 Welcome to the wide world of eSports, a show devoted to all things eSports. I'm your host, Catherine Norr. Today, we're talking about selling eSports with phenomenal sales expert, James Hess, with Encore. Welcome, James. Thank you, Catherine. I appreciate that. I also appreciate you setting me up for failure by saying how phenomenal I am. So good luck to both of us. All right. So let me just ask you, why is sales important in business? Well, what a great question. So I got into sales kind of like a weird pathway. I was a very young person going to an after-school daycare program called Class Act. And Class Act taught you singing, acting and dancing. And I had no idea that I would ever use those skills for anything other than what they taught. But long story short, sales was what I ended up using those things for. So by learning how to act and sing and dance, I learned how to do sales. And sales became the thing that has created so many opportunities for me in both the eSport world and in the traditional sales, well, field. The most important thing to remember about sales in general is that everything is sold. I had a wonderful mentor, a sales leader, back when I was first getting into like a true corporate level sales position, who said, James, you think of sales and what are you here? Use car salesman, somebody trying to trick you into doing something, but look outside. And we were on the 17th floor of a building. He said, look outside and pick me one thing out there that you can see that wasn't sold. And we happened to be right next to a movie theater. And I looked out there and I saw the concrete on the ground and I saw the trees planted in the medians. And I saw the building and I said, you know what, the air wasn't sold. And he said, James, look on top of that building. You see those giant units, those are air conditioned. So even the air outside had somebody who had to sell it to somebody else. And so while selling is important in esports, selling in general is just the tip of the spear for every industry. Okay, we hear words like sales, marketing, advertising, branding. How is sales different from marketing, advertising and branding? Well, that is a great question. I did not give that one to you to ask me. So I'm very excited about this one. So I don't know a ton about marketing. I don't know a ton about branding. I don't know a ton about reaching out to a group of people. What I do know is that sales is understanding a person, the other person on the other end of this pitch. So for example, when I do my sales techniques, no matter what industry it's in, the first thing I'll do is identify the person or the group of people who are the most important or who the sale is going to go to. Then I identify a specific person who I want to pursue. And then I spend a tremendous amount of time, sometimes a full day researching that person, anything they've ever written, anything that has been written about them, anything that they have, let's say company-wide, that's been, this is a great, here's this person and here's how they got into the industry or even their own Facebook if it's open or certainly LinkedIn or justnews.google.com. But I think the difference between sales and then branding and marketing and those other things is that I try to, or any good sales person, should try to understand the exact person that they're going to be selling to so that they can tailor that message so that it's not the same message to the next person. It's not a form letter and that's recognizable. Okay, I can think of an example that I think a lot of our audience would know, not sure thing, because when someone does a pitch, they're actually doing that pitch to the shark and you see the individuality of that pitch and then in eSports Trade Association, which I believe you're a member as well. Anyway, we have an elevator pitch that is done at the conference. And so is it kind of like that where you're pitching? Yeah, that is a great example. So since you mentioned it, the eSports Trade Association is actually something you and I are both part of. I'm on the board of advisors and I am the chairman of the Events Committee for the eSports Trade Association. I will also just quickly mentioning that we will be hosting a panel on parents in eSports of which I am one later this month. So that's just thrown out there if you wanna check out the eSports Trade Association. But your point to the pitch competition is fantastic so that I have sat through a lot of pitches, both from being part of the eSports Trade Association and from people who recognize that A, I have connections in the industry and maybe they can pitch me their idea and help them reach somebody else. And I can tell you 100% of the time whether that person knows anything about me before they start that pitch because it's a very different concept. For example, we have somebody on our board at the eSports Trade Association who won Shark Tank, who got an investment from both Mark Cuban and Alex Rodriguez. Now he happens to be the brother of an NFL player so that could have helped. But his product is literally right here in my hand. And his message was tailored to that industry. He was a sports person talking to sports people about a product that could be leveraged for sports purpose. And that is how that pitch was tailored. Now I've sat through pitches on the other side where nobody knows anything about me. They don't know if I'm an investor or if I'm there to help them, but they have a planned pitch that they are going to repeat. Come hell or high water. And that is the only thing that they know how to do. And there's a huge, huge difference. So yes, pitching is a lot like sales in that you should understand the person that you're pitching to. And it may be a different pitch depending on that