The 90-Day Plan for a New VP of Ticketing

The first 90 days of a new VP of Ticketing role set the tone for the next three years. Most new leaders know this. Almost none of them use the time well.

The instinct, especially after the third or fourth introductory meeting, is to start changing things. Pricing feels off. The renewal motion looks broken. The dashboards don’t match what the GM is saying. So the new VP starts moving — adjusting variable pricing, restructuring the inside sales team, pushing for a new CRM. By day 60, half the org is reorganizing. By day 90, nobody’s sure what’s working and what’s broken.

A real VP of ticketing 90 day plan looks different. It’s not a sprint to early wins. It’s a structured period of listening, diagnosis, and a small number of high-conviction decisions. The teams that get the most out of a new revenue leader treat the first quarter as an investment, not an output.

Here’s how to use it.

The Mistake Almost Every New VP Makes

Touching pricing in month one.

Pricing feels like the obvious lever. Every ticketing leader has opinions about pricing. The data is visible, the changes are easy to push, and the revenue impact is measurable. Which is exactly why it’s the wrong place to start.

Pricing is downstream of demand intelligence. If you don’t yet understand how the team’s buyers segment, what the secondary market is doing, where group sales is over-discounting, and how renewals are pacing — you can’t price intelligently. You’re just moving numbers based on instinct, and you’ll either look reckless to the CRO or invisible to the CFO.

The same goes for restructuring the team in the first 30 days. You don’t know who the high performers are yet. You don’t know which manager is carrying the team and which one is coasting. Make those calls in month four, not month one.

Days 1–30: Listen, Audit, Map

The first 30 days are about establishing a fact base. Three things to focus on.

The people. Schedule 45-minute one-on-ones with every direct report and every other senior stakeholder you’ll interact with regularly: the CRO, the CFO, the GM, the VP of Marketing, the VP of Partnerships, and the head of fan experience. Same three questions for everyone: What’s working? What’s broken? If you had my job, what would you do first? You’ll see patterns within a week. The same problems will surface from completely different functions, which means they’re real.

The data. Get read access to everything. The ticketing platform, the CRM, the BI dashboards, the marketing automation tool, the secondary market reports, the box office reconciliations. Don’t try to interpret it yet. Just inventory it. Where does the data live? Who owns each system? How are they connected (or not)? Where do the systems disagree, and which one does the org trust when they disagree? This is the map you’ll use for the next 60 days.

The customer. Sit in on five sales calls — full season, partial plan, group, and premium. Listen to two renewal conversations. Read the last 50 customer service tickets. Look at the last 12 months of churn exit surveys if they exist. You’ll learn more about your business in 10 hours of customer exposure than in 100 hours of internal meetings.

By day 30, you should have a one-page document — for your eyes only — that lists the top five revenue assumptions you came in with and which of them have been confirmed, contradicted, or remain unclear.

Days 31–60: Diagnose — Four Places Revenue Is Leaking

Now use what you’ve learned. The diagnostic phase is about finding the gaps the org isn’t seeing — the places where revenue is leaking and nobody is paying attention because the dashboards don’t surface them.

In every ticketing organization I’ve worked with, four leaks tend to show up.

Renewal blind spots. Most teams know their headline renewal rate. Almost none of them know which segment of their renewal base is at the highest risk and why. Behavioral signals — game attendance, email engagement, app usage, secondary market listing activity — usually exist somewhere, but they’re rarely connected to the renewal motion. A 92% renewal rate with the wrong 8% churning costs you more than a 90% rate where the lost accounts are the lowest-value ones. Find out which 8% you’re losing.

Group sales over-discounting. Group sales is the easiest place to inflate volume by giving away margin. Pull the last 24 months of group transactions and look at average discount by segment, by salesperson, and by month. You will almost certainly find a pattern of price erosion that nobody flagged because the volume number was hit.

