Tag: SELLING SPONSORSHIP

Top Tips for Sponsorship Sales Calls 19th October, 2018

In our previous blog, we outlined the importance of prospecting and having a tailored approach to every brand that could be a potential sponsor: now it’s time to approach these brands.

The initial call is a fundamental aspect of the sales process, as the old saying goes: first impressions mean everything. Below are Slingshots top tips for making sponsorship sales calls and creating a stand out impression for your opportunity.

Use your hooks from prospecting: A solid prospect list will be a goldmine of reasons why a brand would make the perfect sponsor, the challenge now is to translate this to the person on the other end of the phone. Relating the approach back to the key reasons why a brand would sponsor enables you to demonstrate the areas of business your property will add value to and keeps the call clear and direct. Sponsorship isn’t a fundraising request, it’s a bonafide, tried and tested marketing tool that adds value to their business and the call should deliver that to the prospect a concise way.

Effective questioning: As a sales professional, there’s nothing worse than thinking you’ve got a really hot lead only to find out later on that that your lead is a non-starter. To avoid this episode, it is crucial to ask the right qualifying questions (if you generate initial interest on the call) as early on in the process as possible: “Are you the sole decision-maker on sponsorship opportunities for the brand?”, “When do budgets generally get allocated for the brand?”, “Are you in talks regarding any other sponsorship opportunities currently” All are inoffensive questions that will qualify your lead and save wasting time on dead ends.

The follow up: If the brand is interested, it is vital to set up a follow up call. Sponsorship has a long lead time sometimes up to 3 years before the event, and without a real sense of urgency brands can be lacklustre to respond. Therefore, it’s the sales person’s job to create that urgency. By arranging the follow up call it puts a lose deadline for internal meetings and discussions on the brand side and hopefully keeps your proposal near the top of the pile.

“It’s a no from me”: It happens, we all get rejected. But, the important thing to remember is to try to keep the conversation alive. By asking a few “why not’s” here and there, a good salesperson will divulge information about the brands marketing objectives. Armed with new information, a counter-argument can be formed with assets that will help achieve these goals and ease their doubts. Additionally, it aids prospecting for future opportunities: brands can be pre-qualified based on previous conversations.

By sticking to research and depicting the opportunity correctly, an approach can be made that not only demonstrates the potential of the opportunity, but also protects relationships with brands. By having a genuine set of reasons for a call, a line of communication is opened that will keep ears open for future opportunities. Without proper justification for a call, sales people risk irritating the receiver, damaging personal reputation and severing any opportunity for future conversation.

If you are looking for advice on sponsorship sales or any aspect of the sponsorship industry, we would be more than happy to offer our expertise, please email [email protected] with any enquiries.

Slingshot Sponsorship’s MD Jackie Fast Goes Down Under 16th July, 2015

Slingshot Sponsorship’s MD Jackie Fast will be presenting a two day training course in Sydney, Australia on October 27^th and 28^th with Marcus Evans. This is a unique chance to hear from one of the industry’s leading experts on how to successfully secure sponsorship in today’s landscape.

With the increase of digital and technology, this has created a seismic shift in the way consumers engage in the world around them – and this has a significant impact on brands and how brands utilise sponsorship to engage with their target audiences. Slingshot have successfully been a driving force within this new framework of sponsorship and this two day course will show you why traditional sponsorship practices no longer work in today’s industry.

Key takeaways from the event will include:

Understanding the new rules of sponsorship
Incorporating social media and digital technology to enhance sponsorship activity
Learning how sponsorship can grow your business, not just your commercial bottomline
Elaborating the market trends on sponsorship sectors including sport, arts, music, conferences and CSR
Maximising your true potential

Jackie Fast commented, “I am extremely thrilled to be coming to Australia to present our agency’s framework for sustainable sponsorship for both rights holders and brands. With an office in Singapore, we can help provide further support our attendees in the long term so I am thrilled to be able to come down and start engaging with the Australian sponsorship industry.”

For more information or to book your place please click here.

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:

Know your USP – what makes you a more viable sponsorship opportunity than your competitor
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.
Know your prospect’s challenges and understand why you can help them when no one else can.
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.
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”.

Join Our Webinar – we’ll teach you how to get the right sponsorship 19th June, 2015

At Slingshot Sponsorship we’ve already helped dozens of companies find the right commercial partners. Whether it’s to help them grow, reach a bigger audience, or simply make a project a success, there’s one common theme: we find clients the right, long-term partners.

At the root of it, that’s what Slingshot Sponsorship does differently.

To get there, our clients normally go through our intensive Bootcamp. But we want more businesses and individuals to benefit from the Slingshot approach.

So, working with our friends at Monkfeet, we’re launching our first webinar.

