You won’t hear me talk about sports much, in fact my Dad gives me a hard time because I don’t know anything about them, but I do think we can learn a thing or two from them. Recently, I was having lunch with a good friend who went from managing a Theater Box Office to managing a Ticket Sales for Baseball. She clearly is very happy where she is but had a little bit of a learning curve going from having to deal with an audience to dealing with fans among other name differences among the two. But I asked if she were to come back to theatre today what has she learned that she would bring back with her. She listed several things but I think the biggest one was about group sales.Instead of having groups come to them they go to the groups. They come up with special nights for groups. For instance “Ladies Night” where all the ladies can come to a game together. They have many of them and sell about 500 to 1,000 tickets for each event. They do mass emails to the people they need to target and create a webpage. Then they give a discount for buying into the group.
One event we do like that is “Young Professionals Night” where we invite local professionals to network and see a show. We target them through Facebook and email and get a fair turn out. What if we did the same for other groups. I could see us doing a “College Professor Night” or a “Drama Teacher Night.” Baseball doesn’t wait for large groups to approach them. They go out and approach and form there own large groups.