person. But I could see that the initial pitch might be similar to a lot of different people. However, the follow-up after and how you deal with the question, that may be more individual. Is that right? That is excellent insight. And it's probably the exact opposite of what I think of when I talk about selling. So I do all of that personalized stuff beforehand. Let me give you two examples. So when I was working for a recruiting company, I wanted to work with Southwest Airlines. And I thought, who better to pursue at Southwest Airlines than the chief people officer? There's a gentleman named Jeff Lam. Jeff got his start shining shoes. So I found this out by just reading his bio that the Southwest Airlines had put out there, that they mentioned how he got his start and how he became part of the organization. I put a box together and I put a shoe shine kid in there and a little note that said, Jeff, you got your start somewhere. I'd like to get my start too. Can we talk? And once I got that part of it, once I had gotten to that point, then I had a pitch that I was ready to go with because I knew how to sell to a recruiting person. He's the chief people officer. I've talked to them a billion times. But Jeff in no way was going to talk to me until I showed that I cared about him. In fact, sales is understanding people. Like that's the bottom line. Like if there was one lesson that I could give to a future salesperson, it is try to understand the person to whom you're pitching. The second one I wanted to mention was actually for one of the directors of baseball operations for the Colorado Rockies, the director of baseball operations for the Colorado Rockies. I found out that he, through research, had actually gotten Hank Aaron, had been the first person to give him a job. And this is the same year that Hank Aaron had died. It turns out that I am a huge baseball fan. You can say I have a brave jersey on my wall over here, but I also own a Hank Aaron jersey. So this was during the World Series. So I had my daughter put on the jersey. I had a tiny little baseball bat that I gave her to hold. And I took a picture of her watching the World Series in Hank Aaron's jersey. And I just said, listen, the stories that you told about Hank, because he had some really good stories too, before he left the Braves to go to work for the Rockies. I understood him enough that he will pick up my phone call right now. This is the person who was in charge of making sure the Colorado Rockies have their hotels, the money, everything. But he says, James, if you have anything you need to know or any questions you wanna ask, that is call me anytime. And there's no way that that would have happened if I had opened up my email with, hi, I'd like to tell you about Encore as a company, not in a million years. So understanding the people is actually the first thing you do and tailoring that individual message is how you get to the pitch. You know, that makes a whole lot of sense. And it reminds me of when I pitched my book to agents because I know that almost all the time I can get the agent to answer my email by directing it in a particular way where I, and the word commonality comes to mind. Like if you think about something that you have in common with that person, would you say that that would be something that would be incorporated early on? Yes, it's the absolute very first thing. So there's a really good book that I read called Influence by Robert Cialdini. And if I mispronounced his last name, I apologize, sir. But it gave you, it gave me an understanding of all the things that you and I don't think about when we make a decision. They're all the things that marketers and sellers do to us to help us to, he calls it the click where response. Click, something happens. So one of the things he talked about in that specifically was the idea that you wanted to have something in common with that person, right? And if you look in my background, you can see there's pretty much something for anybody to talk to you. I do most of my sales over video conferencing these days. So what I do is I make sure that no matter who I'm talking to, something like that might feature in the background. So if it's a creative discussion, I've got a guitar, I've got Star Wars stuff. If it's sports, I make sure to focus on my jerseys or I'll put a football helmet or something like that back there. But if it's a money discussion, then I put something like, well, I've put change down on the desk before. And that's actually something that he, in the book recommended. He said that they did a great experiment, social experiment where they had two landing pages for a furniture company. One that had pillows on the background and one that had like pennies and nickels in the background. And at the end of the experience, they asked people what they cared most about when they made their purchase. And the people who saw the clouds in their background cared about the comfort of the furniture. People who saw the money in the background cared about the cost. So I can help whoever it is that I'm talking to create that opinion of me based on what I have going on. And certainly if it's something I can speak to, which I try to not put anything in my background that I have no concept of. To be fair, I only hit no like the first three chords to satisfaction and I don't play them well. But there is an acoustic guitar back here just in case you are a music fan. But it creates that level of commonality. So they know that they're talking to somebody who understands them, who is like them. And that is a huge selling factor. There's a bunch of other ones in that book like creating scarcity. I've got a couple written down by creating scarcity, giving someone a gift or a favor in the beginning. And that also actually