Advice from William Morris and Live Nation

There’s been a lot of good informational sessions over the last two days, but the two most highly anticipated meetings were those with the representatives from William Morris and Live Nation. William Morris brought out all the top agents from its Nashville office, while Live Nation introduced six regional Vice Presidents, excluding representation for the West Coast.

So what did we learn? Well one thing we didn’t hear much about were upcoming tours for 2007 — the agents were still pretty tight about releasing too many names. But arena managers didn’t walk away empty-handed. Folks from William Morris and Live Nation had some good advice to offer about how to get more shows at their buildings. Here are three good tips we liked. If you want to hear more, check out our e-newsletter on Sept. 20 for a full report.

• Make the phone calls and keep the availability sheet open. Mark Roeder of William Morris said venues shouldn’t wait around for the phone to ring. Managers must now be proactive in developing relationships with booking agents and promoters, often selling their own shows.

“We got a lot of people to remember, and it’s not always easy to remember who people are,” said William Morris’ Roeder.

• Know your customers and sell your fan base like you sell your building. Develop marketing tools that allow you to automatically tap into your customer base through targeted email, web marketing and mailing lists.

“It helps if you’ve got a built-in population that you can automatically hit back,” Lane Wilson of William Morris said. “That’s who you have to keep developing, the one percent of the population you know is coming.”

• Develop your promotions and sales strategies for the pre-sale and on-sale dates. Customers are savvy enough to realize that promoters are running desperate when they start marking down prices or trying to give tickets away.

“The consumer is pretty savvy and can see a fire sale,” said Mark Campana of Live Nation “If you don’t put it out on the front-end, you’re dead.”