NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — The University of Tennessee has more seats in its football stadium and basketball arena than perhaps any college in the country. But until this week it barely made any effort to go out and sell tickets.

It’s a similar story at many leading universities, where the concept of ticket sales often means answering the phone in the ticket office or mailing out season-ticket renewal forms.

But, after years of seeing a steady decline in its football ticket sales, Tennessee has decided it’s time to turn pro — in ticket sales, at least.

It’s the third Division I college, joining Duke University and San Jose State University, that in May have signed with IMG College Ticket Solutions, a unit of the burgeoning IMG College division of sports and entertainment agency IMG Worldwide.

University of Tennessee’s Neyland Stadium has more than 100,000 seats.

“There’s been some real changes in how tickets are purchased, especially the secondary market with websites such as StubHub and Ticket Exchange,” said Chris Fuller, senior associate athletic director for external operations at Tennessee. “We wanted to be proactive.”

Fuller said secondary-market sites, together with better televisions and viewing technology, a poor economy and ever-growing distractions for fans — especially students — had made ticket sales more challenging. Read about how these trends have hurt Major League Baseball’s attendance.

University of Tennessee

Tennessee’s Neyland Stadium has 102,455 seats and about 72,500 available season tickets. Fuller said that while several years ago the football team would see “hard sellouts” for five of its seven home games, last season just three game were hard sellouts, and season-ticket figures are at about 67,000. Its Thompson-Boling basketball arena likewise is one of the country’s largest, seating 21,678, with 14,700 available season tickets.

Cue the deal with IMG College Ticket Solutions, signed last week. IMG will bring in a general manager and build a staff of eight to 12 salespeople by mid-June, all of whom will be focused full-time on selling tickets and providing customer care to ticket holders. Right now, Tennessee has seven people in its ticket office whose role is largely taking and processing orders.

The Temple way

The system appears to work, to judge by the experience of Temple University, which signed up to the program last year. Temple’s operation grew from what Eric Roedl, senior associate athletic director, called a one-and-a-half person ticket office to an IMG-hired general manager and four salespeople who between them make 1,000 calls a week.

“We used to send out direct mailings and take out ads, but that’s not enough these days,” said Roedl.

The IMG team, which is typically based on campus, calls alumni, students’ parents, faculty and staff and also upsells previous ticket buyers.

Roedl said last year Temple football-ticket sales and revenue were up about 30% on the previous year. For the coming season, those figures are on course to see year-on-year growth of more than 100%. Temple recently signed a two-year extension with IMG.

IMG College Ticket Solutions is the brainchild of Matt DiFebo, who helped pioneer a professional approach to ticket selling while associate athletic director at the University of Central Florida. He’d previously worked in ticket sales with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and Seattle SuperSonics.

“We brought in a full-time staff focused on selling year-round and using client relationship-management systems,” said DiFebo of his time at UCF. “We also incentivized the staff to sell.”

Under DiFebo, UCF’s football season-ticket-holder rolls grew to 23,000 from 13,000, and revenue from total ticket sales rose by more than $4.5 million a year.

After setting up his own company, DiFebo’s operation was bought by IMG in a deal that closed in January. The fruits of being part of IMG, which is rapidly growing in the college space, are shown in the three new deals. IMG College Ticket Solutions is in talks with three other Division I universities, said a company spokesman, declining to name the schools.