How to Build a High-Performing Marketing and Sales Team in the Experience Economy
The talent in live events and ticketed experiences is good. The structures around that talent, and the development available to it, are often where the performance gap sits. Here is how to close it.
INTRODUCTION
The most common cause of underperformance in experience economy marketing and sales is not a lack of talent. The people working in this sector are good and they are passionate about their industry. They care about the work, they understand audiences, and they operate under real commercial pressure with considerable skill, often delivering the work of 3 people. The gap, when it exists, is usually structural: in how the team is framed, what development is available to it, and whether the people executing campaigns have the commercial context they need to execute them well.
This article is for promoters, producers, leaders, commercial directors, CMOs and senior leaders thinking about how to build and develop the marketing and sales function in a live events, ticketed experience or entertainment organisation. It is also for the marketing and sales managers who are thinking about the trajectory of their own careers and what it takes to move from competent to genuinely excellent.
START WITH THE COMMERCIAL FRAME
Before you talk about team structure, headcount or job titles, the most important question is whether your marketing and sales team has a shared, clear commercial frame to work within. That means: do they understand the P&L they are feeding into? Do they know what revenue per seat/ticket looks like across price tiers? Do they understand how their campaign decisions shape yield as well as volume? And do they have a view of the booking window that goes beyond this week's sales into the season-level picture?
In many organisations, this frame exists at leadership level but has not been effectively communicated to the people executing campaigns day to day. The result is technically competent campaign work that is not optimally connected to the commercial outcome. Marketers who understand the business they are in make better decisions at every level. The fix is not always more resource. It is often better shared context and the commercial literacy to act on it.
THE SKILLS THAT MATTER MOST
Ask marketing directors across theatre, festivals, LBE and immersive experiences what they most want to see in strong marketing and sales managers and the answers cluster consistently around a specific set of capabilities.
ON SALE STRATEGY AND CAMPAIGN PLANNING. Knowing how to plan and execute a campaign from pre-announcement through to final push, managing booking windows, setting up early mechanics, sequencing communications, and adapting to live sales data as it comes in, is the most fundamental skill in the discipline. It is also one that almost no general marketing course covers. The on-sale campaign structure in live events is more like a product launch than ongoing brand activity, but with tighter timelines, real commercial stakes and a window that closes permanently.
YIELD THINKING AND COMMERCIAL LITERACY. Marketing and sales managers who understand the P&L they are feeding into consistently make better campaign decisions. That means understanding how seats are priced across tiers, what revenue per seat looks like across the booking window, and how to shape demand toward higher yield inventory rather than just maximizing volume. This is not the same as being a pricing specialist. It is about having enough commercial literacy to brief and execute campaigns that serve the business's revenue goals, not just its reach or awareness targets.
DIGITAL SKILLS BUILT FOR THE SECTOR. The digital marketing fundamentals: AI, paid social, search, email, analytics are expected. What separates good live events and experience marketers from great ones is how those skills are applied in the specific context of selling ticketed experiences. That means understanding booking window behaviour in paid search. It means knowing how to use dynamic pricing signals in ad creative. It means building email flows that reflect the emotional journey of a live experience purchase, not just a transactional product funnel, it means building AI models to build data models.
AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT AS A LONG-TERM DISCIPLINE. Filling this week's shows, houses and buildings is one job. Building an audience that comes back, recommends your work and deepens its relationship with your brand over time is a different and longer-term job. The best live events marketers hold both simultaneously. Audience development is not just vocabulary from the subsidised arts sector. It is a commercial discipline that directly affects cost of acquisition, the yield from email databases and the resilience of the business when an individual campaign underperforms.
AI AND EVOLVING SEARCH BEHAVIOUR. Increasingly, a strong working understanding of how AI-driven search is changing the way people discover events is becoming a foundational rather than advanced skill. Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO), structuring event content to surface in AI-generated search responses, is moving from early-adopter advantage to competitive necessity. The teams that understand it are already gaining ground.
