The Great Dan Steinberg had a D.C. Sports Bog post today about teams incentivizing fans to become salespersons for the organization.

The Redskins, TGDS writes, are currently offering a big discount on premium seats to any ticketholder who brings more premium ticketbuyers to the organization.

Here’s some copy from the team’s promotion of its referral program posted on the Redskins website:

“SAVE $1,000 each time your friends, family members, or business associates purchase a new pair of 2011 Premium Season Tickets. There is no limit to your savings!”

By all appearances the overall ticket-selling picture at FedExField is uglier than ever before—they are in the midst of removing thousands of seats from the stadium and installing “party decks” in their place.

Then again, sales of club seats have been lousy in Redskins Land for a real long while.

And, on a related note, this isn’t the first time Dan Snyder‘s team has tried to get customers to recruit friends and family with them to the club level.

In 2006, the team debuted something called the “Club Connections Referral Program.” Here’s the pitch from that scheme:

Football is a team game and with that in mind, the Redskins are now offering a unique referral program for existing Premium Seat Members. Start building your team today. Tailgate together before the game, watch the Redskins at FedExField with your friends and family, celebrate after a big play and enjoy the Club Level during the 5th Quarter Party.

One sign of the current ticket-moving doldrums: The incentives offered by the Redskins nowadays are a helluva lot more generous than they were five years ago.

Club Connections participants who sold an additional pair of premium seats to “friends, family, or business associates,” for example, only got to choose between getting a signed Redskins jersey or two Tailgate Club passes, which were good for a pre-game buffet. That’s not quite the $1,000 now being offered.

Four seats brought you the jersey/Tailgate Club passes and a pair of “VIP Draft Day Party Invitations” in 2006. (The extra prizes were accumulated with each pair, “12 Days of Christmas”-style.) Six got you into the “Welcome Home Luncheon.” Anybody who moved eight club tickets also got a visit to the Touchdown Club, which means the buffet plus a pre-game field pass. And if you sold 10 club seats for Snyder, you got all the above plus a trip for two to an away game, a benefit that—according to Club Connections literature—was worth $3,800. (Redskins spokesman Tony Wyllie declined to comment on why the incentives had gone up.)

Nowadays, you move five pairs for the team, you get five grand off the bottom line of your premium tickets invoice.

‘Course, anybody who can sell 10 club seats in the current environment would probably also get a job offer to run the Redskins ticket office.