On this episode of Fired Up, Charlie Slonaker, SVP, Ticket Sales and Service with the Philadelphia Union talks about the deep importance of commitment to the community of which it is an integral member. He also shares his “secret sauce” to achieve an average of 93% ticket sales per game and the increasing role of premium offerings for positive impact to the bottom line.

Charlie began his career with the MiLB Dayton Dragons as an entry level ticket sales rep. After two seasons, Charlie jumped to the big leagues as a ticket sales rep for the Cincinnati Bengals and quickly progressed to the management side of the business with the Chicago Fire as Manager, Season Ticket Sales. From there, he moved to the Indiana Pacers as Director of Group and Consumer Sales.

‍Ultimately, Charlie joined the Philadelphia Union in 2016 to head up the ticket sales department. Under Charlie’s leadership the Union ticket sales staff has grown revenue by approximately 15% and has achieved the top 5 gates in club/stadium history.

Chris Wise:

Welcome to Fired Up. Today we talk with Charlie Slonaker, Senior Vice President of Ticket Sales and Fan Services for the Philadelphia Union.

Charlie Slonaker:

Thanks so much for having me, Chris.

Chris Wise:

Why don’t we start out, just tell us about yourself. Just everything you want to share with us, your background, your position, responsibilities, and really interested, how’d you find your way to Philadelphia? And what your day-to-day looks like.

Charlie Slonaker:

Absolutely, yeah.

Charlie Slonaker:

I grew up in Dayton, Ohio. Went to the University of Dayton there. We had a pretty good relationship with a local minor league baseball team, the Dayton Dragons, so was able to get some internships there. I actually started off as a entertainment intern. I helped, basically, defend our mascots, was their body guard. I’m all of about five foot seven, so I was terrible at that job. I also picked people out for ’70s dance skits and things of the sort. Through that, was able to get to know some people in the front office, the gentleman ran the ticket sales department. One day he said, “Hey, would you have any interest in a ticket sales internship?” I was like, “Absolutely. I have no idea what that is, but that sounds amazing.” He said, “I think you’d really like it. It’s just like sports. It’s highly competitive. There’s a leaderboard. You can see who’s first, who’s all the way down to last. It’s good from the standpoint, the harder you work, the more money you make. Very black and white, you can see who’s doing well, and you can advance your career more quickly.”

Charlie Slonaker:

A lot of those things were really appealing to me, and I really jumped in on that. Fortunately there was a full-time opening when I graduated. I was able to do that for a couple of years out of college, but my passion was really wanting to make it into the big leagues, so to speak. In minor league baseball, you end up doing a ton of different things. In addition to ticket sales, I also was our head of ordering Bobbleheads. Fortunately I had a really good relationship with our Bobblehead vendor who was a previous Cincinnati Bengals employee. He was able to make a connection for me, get an interview with the Bengals and get that opportunity as an entry level ticket sales rep.

Charlie Slonaker:

Was there for about three years, really enjoyed it. Things like Monday Night Football and stuff. It’s tough to replicate that. I was at the point of do I keep on in my selling career and maybe get into sponsorship, but what was really appealing to me was more of the leadership side and getting into a management position within the ticket sales division.

Charlie Slonaker:

So at the time, MLS was an up-and-coming league and they were willing to take a shot on somebody on their way up. That presented an opportunity for me at the Chicago Fire, where I was able to manage the season ticket sales staff there. First time I ever left Ohio, or didn’t live in Ohio. Great experience there. Really just immersed myself in the soccer culture and understanding how it was a little different and how to sell and everything. I was there for about two seasons and got a call from a former colleague who used to manage collection of minor league baseball teams I worked for, a gentleman named Barry Gibson, who had just taken over the VP role at the Indiana Pacers. We stayed in contact. He was building up his management team there and offered me the opportunity to come join him.

Charlie Slonaker:

The Pacers, I ended up overseeing our inside sales division as well as our group sales group. At that point I had overseen most of the pieces of the puzzle. Was in Indy for a little over three years. I was looking to put it all together and fortunately that’s how I made it out to Philly. As major league soccer, again, giving me the opportunity to oversee the pool division.