helps out a little bit. So the reason that you are more likely to donate to somebody when they give you a flower is that you feel like you owe them a favor. One of the other things he says is if you do somebody a favor, you don't say you're welcome or no problem. You say you would do that for me too. And you create that kind of reciprocal relationship with the person to whom you gave the favor. So I would say that commonality is incredibly important and you can generate it authentically by being yourself. Let's focus on eSports. And how do you sell eSports? Like what are you selling? Yeah. So I work for a live events company. We also are the in-house partner to over 2,100 venues around the globe. So places like even Wembley Stadium in London and Fenway Park in Boston. And then almost every hotel and convention center you've ever been to, you'll see the Encore or formerly PSAV name as the in-house AV provider. So I sell that to these industries. However, eSports is way bigger than events. So eSports is $1 billion of $160 billion gaming industry. And eSports has been growing in double digits. One thing I thought was really interesting and we can talk, I'm getting to your question, I promise. But these are all things that are interesting to me. So I apologize for digressing. But one thing I thought was super interesting and as an events person obviously I wanna highlight this is that eSports actually took a step backwards in 2020. So in 2019, the revenues for eSports were by, and I got this data from New Zoo. So the revenue estimates for 2020 for the eSports industry was $1.1 billion. It actually came in at about 910 million which is significantly less when you're talking about an industry that has double digit growth basically since its inception. And nobody could figure out why. But what I found was that there were 5,591 global tournaments in 2009, live tournaments with people in the stand. And in 2020, there were 4,478. So that's a reduction in 1,100, almost 20% fewer tournaments that year. Now, does that account for $200 million in lost revenue growth? I think so. I think that live events are incredibly important to that. So my pitch to the eSports industry is not that different than my pitch to concert goers or accounting firms. We are a company that can take any idea that you have and create it. The problem in eSports, not the problem in eSports, the opportunity in eSports, you can tell I'm a salesperson. The opportunity in eSports is that we can, we are dealing with people who have very little money in general because the event space is so fresh and so young. Many of these people are putting on their first or second tournaments ever and they're shoe stringing it together. They're getting borrowed gear or they're using their own equipment or they're using OBS instead of vMix. There are things that they are doing to keep the cost down and that is not where my company fits in. So when I talk to somebody about an eSports event or a company that produces eSports events, we're talking to companies that do like EVO. My company has done the AV production for EVO since 2010. We're talking about BlizzCon and QuakeCon and those kinds of things. So those would be the types of levels of eSport companies that I would be pursuing. Having said that, we have gotten so many requests from people who want to do something they just don't know how to do it yet. So we can come up with ideas to help companies like that. Like say you have a small, there's a great company that's part of ESDA and one of the owners of the company is on our board. And his idea is to create tournaments in movie theaters. So he already owns movie theaters and he has all the equipment and he's able to stream. So instead of having a movie from two to four, he's gonna have an eSports tournament in there and it's going to be viewed on the big screen and it'll be able to be live streamed. That type of infrastructure is what I can help people to sell to the future, right? So you do have a small tournament right now, but you don't need to put it on yourself at George R. Brown Convention Center in San Antonio or wherever it is. You can put it on at a movie theater in Boca Raton, Florida, have it streamed out to the web and have a $5,000 prize pool or something that creates the excitement for the next event. Because as soon as you have a story to tell, that is where the next step happened. And we know this as much as anybody, Catherine, because we went to the first of the eSports next events for the eSports Trade Association last year in Chicago. And this year, we have a full story to tell. We have content, we have people's experiences, we have testimonials. All of that stuff helps you in your next sale. So I said all of that to say, eSports is just like any other industry when you wanna sell to it, but you need to understand the person that you're trying to sell to. And that goes back to understanding people as the most important part of sales. Sure, and I will note that I have interviewed Heather Blair, who's with Cinema eSports Association. And we did talk about having eSports events in theater, movie theater. And I think that that's a fantastic combination of where a need of filling space and making revenue meets opportunity. But I think that this kind of reminds me when you talk about selling eSports, it reminds me of the Olympic Games in that you can call the Olympic Games a sporting event. But then in 2012 and after the Olympics, 2012 and after actually it was probably earlier than that, you can call it a security event because they had so many security people to every athlete and every spectator. But now I think you could also, and I think it's been this way for quite some time, you can call it a sponsorship event. And so when I look at eSports, I think about one of