Single-game cannibalization of full-season revenue. Dynamic pricing on premium single-game inventory often eats into the perceived value of season tickets. Look at the price-per-seat your single-game buyers paid for premium games versus the equivalent season ticket allocation. If the gap is closing, your STM value proposition is quietly eroding.

Premium account disengagement. Suite holders and premium club members produce the highest revenue per relationship and the lowest visibility. Most CRMs track touchpoints — calls, visits, emails — but not the inverse: which high-value accounts haven’t been touched in 60 or 90 days. That silence is where churn comes from.

By day 60, you should be able to walk into the CRO’s office with a one-page diagnostic that names two or three specific revenue leaks, quantifies them, and proposes what you’d do about each. Don’t propose ten things. Propose three.

Days 61–90: Decide — Three Commitments Before Your First QBR

The final 30 days are about committing publicly to a small number of changes you can deliver on by the end of the next quarter.

The temptation is to commit to a long list. Resist it. Three commitments, defended clearly, beat ten commitments executed halfway. Pick:

One revenue protection commitment. Usually a renewal motion improvement. “We’re going to identify our top 100 at-risk renewal accounts by week eight of the renewal window — 60 days earlier than we currently do — and we’re going to assign owners and intervention plans to every one.” Specific, measurable, defensible.

One revenue growth commitment. Usually an upsell or pricing adjustment based on what you found in the diagnostic. “We’re going to systematically identify single-game buyers who fit the profile of our highest-LTV partial plan holders and run a targeted conversion motion in Q3.”

One operational commitment. Usually about visibility, not about output. “We’re going to consolidate our weekly revenue read into a one-page brief so that leadership can act on it instead of trying to interpret six dashboards.” This one matters more than people think — it’s how you change the operating cadence around you.

These three commitments become your first QBR. They become how leadership measures you for the rest of the year.

The One Metric to Anchor Your Team Around

Most new VPs of Ticketing inherit a stack of KPIs: gross ticket revenue, renewal rate, average ticket price, single-game volume, group sales bookings, ancillary revenue per fan, et cetera. Every metric has a champion. None of them connects.

Your job in the first 90 days is to pick the one number your team rallies around. For most ticketing organizations, that number is contribution to forecasted next-season revenue — a forward-looking measure that combines confirmed renewal commitments, qualified pipeline, and active retention work. It forces the team to think in terms of what they’re building toward, not what already happened.

It’s not the only number you’ll track. But it’s the one your weekly stand-up should open with.

What Not to Do in the First 90 Days

Don’t reorganize the team. You don’t yet know who’s good. You’ll change reporting lines based on first impressions, regret it by month six, and lose two people in the process.

Don’t replace tools. The temptation to swap out the CRM or move ticketing platforms is enormous. The cost is hidden. Every system migration burns at least one quarter of revenue focus. Earn the right to do it later, when you can defend it with diagnosis, not preference.

Don’t promise specific revenue numbers. You don’t have the operating history to forecast accurately yet. Promise process, motion, and intelligence. Numbers will follow.

Don’t go quiet. The worst thing a new VP can do is disappear into research mode for 90 days. Show up. Share what you’re learning. Bring weekly observations to your CRO. Visibility is a deliverable in the first quarter.

What Compounds in Year Two

The VPs who get the first 90 days right share a pattern. They listen first. They diagnose with data, not gut. They commit to a small number of high-conviction changes. And they invest early in the intelligence layer — the connection between fragmented systems, behavioral signals, and account-level recommendations — that will make every subsequent decision faster and more accurate.

That last part is what most operators underestimate. The first 90 days produce a roadmap. Years two and three are where the compounding shows up — and they only compound if the underlying intelligence is in place. Renewal lifts of 4–6 points, sponsor expansion, premium retention improvements — these don’t come from working harder. They come from seeing earlier.

If you’re a new VP of Ticketing — or you’re hiring one — and you want a clearer picture of how the best revenue leaders use their first 90 days to build the intelligence layer their team will rely on for the next five, we should talk.

Learn more at breadcrumb.ai/contact.