I did “12 Steps: A sponsor’s guide to the recovery” and it seemed to have struck a chord, so here is the other side.
As noted in the previous blog, our industry is looking up. There is some breathing room. In some places, the economy is on the upswing. In others, sponsors shifting out of their holding patterns, adjusting to the current economic conditions, and realising that sponsorship is still a very valuable marketing tool.
For sponsorship seekers, this is great news. But before you go all giddy with excitement, you need to know that sponsors are going to be smarter, more sophisticated, and more demanding than they have ever been. The bar is set high, and if you want to be part of this recovery, you need to have an approach and skills that are at that level.
So with a reverent nod to the practical steps pioneered by Alcoholics Anonymous and other recovery organisations, I have created a 12 Step Guide to the Recovery for Sponsorship Seekers.
1. Thank the economy
You may be struggling. You may be freaking out as sponsors question their investments or don’t renew. But this economic crisis has just handed you the biggest sponsorship opportunity you have ever had.
Sponsors are still spending money, they are just spending it smarter. They are spending it with organisations that are as sophisticated and proactive as they are. A huge gulf is opening between sponsorship seekers that are rising to that challenge and those who aren’t. You can be on the right side of that chasm – it is not that difficult. Your organisation can make that choice, and if you do, you will sustain more cash flow and be miles ahead of the competition as money starts to flow more freely.
Related blogs: Weathering the GFC: Best practice case studies from two great sponsees
Related reading: The Sponsorship Seeker’s Toolkit 3rd Edition
2. Get over yourself
Sponsorship is not about you, your organisation, your events or programs, your bigness, sexiness, or worthiness. Sponsorship is about a sponsor connecting their brand with their target markets in a meaningful, authentic, respectful way. It’s about a brand demonstrating an alignment with their target markets, showing that the brand cares about what they care about.
Sponsors know your endorsement has limited value, as people know it was bought and paid for. Sponsors don’t want to “align with” your organisation, no matter how good you are. They want to align with the people who care about your organisation and what you do. Therein lies your value, and the faster you embrace it, the faster you will see a benefit.
3. Embrace your most valuable role
What is your job, if not to align with or endorse the sponsor? Your job is to be a conduit – a tool – through which a sponsor can get closer to their target markets.
Embracing it isn’t that tough. It’s partly about the language you use in your proposals and meetings. It’s partly about the way you come up with the big ideas that will compel sponsors to say yes. But mostly, it’s about seeing yourself as a middleman (middleperson??), because it all flows from that.
Recommended white paper “Last Generation Sponsorship”
4. Treat your brands like brands
If you (or anyone of influence in your organisation) has ever said, “our market is the general public”, you are not treating your brands as brands. If your marketing looks anything like your mission statement, you are not treating your brands as brands.
You are a brand manager. Your organisation is a brand, and every event or program you are marketing is also a brand. Brand management is not so complicated that someone without a marketing degree can’t do it, but you must be prepared to go through the process if you want to maximise your marketing efforts, minimise your cost and marketing waste, and make yourself as appealing as possible to sponsors.
- What are your key psychographic target market segments?
- How do your target markets perceive your event or program – emotionally and functionally?
- What are the hot buttons that drive people to participate?
- What attributes make up the soul of your event?
- What messages will be most effective with your target markets? What media do they pay attention to?
- What are your unique selling points for your audience? For sponsors?
Yes, this is an oversimplification, but these are the biggest pieces of the puzzle. Unfortunately, most sponsorship seekers don’t know this information and haven’t developed a strategy around it.
You can find the whole process outlined within the context of sponsorship seekers in The Sponsorship Seeker’s Toolkit 3rd Edition. I also strongly recommend getting your hands on some well-reviewed, recent brand marketing books and reading them with the idea firmly in mind that you are a brand manager, and the same principles apply.
5. Swear off “levels”
Sponsors hate levels, and you should too.
Sponsors don’t want to pick off the menu, they want you to understand what they want and make something specifically for them. Giving them a choice of levels is telling them that one of three things is at play:
- You don’t care what they need
- You are too lazy to do your homework or customise a proposal
- You take an old-school, unsophisticated approach
Plus, when you offer levels, sponsors will generally gravitate toward the lowest one. If they want to be involved with your organisation or event, but you’re not making any real effort to tailor anything specific for them, why would they go big? You wouldn’t.
