Director of Business Development Matt Schroll Shares How He Approaches Sales For The Houston Dynamo & Dash

1Tell us about your role as Director of Business Development for the Houston Dynamo & Dash. What does a typical day look like for you?

Typical is a relative term now, but my day, in short, consists of making sure all of our representatives are in the best position to succeed.

During this Work from Home time period (which we are still working from home), we’ve managed to continue to sell and service at a high level, which is awesome. But we’ve also found that we had an opportunity to continue training our team at a high level every day.

The ticketing team is in an even better position, prior to COVID, due to the extra training, and it shows on our sales reports!

While every day is generally much different than the last, I work with our VP and management team to try to create the best plan and strategy to sell tickets and provide the highest value to our ticket holders.

2In the beginning of your sports industry career, you tried your hand at roles in Community Relations, Sports Media and Marketing before getting into Sales. What encouraged you to try out different areas of the industry and when did you realize Sales were your fit?

My internships with the South Bend Silver Hawks and the Fieldhouse basketball facility were both labelled as “marketing” internships, but being that both were smaller staffs, I had the opportunity to experience a variety of parts of the industry.

When I was able to experience the sales and sponsorship side during my internships, I fell in love due to the competitiveness and ability to positively affect your career growth through your output. Since then, those two things (among others) have fueled my passion for sales.

3What are some tools you and your team use to identify and develop new business opportunities for both the Houston Dynamo and Dash?

We use several tools, but some of the tools we use more extensively to identify new opportunities are ZoomInfo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, as well as the Houston Business Journal. All three allow us to stay on top of the local B2B scene, in addition to our sales representatives prospecting on their own.

We also conduct a robust email campaign for thousands of companies in Houston to help “warm up” opportunities for our sales representatives to pursue on both the Dynamo and Dash side.

4In a role like Business Development, how important is relationship-building? What is your approach to both developing and retaining relationships with clients?

It’s huge.

There’s two ways to look at sales: transactional or relationship-based.

Transactional selling

Transactional selling is usually a hard-lined, quick sales process (generally, you see this when selling a commodity).

Relationship-based selling

Relationship-based is obviously a little different, and sells based on problem-solving, discovery, and learning about how our product (Dynamo or Dash tickets) can improve their current setup. And the entire last sentence sums up the concept of building a relationship.

The relationship cannot stop at the point of sale, much like how a transactional selling model would. Retention is critical to our business model to help us continue to sell out games, so the relationship is very important to both sides of the ticketing business, selling and retaining.