Originally Posted by TX Flyer
This is what I was going to come post. You can be the smartest guy in the room but you have to know how to connect with people. Neil either needs to hire someone with these connections or find a firm who can assist. It seems he just doesn’t have the right connections.
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I don’t necessarily agree with this. I’m more inclined to think he has a lot of connections...but we are going to need to up the opportunities to interact with programs we want to schedule. Based on what Chris is reporting - which is an excellent read - it’s going to take more than Neil in this effort. AG, his staff, and even Pres Spina along with the AD staff may very well have to buy those golf foursome teams and go support a school’s golf tournament just for the opportunity to socialize with their counterparts and advance relationships on multiple levels.
In my career I was Sr VP of Sales and Marketing. My clients were large companies like ATT, Citibank, AmX, etc. the contracts we were vying for were multi-million dollars - the kind of deals that take 2-3 years to cultivate. Every year I had what I called a “Full-Court Press” list. These were the 10-12 companies we wanted to do business with but hadn’t been able to secure a contract yet. I then designed the game plan to “touch” that company as many times as we could that year by deploying every executive we had as many times as we could to intertwine someone from our company with someone at each of those companies. It was highly successful, resulting in more than $20 million in new business every year. It was so successful we had to pull it back some years because we couldn’t grow fast enough to service the accounts.
The one critical factor here is you have to “have something to sell” that benefits the target. We had that and UD may not...Neil & Company will have to get creative and go the extra mile to lay out for each team the advantages of putting the Flyers on their schedule. They can’t just run the at-large math for UD. I think we are above average on knowing the math it takes to maximize opportunities. I don’t believe others are as good. For P5 schools they very well may be far behind us in this area because their conference makes it easy to get an at-large bid. An at large bid is Dayton’s goal every year just in case we need it. It’s not a concern for those who “always” get one.
However, I think those “always” schools would be interested if Neil & Co could layout putting Dayton on their schedule will help them improve their seed. That’s what will get their attention. That’s what can turn their current response of, “its not a good fit” in to wanting to make it happen. Maybe Neil is already doing this? Chris has given the fans a great look into this year’s challenges. They contacted every Top 75 plus some. Maybe it’s going to take 3 or 4 contacts into each of those 75. Maybe it’s going to take a multi-media sales presentation that a team of 3-4 travels to several key schools to sit down and meet and make the presentation. It’s a brave new world. It’s going to take more than same-old, same-old.
I would take everyone of those Top 75 plus all the others we tried to land this year and start building the matrix for next year. Do the math for every school as if they had accepted Dayton’s offer this year. Figure out what schools would have been better off playing the Flyers ... and then make sure multiple decision makers at those schools have this information. Show them why it’s good FOR THEM to schedule Dayton. I assume the math will not necessarily be better for everyone of the Top 75, but I’m confident it will be for 10-20 programs and we should be able to land 3-4 of those next year. The Flyers are going to be really good the next couple years. Use our strength of understanding the math to show these schools how we can help them get what THEY want - which is a higher seed in the dance.
And also keep pounding the NCAA to fix the scheduling challenges and recruit other schools to do the same. It sounds like Neil is doing this.