Charlie Slonaker:

That’s the position now, is overseeing all ticket sales and service here with the Philadelphia Union.

Chris Wise:

What’s that look like on a day-to-day?

Charlie Slonaker:

From a day-to-day standpoint, it’s really a couple of different pieces in terms of, your basically strategic oversight of all of our ticketing efforts, it’s staffing and development. When I first started at the Union, we had 19 total staff members that did a little bit of everything, where now, prior to the pandemic, we were up to 35 that had very clear divisions from group sales, season tickets sales, service, et cetera. It’s business planning, and execution of that business plan with each of our directors. Then I also represent our ticketing department at the executive table for any high-level positions, they’re high-level conversations and talking how that would impact the ticket sales team.

Chris Wise:

How have you pivoted during this year compared to what you did a year ago to ensure ticket sales for the future, as you look to get through this year? Help me understand what you’ve been up to.

Charlie Slonaker:

Yeah, yeah. That’s an interesting one, Chris. In the past, we had a very clear path of executing the business plan. We know exactly what we were facing. We were able to have 18,500 fans in our stadium. It was pretty crystal clear and it was just business planning and executing that, versus now, we’re continually restrategizing all the different scenarios, and understanding what local government is doing and what we’re allowed to do. Major league soccer has done a tremendous job of having all of our chief ticketing officers together on weekly calls to be able to all be on the same page. That’s been extremely helpful. I heard at one point that somebody described this period as being extremely intellectually stimulating if you don’t look at the P&L, and that has absolutely been the case throughout.

Chris Wise:

Yep, we know how soccer has really grown, really seems to be embraced by the United States population, finally. I remember playing soccer, that was my sport as a high schooler, but when I was in high school, there wasn’t competitive teams. We just had clubs that we played. That was way back when, and then I coached my kids, all four of them, for seems like forever in recreational soccer.

Chris Wise:

But tell, with that growth and interest, tell us a little bit about the market you’re in now, obviously with the attendance you’ve been achieving, just talk about the community and the support you have from them and what has allowed for that engagement. We’ll leave it there.

Charlie Slonaker:

Yeah. I think plenty of people share your same story, Chris. Soccer is a very popular youth sport right now. The participation rates continue to go up and up. People are starting to get more and more interested in the game. That’s what drew me to the opportunity. It was an opportunity to build something. It was an opportunity to grow. Our owner describes it as when he first bought into the Union, the internet had shrunk the world, and soccer’s the world’s game. There was tremendous tailwind from that perspective.

Charlie Slonaker:

We’re pretty unique in Philly. And that our supporters, the Sons of Ben, literally started our club. A very fascinating story in that prior to there being an MLS franchise in Philly, it was the largest market without an MLS team. At one point, we had a number of fans who basically developed their own fan group, the Sons of Ben, which still are the lifeblood of our organization today. They basically started showing up at other MLS matches and other league events and basically saying, “Hey, we don’t have a team, but we’re from Philly,” and doing unique chants and everything like that. That caught MLS’s attention and said, “Hey there is something there.” That’s how our team was actually started. That’s how we were granted a franchise and our owner started the team from there.

Charlie Slonaker:

For us, realistically, talking about the fan component and everything, we will look at our heat map of where our fans are located, and essentially we’re based in the suburbs. We’re 15, 20 miles outside of the City of Philadelphia, and right now we have a very suburban crowd, and a very suburban demographic, and don’t quite pop as much in the city. Whereas other MLS teams are the opposite, they have that young millennial that’s from the city. From a fan development perspective, we’ve spent a considerable amount of time trying to get into the city, having different fan events there, having some of our advertising there. We’ve been looking at potentially do we start a new pub in downtown Philly, and a bunch of different things like that, that would hopefully draw some of that younger demographic out to the stadium.

Chris Wise:

I calculated that in 2019, your average game attendance was an impressive 93%. I hope I was close. Beyond with what you just shared, what factors allow for that kind of performance?

