JOB DESCRIPTION
Title: Senior Manager, Commercial Strategy
Department Code & Name: 415
FLSA Status: Exempt
Reports To: VP, Team Business Operations
Location: Remote with regular travel to LOVB markets, team meetings, and League events
Job Summary:
League One Volleyball (LOVB) is seeking a Senior Manager, Commercial Strategy to serve as a strategic commercial advisor to LOVB Pro teams, with a primary focus on driving performance across ticketing and sponsorship. This role will partner with Team Presidents and commercial leaders to evaluate performance, identify growth opportunities, strengthen sales strategies, and build sustainable commercial capabilities.
Using data, benchmarking, and industry best practices, the Senior Manager will identify performance gaps, develop actionable recommendations, and create tools and resources that can scale across the League. The ideal candidate brings significant professional sports experience in ticketing, sponsorship, or revenue strategy and can move effectively between strategy, analysis, and hands-on team support.
Essential Duties and Responsibilities:
Ticketing Strategy & Performance
- Serve as a strategic advisor to teams across season memberships, partial plans, group sales, single-match tickets, and other ticket products.
- Partner with team leadership and ticketing leads to develop and strengthen sales strategies across pricing, inventory management, sales sequencing, lead generation, retention, renewals, and customer acquisition.
- Own League-wide analysis of team ticketing performance and pacing, proactively identifying performance gaps, emerging trends, and opportunities for growth.
- Establish and evolve ticketing KPIs and benchmarks that provide teams and League leadership with consistent visibility into performance.
- Analyze ticket sales, attendance, gate receipts, pipeline, and other commercial data to diagnose performance and develop actionable recommendations.
- Lead dedicated ticketing strategy deep dives with teams, including developing action plans and tracking progress against agreed commercial priorities.
- Advise teams on ticket sales staffing structures, sales processes, pipeline management, and resource allocation.
- Identify successful approaches across LOVB markets and translate them into scalable best practices, tools, templates, and resources.
Sponsorship Strategy & Performance
- Serve as a strategic resource to teams in developing and executing local sponsorship revenue strategies.
- Advise teams on sponsorship packaging, inventory development, pricing, positioning, category strategy, prospecting, and pipeline development.
- Monitor sponsorship performance and sales pacing across markets to identify revenue opportunities, common challenges, and areas requiring deeper support.
- Partner with teams to evaluate sponsorship pipelines and identify strategies to improve prospecting, conversion, and overall sales effectiveness.
- Help teams maximize the commercial value of local assets, including team, community, digital, social, and in-venue inventory.
- Lead sponsorship strategy deep dives where teams need additional support or significant growth opportunities exist.
- Identify successful local partnership strategies and determine how those approaches can be shared or scaled across other LOVB markets.
- Collaborate with League Partnerships and other functional leaders to ensure local and League commercial strategies are appropriately aligned.
Commercial Analytics & Business Insights
- Own the development and ongoing analysis of League-wide commercial performance reporting across ticketing and sponsorship.
- Develop benchmarks and comparative insights that allow teams to understand performance relative to goals, historical results, and League-wide trends.
- Identify underlying drivers of commercial performance and translate data into clear strategic recommendations.
- Partner with the VP, Team Business Operations to identify League-wide commercial trends, risks, and opportunities requiring leadership attention.
- Contribute to the development and evolution of Team Business Scorecards, commercial dashboards, gate receipts reporting, and other performance-management tools.
- Establish consistent approaches to measuring commercial performance while recognizing differences in market size, maturity, venue, and local business conditions.
- Use data and insights to help teams prioritize initiatives most likely to materially impact revenue performance.
Team Consulting & Commercial Support
- Serve as the commercial subject-matter expert within Team Business Operations, partnering closely with Team Presidents, ticketing leaders, sponsorship leaders, and other commercial executives.
- Participate in recurring team business strategy meetings and lead dedicated commercial working sessions when deeper expertise is required.
- Diagnose commercial challenges and work with team leadership to develop practical, measurable action plans.
- Partner with teams that are behind commercial goals to identify root causes, establish priorities, and track progress against agreed actions.
