| Articles. |  |
By Scott Van Voorhis
Saturday, November 26, 2005
The Boston Celtics are boosting ticket sales and filling Garden seats with a mix of new technology and shoe leather salesmanship that has the team surging past last year’s results.
Despite the team’s uneven performance on the court, attendance at Celtics games is up 10 percent this year, a rise that a top team executive attributes in part to a new sales tracking system.
With a few clicks of the keyboard, Celtics front office staffers can get an up-to-the-minute read on how many tickets have been sold to any particular game - and exactly where they are located in the team’s North Station arena. That’s key information the team’s growing sales force can then use to go and sell some of those seats.
On a 40-inch plasma screen TV, the new software from Cambridge-based StratBridge displays colored blocks showing what’s available for any particular Celtics home game.
It’s just one part of a larger drive by the Celtics to borrow a page from the corporate world with more aggressive marketing, said Rich Gotham, the team’s sales, marketing and corporate development chief. “We have to go out and create demand for our product and identify the people who could be or should be interested in our product,” Gotham said.
Previously, getting an exact read on what seats had been filled for an upcoming game was harder to pin down. By the time the front office managed to round up the stats, more tickets had been sold, making the number instantly obsolete, Gotham said.
Based on the Celtics experience, NBA officials will roll out the technology at franchise front offices across the league, he added.
Along with some high-tech wizardry, the Celtics have also deployed a small sales army to hawk tickets.
Three years ago, the team had four sales staffers. Now it has 20, a marketing group that follows up on the phone with fans who have inquired about tickets and hits the road to make pitches to companies and groups.
View the article at BostonHerald.com >>