Selling Premium Seating in Today’s Sport Marketplace, pp. 9-19

Heather J. Lawrence
Ron T. Contorno
Brandon Steffek

The professional sport premium seating industry in the United States is in the midst of a reinvention that will require professional sport sales professionals to be more proactive in their approach to prospecting, selling, and servicing clients (Titlebaum & Lawrence, 2011). The intent of this study was to address one aspect of this reinvention and analyze the business characteristics of premium seating purchasers. A secondary purpose was to inform professional sport sales professionals about using data mining in premium seating sales. To execute the project, premium seating client lists from 18 professional sport teams and venues (N = 13,455) were analyzed using the master business database from infoUSA to determine the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code/type of business, employee size, sales volume/asset size, and business status of each client. Across all premium seating types, 33.2% of all premium seating owners were categorized in the top 10 SIC codes/business types.