Walk into any team’s sales office during the season and you can watch the same meeting happen. The manager pulls up the pipeline. Each seller walks through their deals. Where does it stand? What’s the next step? When will it close? Forty-five minutes later everyone goes back to the phones, and the organization calls that coaching.

It isn’t. It’s inspection, and the difference between the two is quietly deciding which sports sales organizations sustain revenue across seasons and which ones ride the standings.

I’ve spent decades working with ticket sales, premium and partnership teams across professional sports, and the pattern holds everywhere. Managers in this industry are promoted young, usually because they were the best seller on the floor, and they inherit teams with no training in the actual job of management. So they default to what they know: working deals. They inspect the pipeline, they jump into the big opportunities and they rescue what’s stalling. All of it feels productive. None of it develops anyone.

Our firm’s diagnostic research across more than 300 sales leaders and 1,000 sales professionals shows how expensive that default is. Salespeople rate their own skills dramatically higher than their leaders rate them, with the widest gaps on exactly the capabilities that decide sports revenue: handling objections and managing buyer........

© Sports Business Journal