I’ve covered a lot of ground on the need for better marketing and smarter selling and improved branding in sports and entertainment business lately.
But I have failed to really cover the likely starting point for a lot of these challenges: hiring.
Sports seems to have an especially high turnover rate and it isn’t unusual for people to jump from job to job every 2 years or so, results be damned.
This presents a problem on several levels:
- While getting new blood into an organization is essential, high turnover in the sales team leads to an unnecessary learning curve, lower sales, and, likely leads to many situations where the account turnover is higher than necessary due to the disjointed nature of the relationship between organization and buyer.
- When turnover is high it typically breeds an adherence to and a reliance on metrics that are expedient in the short term, but do nothing to set the organization up for long term success or stability. In other words, measuring quantity over quality.
- Institutional knowledge is lost. This leads to an organization that feels constantly in flux on the business side.
The thing is that in the short term this challenge is likely to only get worse because of many of the headwinds that organizations are dealing with currently:
- Lower real attendance
- Lower TV ratings
- Revenues that are flat or declining
- Attention reduced for most, if not all, sports at all levels
Why is it that the challenge will persist?
Likely due to the nature of hiring patterns and the lack of infusions of new blood and ideas at many levels of many organizations.
This lack of hiring diversity only leads to “me too” ideas like:
- This rampant embrace of “subscription” programs that may sound great in theory, but which act only as destructive discounts that destroy product value and harm the very products and items we say we are trying to protect like season tickets.
- The belief that winning will cure anything when even teams that have historically done very well on the field haven’t seen appreciable boosts in attendance.
- An overwhelming embrace of inefficient business models when what is called for is innovation like in the case of having call volume be the most overwhelmingly important sales metric. Or, having impressions or likes or something like that be the most important marketing metric. Or, discounting the idea of the value of the brand.
So what are we to do?
Here’s a few ideas that we can do to make sure that hiring practices improve and that the skills that are going to set us up for future success are encouraged.
Measure for the outcomes and not the activities:
As a process consultant, I like to work from the end back. That means I need to know the destination before I can choose a road.
In too many organizations, inside sports and out, the road taken is more important than the destination. Or, at least, just as important.
Why?
Several reasons seem to pop up in conversations I have:
- That’s the way a person in leadership may have learned.
- If they are doing things the way that others in the industry are doing them, how can they be wrong?
- Fear that if they are wrong, they will be ridiculed or punished.
But the thing is we are all measured on the results that we produce.
And, in sports business, we need to sit down and revisit many of our metrics.
For sales people, let’s think about swapping out call volume for conversations.
For marketers, let’s think about swapping out fuzzy metrics like “likes” or “followers” and start measuring the outcomes by leads, revenue, or signups.
For the brand, that’s fuzzy, which I don’t like, but maybe you can do before and after surveying of the way that people feel about your team, your organization, and your brand. Or, you can measure the strength of the brand through conversations you have with fans, customers, and the community to see how it evolves over time.
Whatever the case, to improve hiring decisions it is much more effective to start thinking in terms of the outcomes that need to be produced and not the activities that someone might need to take.
Steal, beautifully, from outside of the industry:
This means talent, but also ideas.
One of the real challenges in a lot of industries is that you start out on the path of being an accountant and you are always an accountant in an accounting firm.
So, if you aren’t careful, every challenge is come at from the same POV.
That’s the same pattern that has evolved over the years in sports.
You start out interning in a minor league hockey town, you are always working in a minor league hockey town.
You start out in a major market, you end up in a major market.
But that really limits your thinking.
Think about this, my own path started out by interning and doing really low level jobs for teams in Miami and Seattle. We are talking about lower than interning in the sales office. But while I was doing these jobs, I was also helping marketing and open nightclubs, restaurants, and bars in several markets.
When I moved on in fundraising and events for a museum and found myself back in tickets, working in the secondary market in NYC.
Through all of these moves, I learned a lot about customer service, marketing, selling, and branding that I’ve been able to apply to different clients in different areas.
That’s just me.
Think about what we could add to the industry if we stole some of the sales stack ideas and techniques from IT sales.
Or, what would we be able to accomplish if we did more direct marketing with really compelling CTAs that measured our immediate results?
The thing is we could accomplish a lot if we practiced rapid experimentation of ideas and placed more bets on different ideas and people.
I mean with ratings tumbling what could someone like Andy Cohen do to improve the storytelling that surrounds many of the games our fans watch?
With the challenge of meeting advertiser demands and consumer demands to cut down the breaks in action during NFL games, what could someone that works on Premier League telecasts in the UK tell us about how they maximize revenue while making sure it doesn’t cut down on the action?
The list goes on and on.
The point being that we have to find a way to embrace diverse ideas and people to ensure that we are constantly renewing.
Be willing to revisit your entire compensation and recruiting practices:
To make sure you are getting your hiring right, you are likely going to need to rethink how you do business from the bottom up.
If you want to recruit and keep the best talent you are going to need to do a few things:
- Offer them a work environment that is appealing to top talent.
- Offer pay that is competitive with other industries.
- Train and provide a path forward for your employees.
Much of this comes down to the basics of human interaction like respect.
Further, to make sure these ideas are followed through on:
- Top performers are going to want to be around other top performers and they are going to be a lot more focused on the types of work they can do and the opportunities to grow than they are about some foosball tables or bounce houses.
- Pay, while not always the most important thing, can be a clear differentiator between where talent goes and doesn’t go. And, when you are dealing with multi-million or billion dollar organizations, don’t cheap out.
- Training pays. But you don’t want to get caught in the trap of going through the same old 4-5 sales trainers, consultants, and thinkers. You need to keep your training fresh. Bring in people that are used to normally working in banking or hospitality to talk about upselling. Bring in people that have sold political campaigns to talk about selling games.
The key point here is that you have to, again, begin by asking yourself what the end results you are trying to achieve are.
Then design your whole organization in accordance with achieving those goals.
This means that the goals are going to drive your hiring and not your preconceived notions.
To me, its just like shopping your business. When you go in as a customer, you often are disturbed by what you find. Because it is pretty easy to think that things are going well or aren’t that big of a deal, but when you step into the role of a customer, things change drastically.
Do that same thing with hiring and I am sure you will be amazed at what you find.
BTW, I write a Sunday newsletter focused on value. If you’d like it, send me an email dave @ davewakeman.com and I will get you on the list.