Charlie Slonaker:

Yeah, I think it starts with our team president. We have a team president who strongly believes in ticketing. When I was first interviewing for the role, he told me he wanted to build a ticketing engine. That’s exactly what he’s allowed me to do. From the top down, there’s that core belief there. Then we, because of that I think, and we have good people in other departments as well, we have a marketing team who is highly supportive of our efforts and is really looking to drive the ticket sales side of things. We have that belief across the organization. Then we also have a core group in our ticketing division that’s been absolutely key. When I started in 2016, we had a number of staff members that predated me back to the club’s beginning in 2010. A lot of those folks are my key directors now that know the market and the business inside and out.

Charlie Slonaker:

From there, what we’ll do, we have the key pieces in place to build out the rest of the operation. We look to hire for very specific traits and qualities. Traits and qualities that we think lead to success in the role and bringing fans out, people that are really interested in soccer, really interested in sales, people that are highly competitive, coachable and highly organized. We interview for those specific traits to find those type of people.

Charlie Slonaker:

But then from there, we have to have a very dedicated onboarding type of program where we can get those people up to speed. Essentially after that, it’s just planning and execution. We have a good rapport with all the other MLS clubs to just talk about best practices, and just executing from there to tap into that Philly fan base, the diehards that want to come out and watch.

Chris Wise:

It sounds like you may have a lot of die-hards, right?

Charlie Slonaker:

Absolutely.

Chris Wise:

When you talked about that engine, you talked a lot about the people and a little bit about processes. Is there anything else you can uncover about that ticketing engine that is maybe a secret sauce, or don’t you want to tell us?

Charlie Slonaker:

Yeah. Yeah, happy to share. That’s the funny thing about being on the business side of sports is I have a great rapport with plenty of my colleagues at our biggest rival clubs, because I’m not necessarily competing directly for revenue or fans from them.

Charlie Slonaker:

Yeah, happy to share. I would say what we look at is if you take our 18,500-seat stadium, we look at in a couple of different pieces. We look at first our ticket sales base, which is absolutely key. Those are your people that are coming out every single game. We have a little over 9,000 right now. The goal is to essentially treat those people extremely well. We proactively reach out to them, make sure they’re aware of all of our events, do some seat visits, remember their kids’ birthdays and things like that so they’re feeling the love from us and they want to keep coming back.

Charlie Slonaker:

On top of that, we have to layer on new people. People that are coming out to our games with a big help from our marketing department, who have creative offers, the right amount of advertising, hitting people in the right way to come out to our game and actually try it one time, and if we can get those people out, hopefully a couple of times the next year, and then into season tickets and walk them up the ladder from that perspective, with a dedicated cadence of how we want to communicate with those people. Then on top of that, the secret sauce is sprinkling on the group tickets. We have, basically, a groups department and a couple of guys in there that have been with us for almost since the beginning or since the beginning. Getting to know that your soccer community is huge, and as well as building on some additional programs where we can have high schools come play on our field, we can have churches come out and listen to some of our players talk about their faith, getting some elementary schools involved with fundraisers. It’s just, to me, that extra sprinkling on the top that goes from a pretty decent game, a 75% full game, to that sellout is the group sales on top of it.

Chris Wise:

Interesting. It sounds like you do things to make the relationships with your fans very personal, very engaging, and that you’re out and being very much a part of the community.

Chris Wise:

As you begin the strategic process around premium seating, where do you begin? Because we’ve seen that whole offering evolving, that it becomes more and more important to a club. Talk about the strategic process around premium seating.

Charlie Slonaker:

I think when you first start, unless you’re a brand new team, you have to look at, what do we have now? What product offerings are there, what’s our percent sell through in each of those areas? Who are the clients? What commonalities might they have? And what does our premium sales and service staff look like? When I first started in 2016 and we took a look at that, there were a couple pieces that we really wanted to improve upon. We didn’t really have any all-inclusive F&B offering. It was a little bit of separate. You’d have these great seats and then pay for your F&B separate. But realistically for premium, when you’re entertaining clients, maybe you’re sending some sales reps out with potential prospects, you don’t really want that additional bill. You want it all wrapped into one. We created some specific offerings around our field seats where literally you could reach out and touch the players, like your court side seats.

