and recognizing that the number of touchpoints a fan goes through before buying a ticket is a lot longer than we realize and that the small stuff matters a lot more than we give it credit for.
Meaning things like how nice the bartender at the bar is even if they are slammed. Or, how quickly someone gets through security.
While this particular story is focused on the price limits of resale, the bigger thinking around this topic goes into how do you want folks to experience the purchase process, the service process, the in-venue experience, and beyond.
This idea is popping up in all sorts of conceivable ways from social distanced sections next to fully vaccinated sections in some venues, to only having fully vaccinated folks allowed like Foo Fighters, or only playing outdoor shows right now like Pearl Jam.
As I’ve laid out here before, the key with the marketing mix that y’all use to sell your events, make sure it fits into your strategy.
The big idea here is to keep an eye on the market dynamics and the wants, needs, and desires of your customers.
That simple and that difficult.
Big Ideas:
To win back the power of pricing for the marketing, you are going to have to get strategic, advocate for marketing’s power, and stop blathering on with buzzwords.
Sporadic discounting hurts you, but all discounting does. Research shows that when you discount, you open a door that can’t easily be closed. In other words, if you discount once, you are a discount brand!
The price you set is one of the biggest strategic decisions your organization can make.
I am my own guest on the podcast this week to discuss pricing.
Or, I record an audio version of my pricing presentation from the National Sports Forum.
One loss from the pandemic is my voice and my ability to talk for 45 minutes or so at a stretch.
I’ll also be hosting a panel at Ticket Summit all about the subject of pricing and how to use data to keep from competing in a race to the bottom.
Every time I go through this presentation, I come up with more things that need to be added or expanded upon, especially as we see more and more events go on sale.
I’ve spent a lot of time on pricing and I’m going to do a full on pricing Q&A (send me your questions) on the podcast stream in the next week or so, but I wanted to take a moment to use this space to address a couple of questions here because they are already relevant:
Does sporadic discounting over several years harm your brand and price integrity?
Short answer, yes.
The long answer is that mentally as soon as you open the discount door, you become a discount brand in your customer’s mind for anywhere from 7-10 years based on research conducted and shared in the book, Buy-ology, by Martin Lindstrom and others. That’s not to mention the fact that discounts harm your brand, steal your profits, and train customers that you don’t really trust the value you say you create.
How do you regain pricing power for marketing and sales?
This one happens in a lot of places for two reasons:
One, marketing has done a great job of undermining its own importance in a lot of places because the marketing team is talking all kinds of buzzword bingo stuff that they hear from the “gurus” and they’ve really started selling the job as only the communications bit.
This is one reason I advocate for properly trained marketers so often.
Two, many organizations don’t know how to conduct effective pricing research or marketing research. This makes setting a price difficult.
This is across the board in all industries, not just sports, theatre, and concerts.
To take back the power of pricing for the marketing and sales teams, you should look at taking three steps:
Get the language of the executive suite down. There is a famous 2012 study that pointed out that 80% of CEOs don’t trust their CMOs. I went out and did some research at the end of 2020 and I found that the CMO may have a bit more standing in the organization, but the marketing department is largely looked on with little favor when it comes to results. So talk about results, impact, and profit.
Be strategic. Price is a strategic decision based on your research, the goals you’ve set, and your position in the market. You need to be able to convey that to the decision makers in an informed and strategic manner saying, “This is what the research says. Based on this we set our strategy and goals at this level. Accordingly, for that reason here is the price we are setting.”
Advocate for the role of marketing as the place where you find profits for your business. The reality is that marketing is fun because that is where the money is. Marketing should be talking to customers, uncovering their wants and needs, and discovering new ways to deliver value to your customers. Which should lead to value. Tell that story.
5. Let’s close the week with a few links to some fun stuff:
Andrew Lloyd Weber is voicing a lot of people’s frustrations right now and he is determined to open on June 21: If you’ve never had a chance to visit all of his buildings in London, you should. He has a great portfolio of venues and events, he’s been leading the way in trying to be innovative with getting folks back to the theatre, and the threat of an extended lockdown is frustrating.
Everton wants to conquer America: Good on them for taking their shot. There is another article that I found as I was reading this week on Man City’s efforts. I’ll probably come back to the two of them next week to talk about branding because combined they really do tell a story about the full scope of marketing and properly marketing to different audiences.
Tom Truitt has built a really great virtual platform this year: This is really cool because the salon or gathering thing is something I’ve always wanted to do, but DC hasn’t really been a place to do that kind of thing.
I’ll knock out a few things I really dig here about what Tom is doing:
Connecting people. That’s the gist of what I try to do with this newsletter, the podcast, and the Slack Channel. So the way Tom has used Zoom is pretty great.
Looking at innovation. It can become pretty easy to do things the way they have always been done. So seeing Tom talk about new technologies, new ideas, and new approaches is awesome.
In my opinion, one of the best ways to come up with new ideas is to go beyond the normal path to parallel tracks and ways of thinking. Allow your mind to operate in the spaces and outside of the normal boundaries.
This is one of the cool things I’ve gained from having worked with non-profits, sports teams, venues, colleges, and more.
And, as a final note, one thing that I’ve found, like Tom, the more you give, the more you receive.
Thanks for being here! See y’all next week.
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Check out Linktree and get the stuff I’m working on right now like the podcast! And, make sure you get your Ticket Summit tickets!
Also, the new and improved DaveWakeman.com should be ready next week. I’m in the process of recreating my virtual home and it is almost ready.
Look at what Booking Protect is up to now. Uptake on refund protection has nearly doubled since tickets have started to go on sales again. That tells me that customers want the peace of mind that refund protection provides. Also, Simon Mabb and some of his colleagues are cycling 173 miles from coast to coast to raise money to support prostate cancer research in the UK. So check out Simon’s fundraising.
Activity Stream has launched its new email marketing tool, Activate! As we emerge from the pandemic, having a tool that can help you better use email and data to reach your market is going to be essential to help you cut through and reach the right people with the right message.
Have you had a chance to check out your NPS score yet? ‘Talking Tickets’ has a 67 and Eventellect has a 77. We both realize the value of market research and finding out how we can continue to add value for our customers. So get the worksheet we teamed up to create by sending me an email.