Job Description: Madison Square Garden

Job Description: Madison Square Garden

            This past summer I was worked in New York City as a Partnership Sales Intern in the Sports and Entertainment department for The Madison Square Garden Company. I want to have a career in the sports and entertainment industry so there was no better place for me to intern for than at “The World’s Most Famous Arena.” MSG is a huge company with over 2000 employees and 65 interns. Despite the company being so big, it was divided into many smaller departments. Even though there were 65 interns all working at the same company, I was the only one with my title and worked under a team of 7 total people with 2 of them being my direct supervisors.

There are three descriptions that describe what my main responsibilities were while working at Madison Square Garden:

·      Prospecting

·      Identifying Key Executives

·      Partnership Project

Prospecting

The main aspect of my job was to “prospect.” By the end of every week I had to email a sheet with 20 companies that could be potential partners or sponsors of MSG. I also had to list which MSG property that they would be a good fit for the company and give a recommendation for a specific way that they could partner with MSG, such as billboards, in-game promotions, jersey patch deals, among other things. There were multiple things that I would look for in a company in order to consider it a possible match with MSG.

One example was if a company recently had a change in leadership. Those would always be good companies to consider because new executives want to start building up the company their own way and my bosses always liked to reach out to new executives of companies to find out if they wanted to partner with us.

Another example was if a company had recently partnered with another sports and entertainment company. Other things I looked for were if a company was opening a location in the area of an MSG property or if they showed their marketing strategy was targeting a specific demographic. To get the 20 companies a week I was always on social media, sports business websites, reading newspapers, and just keeping my eyes open in general to anything going on within the sports and entertainment industry.

The best example I can give for how I helped MSG through prospecting was finding introducing one of my bosses to Attendee.com as a possible title sponsor for a College Basketball game held at MSG around Christmas. I recommended them to him since they are an up and coming company who is hoping to grow their brand. Their company promotes the live event experience, which is obviously what MSG does and therefore made this a perfect partnership for that game.

Identifying Key Executives

Another one of my main responsibilities was identifying key executives and preparing biographies to show my bosses. When one of the companies that I sent to my team was one that one we wanted to pursue, my bosses would ask me to find out who the top executives of the company were, find their contact information, and prepare biographies on those people. These included facts including their work history, past education, family, interests, and more. I always felt a little weird when I was doing this since I was using a service MSG paid for to find their emails and phone numbers and then had to stalk their social media pages to find information about them. However, I definitely realized that it was important after sitting in on sales meetings with these people and saw my bosses made sure the conversation went in a direction where they could use their knowledge of the client’s interests as an advantage. Other times I would look up this information because one of my bosses realized that he met the person before and knew that if he could mention something about them to them then it would go a long way in making the sale. That was an aspect of my job that wasn’t my favorite but when I have my bosses’ job, I definitely will be asking my interns to do the same for me.

Partnership Project

For the final two weeks of my internship I was tasked with picking a company out of my weekly prospect lists and to make sales pitch to my team as if they were executives from that company. The company that I chose was Quest Nutrition and after my initial meeting with the “Quest Executives” I was told that they wanted to target families with young children with their new products. They wanted to see a presentation for how one of MSG’s properties could do that for them and maximize their exposure. I presented them with the opportunity to sponsor the Christmas Spectacular Starring the Radio City Rockettes. I chose the Christmas Spectacular because the main demographic of people who attend that show are families and knew that having a strong presence at the show could be really beneficial for a brand. I presented them with the opportunity to sell their products at their own stand, have some of the Rockettes pose for pictures while holding their products, visible signage throughout the show, and VIP access for Quest Nutrition’s employees and clients. In one of my last days on the job I presented this proposal to my bosses, which included the Senior Vice President and Executive Vice President of Corporate Partnerships. They gave me great feedback on my presentation, which has definitely helped prepare me for my future career. I’m so thankful to have gotten to work for Madison Square Garden and I hope to one day have my bosses’ jobs.

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