Charlie Slonaker:

We also created a really high-end tunnel club. We noticed that we didn’t necessarily have an area that was super, super premium. We created this area that was essentially right next to the player locker room. As the players are walking out of their locker room, they have to weave through this tunnel club. We have it sanctioned off to where the fans can’t necessarily get on their side, but they’re literally right there. They can reach out and high five them, just a super high-end type of area where the food is all inclusive, the beverage is all inclusive there. Just a really unique space that is actually right on the water, which is the unique aspect of our stadium.

Charlie Slonaker:

From there, we also just built out the actual premium team. Built out a staff that had that service mentality, that wanted to help people, and wanted to work with those companies and high net-worth individuals and show them a good time, as well as people that were just dedicated to calling on B2B. People that were doing a lot of networking, and people that, instead of calling on Joe and Jill Fan that had been out to a game or two, they were calling on companies to see if they could set face-to-face meetings, and virtual meetings at this point in time, but that was the thought process.

Chris Wise:

As you look to next year, which is right around the corner, right?

Charlie Slonaker:

Right.

Chris Wise:

Any differences in the way you’re approaching premium seating? How has our current situation impacted how you approach next year?

Charlie Slonaker:

We were able to host five games in 2020. With that, there are very specific regulations from Major League Soccer around the pandemic that didn’t massively change what we were able to do. Essentially, you had to be 20 feet away from the field, so wherever the players could go around the playing surface, the seats couldn’t start immediately in row one. They had to be 20 feet back. The high-end tunnel club that I just mentioned, unfortunately, was a total no-go because you couldn’t be that close to players. Obviously, if you’re at risk of potentially infecting the players, that’s when things go south and you’re not able to play games. That was one part of it. We have another stadium club on the opposite end that is more up on suite level that was very limited, limited capacity there. Instead of 20 people in our suites, we did 10 people in our suites to be able to have either one household, or potentially two households socially distanced within there.

Charlie Slonaker:

I think moving forward, what we would do is look to strategize around those regulations. We’ve done a lot of looking at what industries are thriving during this time. What industries have actually seen benefit from the pandemic, and really look to specifically target those people to bring them out.

Chris Wise:

Ah, good. Good.

Chris Wise:

Want to switch gears just a little bit now, what I’m really interested in, what best practices have you established within all areas of the stadium, and premium specifically, around inclusion, accessibility, and diversity?

Charlie Slonaker:

Yeah, definitely.

Charlie Slonaker:

I would say credit to our players and our coach, who really led the way on this front. They’ve been really vocal with a couple of different things. We had this, basically our MLS Is Back Tournament. When the pandemic shutdown everything, we actually went down in Orlando, they created a bubble similar to the NBA, and played down there. That was right after the George Floyd incident had happened. Essentially, our players really led the way from doing a couple of different things. There was a pretty sizable demonstration in the first game. Our players, actually in their first game that we played in, wore the names of victims on their back instead of their own personal last name for our first game. That led to a lot of conversation. Couple of our players have been pretty much leading the way in terms of a new group that was created, the Black Players for Change. One of our players designed a Black Lives Matter t-shirt that led to some of the benefits or proceeds of those purchases going toward the effort. Credit to them, I would say first and foremost.

Charlie Slonaker:

At our stadium, Subaru Park, specifically, we were able to work with local officials to set up a pop-up mail-in ballot. Certainly saw a number of stadiums participating in that type of thing, but we did that the weekend of October 16th. Also have a really good local partner, Newman University, is our collegiate partner and they were able to assist us. We did this great four-part series with them. It was basically a diversity and inclusion class for our front office, led to really good, honest dialogue, really good specific stuff about our business and how we think about diversity and inclusion. It was two women that ran it that are social workers at Newman University. We had topics ranging from how we can do a better job of recruiting a diverse candidate pool, to how we operate our business during a divisive time. That was great.

Charlie Slonaker:

Then the final one I would say is, from our front office, we also formed this group that we call our CARES Group. It’s basically an acronym for Community Awareness, Responsibility and Education in Soccer. These guys lead the way in sending us out just some things that you should be knowledgeable about, some different things. You get a weekly email, so with an update on that. I think we’ve really looked, as an organization, to try to impact some things and be a leader in this space, as well as just gain some more knowledge across the board for all of us to make sure we’re aware of what’s happening there.

