Written by: Brian Barker 
Updated: 11/28/2023
This past weekend, I was reminded of a costly lesson I learned in 2016. It was the scenario we Event Marketers work so hard to avoid at games & concerts. The painstaking coordination with sales reps, the grave-detailed emails we create… but as the saying goes, “we can lead ’em to the water, but we can’t make ’em drink.”
It was 5:30am on a Sunday (just hours before the NFL game). I get a txt from a rep hosting a client “Brad” at the game. “Brad can’t make it. Didn’t use our hotel room last night either. Sorry,” he said.
I’m not sure who’s at-fault, or if fault was even warranted. It was costly though. Between the 1 suite ticket ($1,250) we secured for Brad and his 1-night hotel stay ($297), the company was out $1,500+.
And while some of you may think, “this is just the cost of doing business… stuff happens,” I say you’re just avoiding an opportunity to save the company money going-forward AND multiply a ticket’s value in a situation like this: Brad feels bad about skipping (CREDIT) AND “Customer #2” feels ecstatic for the last-minute invite (DOUBLE-CREDIT).
Using this situation as a career catalyst, I eventually found myself developing an entire platform NextLevelFan.com to create all kinds of opportunities for companies with club & suite ticket programs.
In my story above, wouldn’t it have been ideal to know that Brad couldn’t go? Since our sales rep had no clue either, it wasn’t necessarily his fault.
So we tackled the process instead of blamed the people involved. Here’s a couple of ways we did:
[Infographic] How CEOs get more from their event budget
Think about all the people involved in your club & suite ticket program. Before you’ve attended the first game, there’s already tons of “expense” in the brain trust involved in planning, executing & reporting. It’s not uncommon for the following people to have a significant hand in the program:
(And you know, when the CEO’s involved, there’s an open-door policy to any cost cutting ideas.)
The easy answers are: (1) we hire someone to run this, or (2) we give this responsibility to someone in Adminstration or Marketing… AKA the dumping ground for everything clerical & “in-between.”
However, that’s not necessary. We designed NextLevelFan with this cost cutting idea in-mind; we built a tool.
It’s purpose is to simplify all the processes into 1 single dashboard, from attendee nominations to communications and ticket transfers to reports/analytics.
With NextLevelFan, the program should still have all the same people involved. We just make it easier to stay organized and scale the number of events you can manage simultaneously.
Customers like AFS Logistics, which has multiple luxury suites in major US stadiums, have seen the results of 70+% reduced admin time since 2019. Read our case study below:
After every event, it’s natural to move-on to the next one, which may be the following day for MLB or NBA club & suite ticket holders.
But the longer event recaps are left to pile-up like dirty dishes in the sink, the more-likely you are to create problems like excessive costs (i.e. foul odors filling the kitchen, the den and then the entire house).
Again, this was my experience prior to launching NextLevelFan. One of the most significant cost cutting ideas our development team had was to track vital metrics after every event.
We do this with Event by Event and Year-over-Year comparisons of metrics like:
It really is impossible to catch costly patterns without a system in-place. It only takes a few games of excessive F&B receipts, a series of unused tickets or low customer revenue turn-out to make your boss question your abilities to do your job (which may be one of many “jobs” you have in the company).
Assessing your current situation is simple. We can help.
Click here to schedule a 15-minute NextLevelFan.com demo.
