Sponsorship Sales Basics – Part One: “It’s Not My Proposal, It’s My Lack of Contacts” 26th June, 2015

We have been running a monthly event at our Head Office since December (find our next Sessions event) and some of the challenges and hurdles that are being faced by quite diverse companies we have been helping seem to be the same.  Therefore, I have decided to create a Sponsorship Sales Series for the beginner.  If you are an expert, this blog is not for you – you might be more interested in reading this.

 

The one thing I hear quite often is that the lack of success in sponsorship sales has nothing to do with the capability, the product or the proposal – but rather, because they just don’t have the contacts.

Opportunities that are truly great opportunities for a company and are communicated well will get noticed within any business.  It is quite easy to make excuses for lack of sponsorship sales from junior sales teams because they just don’t know the right people, when in actual fact the problem lies not in their little black book, but their inexperience at understanding the true proposition between your organisation and the prospect’s strategy.

With the right proposal, right property, to the right brand – there is no sale.

Far too often a significant amount of investment is spent in sponsorship taking sales training courses and the creation of tools to support the value such as media research – without actually addressing the real issues.  Media results and training are incredibly useful tools for a sponsorship team, but if the people generating the leads don’t understand why they are making the approach, these tools become useless.

The 5 Top Tips of Prospecting for Sponsorship:

  1. Know your USP – what makes you a more viable sponsorship opportunity than your competitor
  2. Stop contacting the Big 5 just because you’ve seen their logo on other sponsorship campaigns: HSBC, Barclays, Coca-Cola, Google, and Emirates. This is not a good enough reason to be contacting them.
  3. Know your prospect’s challenges and understand why you can help them when no one else can.
  4. The sponsorship needs to work on a number of levels across a brand’s business – so understand how this will impact and support wider business objectives.
  5. Stop randomly contacting people in hopes that someone will read your proposal. Within any Marketing Director’s job description nowhere does it ever read “to read over 12,000 proposals, feedback to each person who has submitted something, and then find one that works for the business”.