the big sales targets for you is selling to sponsors. How do you convince a sponsor to buy into an event? Katherine, I would love to give you that answer, but if anybody knew that, if anyone had that silver bullet ready to go, they wouldn't be sharing it with either of us, right? So that is a great concept. It's actually a question I asked to a panel of people last year talking about partnerships. One of the things that is very unique about eSports is that the audience is not in a seat, right? Like, so we work a lot with traditional sports. In fact, my background and how I got into eSports here at Encore was that I was the sports person after COVID, essentially. So my company went from being the biggest in the industry to having like zero employees for multiple months throughout 2020 and the live events industry, anyone who works in live events was in that same position, whether it was a movie theater or a Chuck E. Cheese, right? So anytime, anywhere live. What we did was completely shut down for a year. So when I came back, they gave me five hotel properties. Out of the 2100 we have, five of them were assigned to me. I used to be one of five sellers at a big box, we call them, at one of the big hotels here in Dallas where I live. Anyway, I got to be in charge of one hotel that was near Arlington Stadium, well, the baseball stadium in Arlington and eSports Stadium Arlington was right around the corner from there. I did one event for a local Texas Rangers pitcher and I became the eSports guy. So that is how I fell into eSports. Now, when you talk about selling sponsorship and things like that, those people are not aware of what they're gonna get in return. I just literally wrote an ROI message for my own company so that I could explain what ROI we could produce if they invested more in eSports. And like you said, sponsorship is one of those things that nobody really knows how to define it. When you talk about ROI, are we talking about X number of dollars are gonna exactly come from this event? Well, how do you figure that out? Okay, you can sell merch on the event or something like that, or you can do influencer type marketing stats where you see in the number of impressions and how many people click through rates and things like that. So selling sponsorships is its own animal and is not something that I think anybody has a good handle on. But there are other things to make money in eSports and I don't wanna sound crass that I'm only in eSports for money. I'm thrilled, I love eSports. I have been playing video games since I was a young man. I know I don't look that old. I am in my 40s and I do have kids and they love video games because I love video games. But besides sponsorship, there's media rights. There's publishing fees, the publisher fees. There's merchandising and tickets. There's digital and streaming rights. So those are all other ways that people can sell and make money in eSports and you just have to again understand what the person in front of you is looking for. Are they the type of person who would buy an ad on Instagram knowing it's gonna get a certain number of impressions and sell to them like that? If they're the type of person who's like, hey, I need a direct ROI. I won this event because I went to your live sporting event. That is the person that you need to tailor that message to. So again, it all goes back to understanding people and knowing how you can convince them, not convince them, but how they would love to get the ROI back. So when you're talking about sales, I know that sales people have to deal with objection. And when you're dealing with objections in relation to eSports, one objection that I can think of is, oh, eSports isn't that big. Shouldn't I be doing something in with regular traditional sports? How, let me ask the expert, how do you deal with objections? That's fantastic. So objection handling is absolutely sales 101 and you should be prepared for that one. And there are a lot of good eSport objections. One thing I always hear is I can't believe that there are actually people who watch this. Like I thought there were just children. Like you're a 40 year old man, what are you doing? Like those are some of the objections that I have to deal with. And that is just education, right? That is the education part of it where it's super simple. You could point to, if you know the type of person you're talking to, if they're the type of person who would say to your face, I thought you'd be a sweaty nerd instead of a cool guy, then you need to have raw data for that person. So what I like to say is, again, the gaming industry is bigger than music and movies combined. People spend more money in a year on gaming than they have spent on movies and music combined as industry, $160 billion. eSports is $1 billion of that pie right now. I tell them it's like being part of the WWF in the 1980s. I knew there was something there when I was watching the Royal Rubble and I was watching Hulk Hogan, Body Slave, Andre the Giant. I feel the exact same way when I see Team Liquid and Face Clan up there. Like I understand that completely. And then I like to talk about personal experiences. So in general, whenever, I'm probably giving too much information away, Catherine. Hopefully nobody I try to sell to is going to watch this podcast. But what I always say whenever anybody gives me an objection is if I was in your position, I would 100% agree with you. Or from your perspective, I see exactly what you're saying. There's also a technique called Feel Felt Found. It's a great old sales technique that says I know exactly how you feel. I know other people who felt that way and here's what they found. And so that's one of the techniques I use. So I know how you feel. It seems like it's nothing. You've never heard of it. It's