WHERE GENERAL TRAINING FALLS SHORT
General digital marketing qualifications are not useless. They build a foundation in tools, platforms and frameworks that transfers across contexts. The problem is that the live events context is specific enough that the foundation alone leaves real gaps. And those gaps show up in a few consistent places.
Wrong commercial models. Generic courses are built around scalable products and recurring revenue. The mental frameworks they develop do not map naturally onto finite, time-bound, perishable-product businesses where every campaign window has a hard close.
No ticketing knowledge. The tools, platforms and commercial logic of live event ticketing are essentially absent from standard marketing syllabuses. This leaves practitioners having to develop crucial skills entirely on the job, which is slow and produces uneven results.
Case studies that do not translate. Learning from e-commerce and SaaS examples is useful to a point. It does not replace case studies from the sector you actually work in, where the commercial dynamics are different enough to matter.
Irrelevant peer cohorts. The community built during training is part of the value. A brand marketing cohort connects you with people solving genuinely different problems. The conversations can be stimulating, but they rarely produce directly applicable insight for someone managing an on sale campaign for a theatre or festival.
The most efficient way to close these gaps is training and professional development that starts from the sector. Not adapted for it. Started from it. The GIEM masterclass was built on exactly this principle, to give marketing and sales managers in the experience economy the frameworks, commercial literacy and peer community that accelerate development in ways that general qualifications cannot. More at www.theGIEM.com.
STRUCTURE FOLLOWS STRATEGY
For leaders building or restructuring a marketing and sales function, the right team structure depends entirely on what the organisation is trying to achieve commercially. There is no universal answer, but there are some consistent structural questions worth working through.
How is the relationship between marketing and ticketing managed? In many organisations these functions operate in silos that damage campaign performance. Yield management and audience development have to work together from the moment tickets go on sale, not be reconciled after the fact.
Is audience development owned by a specific function or diffused across the team in a way that means it happens inconsistently? The organisations that build loyal, returning audiences over time tend to treat this as a discipline with clear ownership and measurable commercial outcomes, not as a general aspiration.
How is the team's work being measured? Awareness and reach metrics tell you something useful, but they are not the same as commercial performance indicators. High-performing teams have a clear view of how their work connects to box office outcomes, cost of acquisition and the lifetime value of the audience they are building.
Is the team's development being taken seriously as a commercial investment? The experience economy is changing fast, in its digital infrastructure, its AI landscape and its competitive environment. Teams that are actively developing their skills maintain a material advantage over those relying on what they learned two or three years ago.
THE CAREER OPPORTUNITY
For marketing and sales managers thinking about their own trajectory, the structural picture above has a clear implication. The experience economy is growing. The demand for professionals who genuinely understand its commercial logic, who can connect brand to revenue outcome, build audiences as well as shift tickets, and communicate credibly at a leadership table, is outpacing supply.
That gap is an opportunity. The professionals who invest in sector-specific development now, who build the commercial literacy and the peer network that the sector genuinely needs, are building a competitive advantage that compounds over time. The most career-defining skill in this sector is the ability to hold the long game and the short game simultaneously: to fill next week's houses while building the audience that makes the season after next easier and more profitable.
For those who are already operating at a senior level, the career question shifts from personal skill development to building the capability of the team around them, influencing commercial strategy at an organisational level, and positioning themselves as a credible voice in conversations that connect marketing investment to business performance. That is the intersection where consultancy support and senior advisory are most useful. More on that at dawnfarrow.com.
On Sale Live, the annual confex for marketing, sales, ticketing and communications professionals across the experience economy, is where the sector's practitioners come together to build the peer network that makes careers as well as fills houses. More at onsale.live.
Build your team's commercial capability
Sector-specific masterclass for marketing and sales managers: www.theGIEM.com
Annual confex for experience economy professionals: On Sale Live at onsale.live
Strategic consultancy and leadership advisory: dawnfarrow.com