Adam O’Connell has the duality of professional and collegiate experience in ticket sales, which means he can see past the rhetoric, discussing what works and what doesn’t when selling sports tickets. O’Connell talks about his tenure with the Fresno Grizzlies minor league baseball team and the Fresno Falcons junior hockey league team, then expands to what Akron is currently doing to ensure that each fan receives the best customer service in the Ohio area.
Don’t go calling Mike Briercliffe an expert, because he doesn’t believe there is one in the world of social media. Briercliffe does have advanced knowledge on how to build a cohesive social media strategy, going from the fast lanes of the Twitter down to the medium slow lanes of Facebook & LinkedIn. Briercliffe shares his social media philosophies on what works, what doesn’t in terms of building a social media fanbase, as well as his love for the Liverpool Premier League club. Twitter: @mikejulietbravo
Part 2 of UK Sponsorship Discussions focuses on sports teams’ branding efforts in a changing world of revenues with Two Circles’ Matt Rogan. The discussion centers around some of the ways that a team can brand themselves differently from their competition, and then looks at the UK relegation system compared to the US sports team’s amateur draft and salary cap. An interesting conversation on how to work with a brand that may be 200 years old and what to do when fans affect the brand more than the brand affects the fans. Twitter: @MattRoganSport
Located in Indiana, Juan Garcia shares some of the misconceptions that not only the public, but even the players have about agents. This is an eye-opening account as to what players expect from their representatives, especially when it comes to the player’s personal matters. Garcia talks about the collective bargaining agreement, the NBADL and whether being located in Indiana instead of Chicago, New York or Los Angeles is a hindrance to his agency’s growth. Twitter: @JuanAmg40
Part 1 of UK Sponsorship Discussions on sports sponsorship branding begins with Activate’s Jeremy Edwards, who shares some of the details on how effective branding works for the sports team’s sponsor. Edwards discusses ROI and a good brand message which creates conversation for the team and sponsor. Typically, the focus on branding is what the team can achieve to the fan, but rarely does it go indepth into the customer’s reaction to a businesses’ sponsorship of their team. The conversation also touches on how a team’s roster has now become their own media channels through social media. Twitter: @Activative
A former Arena League2 General Manager, Butch Bellah now spends his days developing and training sports sales staffs across the country. Bellah talks in terms of the sports sales person being a craftsman, ensuring that each understands that they should take pride in what they do. Bellah shares his philosophy on starting the work week off right while the competition is struggling, especially on Monday mornings and Friday afternoons, and how make sure that each sales call ends with progress toward a sale, not toward a no. Twitter: @SalesPowerTips
FC Dallas is one of the examples of why Major League Soccer is starting to take hold in the USA. VP of Ticket Sales Kris Katseanes talks about how forward-thinking the FC Dallas ownership group was in placing the team in the city of Frisco, led by the late-Lamar Hunt. Katseanes talks about what he looks for in staff and the target market for the FC Dallas franchise.
Peak Sports Management is one of the newest corporate sponsorship third party groups servicing collegiate properties. Peak President Ryan Holloway discusses the tricky world of deliverables in a college sports world conditioned to believe in signage, magic wand RFPs and philanthropy masking as sponsorship. Holloway talks about Central Arkansas, Peak’s Sports Management’s flagship property, which has garnered a lot of attention nationally from a striped field concept. Twitter: @PeakSportsMGMT
Compliance is tricky when it comes to being one of the top schools in the nation, in the Southeastern Conference. Brad Barnes talks about compliance in terms of rules education, how examine both a rule and judgment call, and some of the best practices to working with coaches and administrators in order to ensure that violations are not a norm for a department. Barnes talks about why the NCAA has made some of the rules regarding electronic communication, especially the ban against hashtags on the football field. Twitter: @TAMUCompliance
When it comes to organizational systems and people management, Sean O’Neil wrote the book on the subject. O’Neil talks about some of the misconceptions about why people do the things they do, whether a management style should favor process over people, and how to engage each type of person working within a management structure. Twitter: @BareKnuckleMgmt