not traditional sports. There's not a 10 million people watching an eSport event. But you know what there are? There's 75,000 people in your demographic who are watching this eSport event right now. Can you promise me right now, if I advertise on the Super Bowl that you would get 75,000 18 to 24 year olds with disposable income and interest in video games? Maybe, but you'd be taking a risk. I can promise you that anyone who tunes into a Twitch stream of an eSport is one of those people. So that's one objection that I have. And then I talk about the people who I have heard who do believe in eSports. There's a great person. I talk about ESTA a lot, but this is only coincident because it's a great organization and it's part of what I know about eSports. But at eSports next last year, the fireside chat was a gentleman named Bruce Stein. Bruce Stein happens to be one of the founders of Axiomatic Gaming. Axiomatic Gaming invested a quarter of a billion dollars in Epic Games before Fortnite came out, back when they were a billion dollar company. And he bought it because of the Unreal Engine. This is the same person who brought Batman and Star Wars toys to Kenner. He was the CEO of Mattel. He was the CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment. And he believes so much in eSports and gaming that he invested $250 million into a one billion dollar company that's worth like six or 10 or 30. I can't even remember what Epic Games is worth today. But his personal investment has grown that much. So I point to people who have taken the leap and I tell them about my own experience. And that's how I handle that objection. And do you think about someone's decision making styles before you or during the process of selling? Absolutely. So that is a great question. So in a selling process, and I'd love to have more time to give you my complete rundown, but I wouldn't because it's mine and you can't have it. But in my selling process, in that discovery call, I always to make sure, hey, how do you get measured on success? How are you going to be judged on this? Because that a lot of the times is the most important thing to them. If the surveys at the end of the event that I'm putting on are all 10s, I get a bonus. Okay, well then we need to make sure that the audience's experience is the best. If the answer is my CEO is standing up on stage and if she doesn't have a wonderful experience, I'm fired, then we make sure that the presenter support is the most important thing. So you just, like you said, have to understand exactly who you're talking to, but you won't know their decision making process unless you ask for it. Sure. Yeah, you know, I am an attorney, but you know, I actually read sales book and it isn't because I'm like directly a sales person but I sort of assume that a lot of information about anything like a broad knowledge of anything regarding marketing, branding, sales, which I all read about, you know, I think it's important to just any regular person on this earth, do you agree with me? Listen, it would be hard for me to say no to that given that I spent the last 15 years doing sales. But I would say specifically that selling yourself is something you will have to do in every interaction you have for the rest of your life, whether it's a job interview for an account role or whether it's, you know, meeting somebody for the first time and starting a relationship, you are selling yourself the whole time. So the more you can learn about how to sell or the way that people respond to selling, like I mentioned, Influence is a wonderful book because it didn't teach me how to sell to other people. It told me how people were selling to me and it's like, if somebody tries to do this to you, here's how you respond. Another great book that I love is The Challenger Sale. It goes beyond becoming the friend, relationship maker and talks about really bringing somebody something they didn't think about before. Really quickly, I will tell you one more story. My own company, I wanted to get my company to be part of the ESTA, but I couldn't think of a way to do it. I found out that my company cared most about recruiting right now. So I told them that they can reach people in esports right now through recruiting and they 100% bought into it. It wasn't even a question. Like they signed the contract that next day. So yes, selling and understanding that person and the part of it is incredibly important no matter who you are or what you're doing. James, I've learned so much today about selling and I'm looking forward to hearing more of your success in the future. I'll give you the last word. You can let people know how they can find out about Encore and how they can connect with you. Yeah, wonderful. Encore is the biggest live event company in the world. We've done every presidential inauguration since 1948. We light the national Christmas tree. We do EVO. So you've heard of us, you just didn't know it was us. So come visit us at encoreglobal.com. See what you can see about our virtual and hybrid events which is where I focus. And me personally, feel free to look me up on LinkedIn just as James Hess Encore, if you wanna put it into... Oh, thank you very much. As James Hess Encore down at the bottom or you can just look me up as James Hess. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, James. It's been a great opportunity to learn about sales and about Encore. Thank you, Catherine. And this went as fast as you promised it would. I have so much more I wanna talk about but this is very exciting. I appreciate the time. We'll have to do a part two. Okay. Anyway, thank you to our viewers for joining us today. Next week, my guest will be Esports Business Consultant, Sharon Gill. See you then. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.