All sales and marketing should revolve around and point to the customers’ problems. It should provide a solution to their problems and never talk about the company’s problems. In sports and entertainment, this is true no matter the customer type – ticket buyer, sponsor, donor, avid fan, casual fan, fence-sitter – you name it.

Everyone exchanges money for things they need and/or want and this is also true with sports and entertainment. People buy entertainment for a multitude of reasons, usually to solve a problem. The idea of defining a customer is interesting when you consider doing so through the three types of problems customers have – internal, external, philosophical.

Donald Miller’s Building a Storybrand first introduced me to the idea of these problems in his 2017 book and I’ve been using this framework to train sales and marketing staff ever since – and all my teams have seen huge growth in revenue and attendance when they’ve applied the framework clearly and consistently. It does take a little bit of work to change the way most entertainment professionals think – but once they do – they become unstoppable and it’s amazing to see how customers respond in real time to this different way of “selling” sport and entertainment products. And even more fulfilling to see your teammates grow and see the fruit of their labor come to life.

My teams have had huge success in selling tickets and ticket packages, add-on items to ticket orders such as seat cushions or concessions vouchers and merchandise items and packages. Donation and giving campaigns have even succeeded when using this framework. It works for small inner city university basketball and it works for large stadium football. It even works for concerts, theatre, music and other performing arts. The hardest part is figuring out what problems your product solves and changing your way of thinking to make everything about the customer. This is essentially practicing empathy, a skill that doesn’t necessarily come natural to some people. We’ll dive into that more soon.

I’ll be reviewing and explaining the Storybrand framework in future posts and encourage you to buy the book if haven’t read or heard of it yet. It’s a game-changer when applied directly and consistently. Go Forth!