6. Think big
Levels are about small thinking. What I want you to do is to think big – about what you offer and much more.
Aim for fewer, bigger sponsors
Small sponsors take as much time – and often more time – to manage as larger sponsors. Why put yourself through the angst for so little money, when there is an alternative? Instead, target only the best matched potential sponsors and go all out to create amazing, comprehensive, and valuable sponsorships for them. Make plans to drop your least valuable, least engaged sponsors, and elevate your best.
Start your offer development from the “big idea”
Most proposals revolve around a set compliment of benefits. This is extremely limiting. Instead, throw out the rulebook and ask this question of your team, “if we were this sponsor and could do anything in the world to achieve our objectives and show our target markets how much we understand and value them, what would we do?” Have a huge brainstorm, pick the best ideas, and create the offer from there. You will be astounded how much more receptive sponsors will be. You wouldn’t do this for a tiny sponsor, but your goal is fewer, larger sponsors… isn’t it?
Make your event bigger by incorporating the whole event experience
Selling sponsorship isn’t only about the number of people who rock up to your event, it’s about all of the people who care about your event. 1000 people might take part in your walkathon, but how many people sponsored them, talked, blogged, and tweeted about it, posted photos to Facebook? You may have a conference that got only 200 people, but how many people will read the plenary papers in your newsletter, download the podcast, get the Twitter feed, and so on. Don’t limit your “event” to the event itself. Embrace the idea of the event experience, which goes from the moment someone first hears about your event until the last memory fades and can include everything from the ticket buying experience to the vibe at the pub to traffic hassles. People can have an event experience without ever going to the event, and if you pitch the entire experience as an opportunity for a sponsor to leverage, you are presenting a much more valuable opportunity to them.
Related blog: For maximum impact, forget the event, concentrate on the event experience
7. Listen
When you are trying to sell sponsorship, there is this pervasive belief that you have to spend your time “selling”. That could not be more wrong.
If you want to be successful, you need to spend most of your time paying attention.
- Pay attention to a potential sponsor’s advertising and other marketing messages, because they will tell you who the brand is targeting and the key message(s).
- Pay attention to a potential sponsor’s website, because they will tell you where they are putting their emphasis and often who they currently sponsor.
- Pay attention to the potential sponsor’s industry association, as they will often provide insights you won’t get elsewhere on their websites (many have searchable databases of articles from past publications).
- Pay attention to searches. Use ABI/Inform Full-Text Online (free, ask your nearest large library – it’s a ProQuest service) or Lexus Nexus (not free) to search thousands of global business magazines and newspapers to get additional intelligence on your potential sponsor.
Then, once you’ve got enough background that you are prepared to speak with the brand manager about their specific needs…
Listen to the sponsor. Don’t get over-excited because you’ve got a potential sponsor on the line and launch into some overwrought elevator speech. The first time you speak with a potential sponsor, you should be trying to fully understand their overall marketing objectives and priorities. Then go away and try to figure out how sponsoring your organisation will help them to achieve those goals.
8. Learn to know rejection when you see it
You can do everything right and you will still hear “no” more than you hear “yes”. Between corporate politics, budgets, changing priorities, and more, it’s just the nature of the beast. The problem is, a lot of sponsorship seekers don’t actually take “no” for an answer. More to the point, they don’t hear it when a sponsor rejects them.
Now hear this: Brand managers are the decision-makers 95% of the time. If the brand manager refers you to the ad agency or the sponsorship manager, they’ve just referred you to a gatekeeper, who will either tell you “no” or ignore you until you go away.
In fact, if anyone in the sponsorship food chain is ignoring you – that is, haven’t answered three voicemails or emails – it’s a “no”, and it’s time to move on.
Don’t take rejection personally. Keep in mind that some sponsors get hundreds of proposals, letters, and phone calls every single week, whether they are in acquisition mode or not. It would be nice if they could all get back to you and explain why it’s not going to work, but realistically, most just don’t have the time, so they ignore you and hope you get the hint.
