Choose Your Own Adventure Sales
As a youngster I was in a 'Choose Your Own Adventure Book Club'. Even though I clearly did not write any of those books, I thoroughly enjoyed the idea that I was taking ownership over my own journey. If you couldn't tell, I owned a lot of these books.
In ticket sales, I find that the majority of sales people spend a lot of time just passing along information. They get on the call, ask a few questions, and then tell the potential all the information about all the different ticket packages they have. Even though that works from time to time...the internet can handle those responsibilities even better than you can. So where do these two things collide? What if, in ticket sales, we allowed our clients to build the experience they wanted...and then sold them the ticket package that fits that best? This reverse engineering would allow us to do a few important things:
Show the client that we are there for them by being more present in the questioning process
Allow the client to take full ownership of their decision themselves without us having to oversell...which we often do
Establish ourselves as the expert when we provide the link to the experience they made with the ticket package that fits them best
Make us more likely to make the sale because they are buying something they created
Hold on to our benefits to use them as objection handlers
So how does this work?
Don't talk product until you feel confident you can make a recommendation
Be a ticket product knowledge ninja...know your product forward and backward so you can make an informed recommendation based on what they say
Ask follow up questions to basic questions to get as much information as possible about their experience at your games and who they would want to bring
Educate them on new people they can bring. They came with their dad? Great, what other friends would want to go? Who from their office would they want to take? What other groups (bowling, knitting, etc.) are they a part of?
Allowing clients to build their own experience is a tactic that progressive sales teams outside of sports are doing...I'm confident that those that bring that attitude in sports will have tremendous success. Who's going to #getafterit?