Stop Sales Social Distancing

It is critical for us to be 'social distancing' as a society to ensure the spread of the coronavirus ends. But, when everything gets back to normal, it's critical that we stop sales social distancing.

What do I mean? There's just not enough face-to-face interaction in #sportsbiz ticket sales. Some teams and reps do a very good job of this...most don't. Why is it so important? More than anything else...math.

#SportsBiz lead lists close normally at about 1-3%. Meaning if a rep makes 100 calls in a day, they can reasonably assume they'll make 1-3 sales. And most reps don't make 100 calls a day. Anything electronic closes at just north of 0%. People just aren't giving their credit card in an email...much less a Twitter DM.

Face-to-face interactions? Online information (here and here and here), and over 15 years of selling on my end, would peg that close rate at 33-40%.

So, for a #sportsbiz sales rep, we are anywhere from 10x-40x more likely to close in person than on the phone...but infinitely more likely on both than anything electronic. The catch is that face-to-face meetings are BY FAR the most time consuming...and you can't just create a face-to-face meeting out of thin air.

So what should a rep be doing? Taking every phone call and email and every social media post and every contact made at our games or a networking event and pushing them to face-to-face meetings. Doing this will certainly see you run into some phone sales along the way, too.

Make activity purposeful activity. Calling, or any interaction, attacked with the purpose of a face-to-face meeting will have a higher close rate because we aren't asking for money...in fact, in many cases, we are asking sports fans to come to an empty pro or collegiate sports stadium. That's pretty awesome for a fan. And we know that the more face-to-face meetings we have, the more closes we'll make.

Block time on your schedule each week for face-to-face meetings. Make yourself available mornings, nights, weekends, and before games. Take advantage of your team's sales events. Go to networking events. Get leads at the gym or at a restaurant. Go get coffee with someone who says 'maybe'. The math says it's just worth it.