- Provide hands-on strategic support during critical commercial periods, including ticket sales launches, renewal campaigns, and major sponsorship initiatives.
- Conduct market visits and work alongside team commercial staff when in-market support can accelerate performance or capability development.
- Build trusted relationships with team leaders while constructively challenging strategies, assumptions, and approaches when appropriate.
League-Wide Commercial Capability Building
- Lead the strategy and content development for League-wide ticketing and sponsorship working groups.
- Build and maintain a centralized library of commercial best practices, templates, benchmarks, case studies, and resources.
- Identify recurring challenges across teams and develop scalable solutions.
- Create opportunities for teams to share successful strategies, learnings, and commercial resources.
- Support training and professional development for team ticketing and sponsorship staff.
- Bring relevant sports and entertainment industry best practices into LOVB and determine how they can be applied across teams.
- Collaborate with League Marketing, Partnerships, Data & Analytics, Finance, Merchandise, Venue Operations, and other functions on initiatives impacting team commercial performance.
- Support broader Team Business Operations initiatives designed to strengthen team business performance and operating capabilities.
Required Skills/Abilities:
- Strong expertise in professional sports ticketing, sponsorship, revenue strategy, or commercial operations.
- Demonstrated ability to evaluate commercial performance, diagnose business challenges, and translate insights into actionable strategies.
- Strong understanding of ticket sales, sponsorship sales, pipeline management, pricing, inventory, and revenue-generation strategies.
- Strong analytical capabilities and ability to work with commercial data, dashboards, forecasts, KPIs, and performance reporting.
- Ability to establish benchmarks and translate complex data into clear recommendations for senior leaders.
- Demonstrated ability to build trusted relationships and influence leaders without direct authority.
- Ability to operate as both a strategic advisor and hands-on problem solver.
- Exceptional communication, presentation, facilitation, and stakeholder-management skills.
- Strong organizational skills with the ability to manage priorities across multiple teams and workstreams.
- Collaborative, curious, solutions-oriented, and comfortable operating in a fast-paced and evolving environment.
Education and Experience:
- Bachelor's degree required.
- 7+ years of relevant experience in professional sports, entertainment, live events, or a related commercial environment.
- Significant experience in ticket sales, sponsorship sales/strategy, revenue strategy, or commercial operations, with deep expertise in at least one of ticketing or sponsorship.
- Experience developing sales strategies, evaluating pipelines, establishing KPIs, and measuring performance against revenue goals.
- Experience partnering with senior business and commercial leaders.
- Demonstrated experience using commercial data and insights to influence business decisions and revenue performance.
Preferred Experience:
- Experience working for a professional sports league, team, or league-level team services/club business function.
- Direct experience across both ticketing and sponsorship.
- Experience with ticketing platforms, CRM systems, sponsorship pipeline tools, and commercial reporting systems.
- Experience developing dashboards, benchmarks, forecasts, or performance reporting for senior leadership.
- Experience consulting across multiple teams, markets, business units, or properties.
- Experience in a high-growth or evolving sports organization where commercial infrastructure and processes are still being built.
Behavioral Competencies:
- Strategic thinker with strong commercial instincts and business acumen.
- Analytical and data-driven with the ability to translate insights into action.
- Results-oriented with a strong focus on revenue growth and team performance.
- Highly collaborative and able to build credibility with senior leaders.
- Comfortable constructively challenging assumptions and influencing without direct authority.
- Highly organized with strong ownership and accountability.
- Comfortable navigating ambiguity and competing priorities.
- Strong communicator who can simplify complex commercial concepts.
- Curious, resourceful, and solutions-oriented.
- Passion for LOVB's mission and commitment to helping teams build sustainable, high-performing businesses.
Work Environment & Physical Requirements (Remote):
- Ability to operate a computer and use a keyboard, mouse, and video conferencing tools.
- Ability to clearly communicate via video, phone, and written channels.
- Ability to work effectively in a remote, highly collaborative environment.
- Occasional travel required for team meetings, planning sessions, business events, and league-related activities.
