Assignment

You absolutely must start early on this assignment! You cannot expect to make one call and get an interview right away! Use the initial phone call or email to set up a time to spend a little more time asking questions. You might even ask a question or two in an email and ask for time to get a few more questions answered for a paper. Be respectful, patient, prepared, and thankful. In the spring semester, a few students were offered internships out of the interviews so take this seriously - you never know how this could help you build your career and network.

4 pages, single-spacedsummary/reaction paper from your interviews with works cited that addresses date and type of interview (email, phone, in-person, etc).

You will seek out two brief interviews with sports sales professionals across the country. The goal of this assignment is two-fold: 1) learn to communicate effectively with professionals in your industry and 2) a chance to learn how others in the world of sports sales explain and define their work. This will shed light on their personal sales philosophy that will allow you to compare with The Ultimate Toolkit philosophies. This will ultimately help you shape your own personal sales philosophy.

For this project, you will choose one Ultimate Toolkit client and one that is not an Ultimate Toolkit customer to compare and contrast different sales philosophies. Reaching out to sales professionals is not to be taken lightly as each of the Toolkit clients is like a client of ours that we hope will be interested in hiring UI SRM students. You are representing our program and future job opportunities for you and others in the program are at stake. A current list of Ultimate Toolkit customers can be found on ICON and key content to include is on page 2 of this document.

Include the following topics in your paper:

· Educational and career path of each individual interviewed

· Sales philosophies of these two sales professionals.

· Similarities between the two interviews

· Differences between the two interviews

· Ultimate Toolkit Principles you heard mentioned during the interviews (from which org?)

· Information that conflicted with Ultimate Toolkit Principles

· Ongoing (not just first week of work) Training that these organizations do

· Sellout emphasis

· Type of menu sold from (full-menu?)

· Percent of season tickets per arena/stadium capacity

· Percent of season tickets per arena/stadium capacity sold before season starts

· Season ticket renewal rate they strive for - how do they go about accomplishing this?

· Promotions used by the organization

· Types of games promotions are used on

· Discounting used by these organizations - when and why?

· Traits and characteristics of successful sales professionals

· What interviewees job are like on a day to day basis

· How do the organizationscollect and nurture leads?

· Advice when it comes to working your way into the industry?

· Most surprising finding in your interviews.