Related blog: Six signs a sponsor is just not that into you
9. Sell, but don’t sell out
Do not let a sponsor change your event if that change hurts your event. Do not let them disrespect your target markets. Do not let them commercialise what you do in an unseemly way. I don’t care how big a cheque they wave in front of you, alienating your target markets for money is a losing proposition.
If they want a specific type of event or benefit, you could offer to create one for them and charge accordingly. Better yet, negotiate so they get access to plenty of your IP (intellectual property – logo, information, expertise, photos, behind-the-scenes, etc) and encourage them to create a leverage program that fits their needs exactly. This is also a great way to create big sponsor value from events or programs with a small or sensitive participant base, but a lot of relevance to a broader target market. Examples:
A homeless charity serves a niche, disadvantaged community. The clients themselves probably have little commercial value to a sponsor, but the issue of homelessness and support for homeless people is a much broader issue. Creating a donations program for customers or an employee volunteer program (or both) is a much better idea than branding blankets and coffee cups.
It would be inappropriate for a sponsor to put branding or heavy marketing to the participants in a self-esteem program for inner-city girls. But, using the program to underpin a brand that stands for celebrating and building strong girls and women would be extremely valuable. What they would need to make that work is plenty of IP, so they can create an amazing leverage program for their own customers.
Related blog: Pet peeve #228: Disrespectful sponsorship
10. Avoid pressure situations
When you are selling sponsorship, you are selling opportunity. It is the sponsor’s leverage program that provides the results for them. What does that have to do with pressure? Plenty.
It takes sponsors time to develop and implement a leverage program that is going to provide strategic value to their bran. If you are still selling close to your event (generally, less than six months), you are reducing the time they can devote to creating the leverage activities that will give them a result. If you are selling less than three months before your event, there is little chance a sponsor will be able to create and launch a leverage program, so the upshot is that you are selling opportunity with no chance for a sponsor to get a result. You’re unlikely to be successful and you’ll damage your credibility. Not good.
You need to shift your sales cycle back as far as you can, with the goal being that the bulk of your sponsorship will be sold six months prior to your event. You can then spend that six months assisting sponsors with getting their leverage activities happening.
Related blog: What should you do when your board sets unrealistic sponsorship targets?
11. Don’t be a slave to a lost cause
Time to get real. Some of the events you seek sponsorship for are just not appealing to sponsors. There is no shame in that – your organisation’s job is to provide events and programs and services that your target markets need, not churn out a succession of commercially “sexy” sponsorship opportunities. The problem is, a lot of sponsorship seekers spend a huge amount of time trying in vain to raise sponsorship for them.
Here’s what you do instead: Raise as much money as you possibly can selling sponsorship of your “sexiest”, most commercially attractive events and programs, using them to generate money to help underwrite your less commercial events. Job done.
In case you just said to yourself, “isn’t it unethical to sell more sponsorship than the event needs?”, the answer is “no”. When you are selling sponsorship, you are selling marketing opportunity, not the right to underwrite your costs, and it is worth what it’s worth. Seriously, job done.
12. Mix with a more diverse crowd
All you non-profits out there, you could learn a lot from big sports and festivals. Sports, you could learn a lot from the arts and membership associations. Actually, you could all learn a lot from each other.
What I am trying to get at – after way, way too many hours writing this HUGE blog – is that if you want to learn something new, to be innovative, you need to look outside of your own segment of the industry for case studies and ideas. Find concepts that you can twist and make work in your own organisation!
The key word here is “find”, because the most innovative festival director in Canada is unlikely to be speaking at a conference for fundraisers, and the NBA team marketing manager who managed to get every sponsor to do something innovative on their website is unlikely to write a paper for national museum association newsletter. I’m not knocking the resources that serve your segment. I’m simply saying that you should be seeking out the best ideas in sponsorship, not the best ideas solely in your segment.
Go to conferences that serve a different segment of sponsorship seekers. Check out the websites and media that serve those other segments. Look for amazing case studies from across segments on ABI/Inform Full-Text Online. Give yourself a huge edge.
