Rechercher dans ce blog

Friday, September 25, 2020

How To Sell Tickets After Covid-19: Forget Everything You Once Knew. - Forbes

forget.indah.link

It is very lonely when your beliefs are the opposite of everyone else. I know this well. When the Covid-19 pandemic shut down live entertainment in mid-March of this year, everyone believed we would resume by Summer or at the latest in Fall when the NFL returned. Well, almost everyone. Two of us thought otherwise. 

Dave Wakeman and me, both consultants to live entertainment companies, knew live entertainment just hit a wall. Like the Maytag repairman, we stood lonely among a sea of ticket sellers who were emphatic this Covid-19 pause was temporary. It is not. Now, Dave is about to release a whole series of lessons about how to succeed selling tickets in the new post-pandemic world. He believes we must scrap the old playbook, and I agree with him.

Dave is a well-known as a marketer, host of the Business of Fun podcast and someone I find to always be in front of changes occurring in the ways of selling tickets for sports, theater and music. So, when he told me he saw rapidly dropping interest from fans in attending sporting events it caught my attention. It is sporting events which most relies on the old school model of a sales room in which newly hired salespeople work the prospect list to try and get tickets sold. That was failing many teams before the pandemic. Demand will not rebound fast enough for that system to be enticing in the future. My thought has always been that ticket sales have to pivot to serve the customer better rather than making the customer feel lucky to have gotten a seat. Dave agrees.

Recommended For You

Dave created The Seat Selling Sprint to help the live entertainment and sports industry find its way as ticket sales prepare to restart, likely in time for holiday gifts. His sprint is a three-week program starting October 28th providing about 3 hours of interactive instruction weekly.  Event promoters and teams really need to bring back fans if they want any of the live entertainment segments to return successfully. I am hopeful that some fresh thinking can jump start that process. I don’t know of any industry which can withstand 18 months of zero revenue. At least with tickets you can sell the tickets today for events in the future. Absent that, we are going to see an awful lot of closed clubs, withered venues and bankrupt entities. Anyone remember how fast the XFL burned through $200 million before it sold to The Rock for $15 million just ahead of a bankruptcy auction?  

This is not Monday morning quarterbacking. Here is a published record of the predictions made by both Dave and me, below is the chronology of some of our early predictions about the effect of the Coronavirus shutdown on live entertainment:

Dave publishes Talking Tickets a weekly newsletter which was already on point by late March:

Wakeman Consulting GroupTalking Tickets: 27 March 2020--Take Care Of Yourself! Twitch! TV Money! Marketing and More! | Wakeman Consulting Group

I had already published a piece on Medium and in industry trade press the week prior:

MediumSay What? Coronavirus Armageddon 2020.

In that piece I commented on Elton John’s announcement that his tour dates from March 26 – May 2, 2020 would be postponed to 2021 while the rest of the 2020 scheduled dates would be played as scheduled. I said: Elton’s shows are not going to restart for so many reasons including his age, risk of Coronavirus and that no insurer would bind coverage. This morning Elton announced his new tour dates are pushed out until 2022.

By the end of April, I was already on record that all live events planned for 2020 were going to be a write off:

MediumDigging Out

Dave then published another prescient newsletter in June going through the effect of the pandemic on future sales for sports:

Wakeman Consulting GroupTalking Tickets 12 June 2020--AFL! MLB! Revenue! And, More! | Wakeman Consulting Group

These articles discussed the idea the Summer was gone, and the Fall was suspect. It was falling on deaf ears. No one was yet prepared to write off 2020. Those truly on the inside are now looking at the genuine prospect 2021 is also a goner. Likely, 2021 will be the year for soft experiments on how to maintain social distance and still provide an experience fans wish to attend. There is no louder alarm bell ringing than the inability of the NFL to sell out even 20% of a stadium’s capacity to a football game. For live event ticket sales, Covid-19 changed the rules changed instantly. The lesson is clear. Adapt or perish.

Last week Dave and I caught up to talk about how we see the future, and we are both still aligned. Promoters, Teams, and Leagues who continue to sell tickets as they did before the pandemic are not going to do well. Expectations have changed, economics have changed, and in a stunning twist, interest in live sports has fallen dramatically. 

These next six months are going to be brutal in the world of live entertainment. Absent a quick and impressive infusion of government cash, we are about to see 20% or more of the industry run out of cash. Venues have been closed since mid-March. The only action in ticketed events has been refunds. Consumers are rejecting the idea of going to socially distanced sporting events. Drive-in movie theater events were a Summer diversion but now Fall has arrived. Broadway is unlikely to restart before Fall of next year, and just this week the Detroit Auto Show postponed from Spring 2021 to Fall 2021. 

There is an entire generation of planners and salespeople in ticketing who have never seen such a sharp and persistent downturn. My fundamental life philosophy is that you learn little from success, but much from adversity. I have also come around to the idea that people with more experience may have ideas worth considering.  It has been lonely living at the edge of ‘ticketing won’t come back like it was’, but there is so much to learn about what will come next. I’ve been reading and following everyone I can find who has an original thought and it’s amazing both what I’ve been able to learn and what I now remember which I had been able to forget during the great ticket sales boom.

Planning is the key to success. Planning requires information. Once you decide that the old way is no longer valid, it becomes your responsibility to figure out the new way. Otherwise, you will be exactly like Blackberry after the introduction of the iPhone. Too little, too late and as a result too irrelevant.

The Link Lonk


September 25, 2020 at 09:47PM
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericfuller/2020/09/25/how-to-sell-tickets-after-covid-19-forget-everything-you-once-knew/

How To Sell Tickets After Covid-19: Forget Everything You Once Knew. - Forbes

https://news.google.com/search?q=forget&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en

1 comment:

  1. All information you included on your blog that's really commendable. All things are very useful. I hope you keep sharing your knowledgeable information with all of us. sell concert tickets instantly

    ReplyDelete

Featured Post

Forget WKHS, Tap These 3 Non-Meme Stocks to Play the EV Boom - Yahoo Finance

forget.indah.link Has the ongoing social-media frenzy gained precedence over fundamental strength of a company in deciding its fate? Well,...

Popular Posts