Looking from the perspectives of both attracting and proposing sponsorship, we’ll take you through:

Tricks and tips for making the most of sponsorship opportunities
How to form valuable marketing and marketing partnerships
Understanding your proposition
How to write a sponsorship proposal
How to navigate the sponsorship sales process

This 55-minute online course might be the best £25 you’ll ever spend. Book now!

We’re also hosting in-person, in-depth sponsorship workshops at Monkfeet: take a look at our courses.

Slingshot Sponsorship Launch Full Day Training Events in London 12th January, 2015

Slingshot Sponsorship is delighted to announce that they have expanded their popular Slingshot Sponsorship Bootcamp training to also now provide full day, in-depth Sponsorship Sessions held each month in London. The sole aim of the Sponsorship Sessions will be to provide teams the necessary tools to increase their commercial capacity within sponsorship for their event, charity, start-up, association, sports team, or online network.

Most organisations fail to reach their full sponsorship potential due to common pitfalls. By working in a small team, industry expert Jackie Fast (MD of Slingshot Sponsorship) will create a tailored training programme for each attendee in order to help pinpoint challenges and create strategies and tools to overcome them.

Jackie Fast commented: “Unfortunately, typical sponsorship training and education often fails to address the different challenges organisations face when tackling sponsorship. To be successful, one needs to really question these variables in order to recommend the right sponsorship strategy. The Sponsorship Sessions allow us to do this by working in very small groups with a format that encompasses absolutely everything teams need to learn to truly develop commercially. The success we have had with our training programme has even shocked me – having helped raise £1.27m additional sponsorship revenue for our attendees in the last three years alone. Having kept our Bootcamp under wraps previously, I am absolutely thrilled to be bringing this training scheme out to the masses!”

The Sponsorship Sessions combine the need for high level training at the cost of attending a sponsorship conference (£219/ticket) – ensuring that attendees walk away with a clear direction on how to build the right sponsorship programme for their own organisation.

Previous Slingshot Sponsorship Bootcamp attendee Charlene Asamoah, Corporate Fundraising Manager from Parkinson’s UK commented: “It was absolutely amazing bringing Slingshot Sponsorship to Parkinson’s UK and I truly believe it was one of the best things I have done whilst working here. Our entire team have changed dramatically and it’s all for the better!”

The next Slingshot Sponsorship Session will take place on Thursday 22^nd January. More information on the agenda and booking can be found here. Or please contact Slingshot directly at [email protected]

To read some testimonials from previous Slingshot Sponsorship Bootcamp attendees click here.

It’s Not Who You Know 10th March, 2014

Three questions you should be asking your sponsorship sales person before you hire them

I have been in far too many pitches where I dread the question and answer period at the end. This is not because I don’t like answering questions, it’s because the questions are always the wrong ones. It never fails that when people are looking to hire a sponsorship sales person (regardless of whether it’s an internal hire or contracted external agency) the questions they always ask are the same and include a variation of the following:

“How many brands do you know that you’ll be able to get to sponsor our platform?”

Sometimes the person in question is slyer and the question comes across as:

“In terms of relationships you currently have, how many of those do you think you would be able to approach on our behalf?”

It always comes down to the black book.

Now in theory this makes a lot of sense. Obviously the more brands they know personally, the easier it will be for that sponsorship salesperson to put your platform in front of them. However, this doesn’t address the whole point of sponsorship sales. Sponsorship sales are not transactional – unlike selling socks or vacuum cleaners, you have to understand how to derive value from set assets to drive brand objectives. Creative thinking is vital. Sponsorship sales are specific and not all sponsorship platforms are the best fit for all brands. As such, it becomes less about the relationship and more about how the platform can help the brand meet certain objectives. Even though I have drinks with the Marketing Director from Pampers, but that doesn’t mean they are going to sponsor Tough Mudder just because I asked politely over cocktails.

In addition, any sponsorship sales person or sponsorship sales agency who has lasted longer than 1 year will inevitably have a good black book. And even if they don’t have a strong black book in your specific sector, they will know quite easily how to build one quickly. That is after all, what they do and why there are at the pitch to begin with.

So rather than waste time on answers that really won’t make too much of a difference to your end result, here are the top 3 questions you should be asking:

How long is your longest running client and why have they stayed with you for so long?
Have you ever lost a client because of not meeting your sales targets? *To note, there are many variables that can affect sponsorship sales so if someone hasn’t met targets I wouldn’t write them off. Instead, try to understand whether they took on the project without being transparent to their client about their own concerns such as pricing that is overvalued or timing that is unrealistic.
What do you think the key USP of our platform is and what type of brands do you think it would attract?

Happy hiring!