Off-Season Selling - Pt. 2
All right. You've decided the 2020 off-season is going to be your chance to launch yourself past others on the sales board. Now how, specifically, do you go about doing that? Great question! Here are some tactical ways to make this off-season your best off-season.
Ramp Up Activity: Let's get the 'negative' one out of the way first. I put 'negative' in quotes because you should enjoy interacting with our fans. But since we're mostly out of the news, you need to do more to drum up interest. More calls. More emails. More connections and posts on social media. More text messages. More networking events. You have the time without any games on the schedule, replace that game time with activity time. If it's harder to sell, you have to increase your chances to sell.
Your Own Database: Across the course of the season you made phone calls, met people at games, met people at other events, etc. Look back through all your notes and records and find all the people who said 'no' or 'not now' to you...and turn them into a database. Send emails and messages to that database throughout the off-season. Curate and create your own content for it. You may get some 'unsubscribe's'...but if they had a good experience dealing with you, you'll also catch some people when it's finally the right time for them, too.
STADIUM TOURS!: We tend to call a lot of individual game buyers or group leaders we're trying to get back in the off-season. But if we only have season tickets to sell, have no schedule, and/or the season's so far away we have to squint to see it, we have a really high bar that we need to sell to. But inviting someone to our empty, awesome, stadiums and arenas? When no one else gets access to it? That's special. That's unique. That's a gift to them. And we know that we have a high close rate once they're here...so we are lowering the bar on our ask, and raising the percent to close. That's a great combo.
3-Dimensional Sales Process: When we use telephone or generic emails we make an emotional product boring in general. When we do it over the off-season? Man that does not excite people. So use more pictures. Make more videos. Include them in social media. Include them in your emails. Raise the excitement level of your voice on every phone message and conversation. The more we can raise the sales process off informational to 3-dimensional...the more people will engage and buy. Also, it's way more fun for you to sell, to.
More action. More excitement. More face-to-face. More strategic. Each of those is critical to sell at a time of year when most salespeople will just punt until it's easier to sell. Take pride that you are raising your game. See that opportunity. Have fun with it...and just go for it. You're always going to get more 'no's' in the off-season...but that shouldn't stop you from being excited to get more 'yes''. Make this off-season your best one yet.