Ch. 17 - Personal Selling and Sales Management

                               Taking Risk 101: relationship selling & Generating leads

Every single inherent move Empire makes is devoted to selling its brand as a whole, this is always first priority: The image of the company. The brand and the players have a symbiotic relationship, even if a players value may not be high, being affiliated with the brand itself raises his or her worth.  If this sounds weird, then again you have to look at this as a sport! Would you rather have the number one player on one team or the 2nd, 3rd, 4th best players all on one team? Empire trades the idea of having an all-star team rather then just having one dominant player. This works in their favor because anytime Empire is in the lime-light everyone gets their shine. 


Enough rambling! So where am I going with this? 
Empire Arcadia is not a sponsorship, although contrary to my statement they will sponsor players to events at times. This means Empire, must seek outside sponsors. The hardcore and casual gamers as I said before are not the only ones consider consumers to Empire, other businesses are consider consumers as well. This is where Empire utilizes its players to develop both interpersonal and business relationships with sponsors and players with "pull". I say "pull" as the definition of someone who has power in the world of gaming. Often if not the sponsor or consumer becomes very passionate about helping Empire even sharing in their views, which is the process where they empathize with Empire and become trusting of their work ethic, goals, image and marketing capabilities.

Networking is by far the biggest form of generating leads Empire uses to find potential buyers. As I said before, Empire heavily relies on social media sites and public relation tactics in order to put word out of upcoming events, company updates and even logs of championships they may have obtained recently. For example, I am a member of Empire ( yeah no surprise right) and I have been inactive as a player for the last 3 years, but I still maintain a mass following on social media websites due to the amount "shine" being passed around through Empire every single week. So lets say I have 4000 people added on Facebook and another player apart of Empire has 5000 added, anytime something is posted to our wall on average I would say about 6000 people are seeing this across their news feed give or take we have some of the same people added. It's like advertisement and generating leads all at once, its genius!