Open Forum

I'm sharing a message from the Executive Director of a historic theatre (The Ritz in Corpus Christi, TX)--we're a National Register site currently going through rehabilitation to open. As part of our architectural planning, we're creating dedicated events space that we expect to be in demand for rentals in our city. Right now, it looks like about 300 seated as well as several small classroom/meeting rooms that can be used for smaller meetings/breakout sessions (in addition to our auditorium/stage).

We aren't finding lots of comparable businesses in historic theatres, I think because so many are landlocked and don't have the flexibility we have to create a space like this--but I know I've seen it done in museums! We're specifically looking at sites that have proactive sales teams versus "wait til the phone rings" rental bookings but if you have stats to share on your venue rentals in general we'd love to hear them! 
Thank you!
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I'm looking to gather insight from facilities who have a dedicated event sales team focused on actively generating business for rentals and special events.

To clarify, I'm referring to team members who are out in the field prospecting, networking, building relationships, and pursuing new business-not staff whose primary role is handling inbound website or phone inquiries.

I'd appreciate any feedback you're willing to share on the following:

• Do you have a dedicated outbound event sales team, or even a single dedicated salesperson?
• What types of events are they primarily selling (corporate meetings, private parties, buyouts, community events, weddings, etc.)?
• How is compensation structured? Base salary + commission, commission only, bonus model, or another method?
• If you're comfortable sharing, approximately what annual sales volume do they generate?
• Has having a proactive sales function been worth the investment?

I'm exploring best practices and would greatly value any real-world insight from those currently doing this successfully.

Thank you in advance for sharing your experience.

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Jillian Becquet
Corpus Christi, TX
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HI Jullian,

We've actually been having similar conversations with a few museums and venues that rent out their spaces, so this topic has come up quite a bit recently.

We did some light research around how different organizations approach rentals (Chicago area), especially the difference between more passive "wait for inquiries" models and those with a more proactive sales function, and it answered a lot of the same questions you're raising here.

One consistent theme we're seeing is that venues that treat rentals more like a structured sales function (even with just one dedicated person) tend to get much better utilization and more predictable bookings, especially on the corporate side.

The reason we originally looked into this is because we've been exploring ways to support these teams with AI, mainly around helping salespeople respond faster, capture more inquiries, and move things through the pipeline more efficiently without needing a large team.

If you'd like to see the report we put together, feel free to email me at tanya.lipovich@gmail.com
I'm happy to share.

Best
Tanya

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Tanya Lipovich
Fractional CMO
San Ramon CA
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Sending an email, I'd love to see it! 

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Jillian Becquet
Corpus Christi TX
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Original Message:
Sent: 04-28-2026 02:42 PM
From: Tanya Lipovich
Subject: Sales of Rental Spaces

HI Jullian,

We've actually been having similar conversations with a few museums and venues that rent out their spaces, so this topic has come up quite a bit recently.

We did some light research around how different organizations approach rentals (Chicago area), especially the difference between more passive "wait for inquiries" models and those with a more proactive sales function, and it answered a lot of the same questions you're raising here.

One consistent theme we're seeing is that venues that treat rentals more like a structured sales function (even with just one dedicated person) tend to get much better utilization and more predictable bookings, especially on the corporate side.

The reason we originally looked into this is because we've been exploring ways to support these teams with AI, mainly around helping salespeople respond faster, capture more inquiries, and move things through the pipeline more efficiently without needing a large team.

If you'd like to see the report we put together, feel free to email me at tanya.lipovich@gmail.com
I'm happy to share.

Best
Tanya

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Tanya Lipovich
Fractional CMO
San Ramon CA
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Hi Jillian,

this is a great question and I'm happy that you and your ED are making that distinction between a passive and a proactive sales team. I joined NHMU a little over a year ago and we've worked on evolving from the former to the latter, with some preliminary success - but we're only now starting to see some momentum so I don't feel I can claim victory yet. But I can tell you some of the things we have done to move toward a more proactive model:

• we've started using a rental management platform (we chose Perfect Venue which is right-sized for us, but there are others)
• I developed a detailed dashboard that shows new leads, sales pipeline status, inventory usage, conversion rates at various stages of the pipeline, year-to-year comparisons, distribution of type of events, etc. I review this with the events team regularly and we plan how to push specific leads over the finish line, or how to activate some months in which we're seeing low reservations.
• We joined NACE (National Association of Caterer and Events) and have started attending networking local events and inviting other members to come see our space, with some incentives for them if they refer us.
• We hosted a couple of free evening events for local decision-makers, to show them what an event at NHMU can look like. 
• We're going after DMCs to encourage them to bring clients to us.
• Most importantly, we're in the process of creating a detailed marketing strategy, starting with really polishing our value proposition, our client promise, and our messaging. We've done some targeted advertising on social and specialized magazines (e.g. Utah Bride). I'm working with the team on market segmentation and other strategies to get more inquiries in our market segment - we get a lot of inquiries (especially for weddings) but a lot of them don't convert because we're not in the price range they are looking for. So we want to really focus on finding the right prospects; that works better with corporate receptions than weddings.

I'm happy to share more details offline, you can email me at aestable@nhmu.utah.edu. Tanya, I'm reaching out to you as well :-)

Kindly,

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Axel Estable MBA
Director of Operations
Natural History Museum of Utah - University of Utah
Salt Lake City UT
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