Chris Wise:

Do you, in other areas of diversity, and I’ll include folks that are sight-impaired or just have trouble getting around because they may be in a wheelchair or some other areas as it relates to not only physical facility, but communications with a broader group around inclusion, accessibility, and diversity?

Charlie Slonaker:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, there’s definitely a number of different laws associated with ADA compliance and things that we follow to a T. Our head of ticket ops does a really good job of just making sure that we’re fully set up and making sure that all those guests can make sure they’re able to view an area from a like area there as well. We’ve just started to have a little bit more conversations around those that are hearing impaired or potentially anything with the eyesight, and doing some different things there. I think that’s something that we’re still trying to continue to make some improvements on for sure.

Chris Wise:

With this year, how have the challenge of this year, or how have you used the challenges of this year to build the institutional marketing behavior? The way our behavior has changed will not just automatically go back to the way it was once we get past this situation. How have these challenges really changed behaviors and your approach to ticket sales looking ahead?

Charlie Slonaker:

I think there are a handful. One: It allowed us to really tear the Band Aid off in terms of some things we were looking to do. One specifically would be mobile ticketing. For years, we have had basically season ticket member cards where they had a physical, credit card-sized card that they would have all their tickets loaded onto and everything. Our fan base was fairly hesitant about moving to all mobile tickets, which we really wanted to do for a variety of reasons. Of course with the pandemic, you want to be as contactless as possible. It just makes so much more sense to have the ticket right on your phone rather than have to hand anybody a card or anything like that. We made that switch for these five games, and we look to carry that on to next year, now that everybody’s used to it. Nobody had any complaints, it worked well. Everybody was able to get in. Probably continue with something like that.

Charlie Slonaker:

We’ve also looked at our sales process and how do we continue to evolve that. One of the big things is just how we’re meeting today. You have all these different platforms that you can communicate with people like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and things that I don’t think that we were super in tuned with, or at least utilizing in our sales process. We have primarily tried to incorporate a lot more video into our sales process, where in the past it would be … We were phone, email, text, chat through our website, and then in-person, and really that extra one would be the video. Where I think for me, if you’re talking to somebody on a video chat, it really humanizes them as opposed to thinking of them as a salesperson that we want to do everything we can to make our prospect or our client think of Chris the person, as opposed to Chris is trying to sell me something.

Charlie Slonaker:

At any step of the way, we try to pivot people more to a video call, as well as we have some cool integrations with our CRM software, where we can insert a video into an email, that if I had a whiteboard as an example, and I said, “Hey Chris, how are you doing?” And showed that up on the whiteboard, you would hopefully get the feeling like, wow, this was really personalized for me. This isn’t just a spam email, et cetera. I think there’s some things like that.

Charlie Slonaker:

Then the final one was probably just adjusting our sales force to, and how we manage our sales force to 100% work from home life. We’re just now to the point where we’re starting to get people back into the office, and able to come back in a couple of days out of the week at half-staff. But for the most part throughout the pandemic, like most other people, we’ve been from home. From that standpoint, it’s just making sure that we have the same parameters in place of essentially as people are making phone calls or sending emails from their home, able to take their laptop home, have to plug into their CRM software, and we can see as all that’s happening. It gave us a lot of comfortability of like, wow, even though people are from home, we can still have all of our checkpoints in place to make sure we’re executing our plan. It’s certainly given me some comfortability of maybe even when things get back to normal, there could be some more working from home and things like that, because now we know how it works and we can execute it fairly well.

Chris Wise:

Charlie, you’ve been even great. Sure appreciate the time today, and sharing your insights. You have a good rest of the day and a good holiday season, and look forward to seeing how things go for you in 2021, and how the Union fares next year.

Chris Wise:

You’ve been listening to Fired Up with Charlie Slonaker, Senior Vice President of Ticket Sales and Fan Services with the Philadelphia Union. Thanks, Charlie.

Charlie Slonaker:

Thank you so much, Chris. Appreciate you having me on.