A sales channel for each audience
Pierre-Henri DEBALLON, Co-founder and CEO at Weezevent
Unless you’re doing it wrong, you won’t address a captive audience and a non-captive audience the same way, and especially not using the same sales channels: captives must be addressed directly, without middle-men, using your own ticketing software. Conversely, you should try to conquer the non-captives with the support of the distribution networks whose expertise it is.
A captive audience tracks your updates, follows you on social media, reads the local or trade press, receives your newsletters/messages, and in the end visits regularly one of your media, including your website. Since your goal is to sell tickets, you should consider this website as a physical store and tickets as your products. From there, it would be completely illogical and counterproductive to direct your buyers to “The usual points of sale”. Imagine if you wanted to buy some bread and your baker asked you to get out of his bakery, go across the street, enter a supermarket, sign up for a membership card, enter a ridiculous password, specify the name of your first hamster, etc. all of this just to buy the same bread at a higher price …
Beyond the issues around customer experience, such practices are insane.
In fact, your own event website must include a ticketing solution allowing you to convert your prospects (visitors) into end customers (attendees). This is why we created Weezevent in 2008, to give the most tools to event organisers, especially to self-distribute. Our role is therefore purely technical, we are not distributors.
Conversely, distributors have the ability to bring people who would not have come naturally, or at least not without their involvement. So, unless you sell out effortlessly, you need distributors to reach a new audience and showcase your offer. In this case they are very useful and really add value. Although higher, their commissions are fully justified since they to pay not only for an IT platform but also a media power, an audience that do pure-player software don’t have (for instance, no ticket is sold on Weezevent’s website — we are a software and not a sales platform).
Sometimes among your captive audience, some may prefer to purchase from a reseller because it is a guarantee of re-insurance or it allows to obtain a physical ticket. If only for this reason, it is important to continue to work with a distributor.
Whoever distributors are, their promise is to increase your sales, namely to reach a target, make them aware of your event and get them to buy a ticket and attend. And a distributor is even stronger when they have built a powerful network, whether online or in-store.
But still it is necessary to use the audience of the distributors for the right reasons and at the right time, otherwise the risk of getting cannibalised is high. As long as everyone plays their part, everything is going well in the best of worlds, unfortunately the reality is somewhat different as we describe in this other article: My retailer ticket-jacked me.
Pierre-Henri DEBALLON
CEO & co-founder at Weezevent
Organiser of the Velotour event and co-founder of a ticketing and cashless software used by over 180,000 event planners across Europe, I have been advocating direct sales for 10+ years.
