All I need is the Right Contact…

Sometimes, sponsorship seekers approach sponsorship like they would winning the lottery.

You know, how if you just had that million-dollar ticket, all your problems in life would disappear.

Well, if a sponsorship seeker just had the right contact, their lives would irreversibly change for the better. They’d have so many companies banging down their door asking for sponsorship that they’d have to turn people down!

So when I talk to sponsorship seekers like these, and I ask them why their sponsorship program isn’t progressing as they want, why they’re not meeting the milestones they set, they tell me “all I need is the right contact.”

I hear this, or some variation of it, every single week. 

I understand why this belief is so common, but the reality is, it’s incorrect.

In today’s post, I want to tell you why.

Your “Right Contact” Is Inundated with Sponsorship Requests 

Who is the right contact at this phase of your sponsorship program?

I might not have a crystal ball, but I do have many years of sponsorship experience, so I think I can harbor a guess.

If you asked me, I’d say the quote-unquote right contact for most sponsorship seekers is a Fortune-500, household brand, multi-million-dollar company. 

Why? These companies are akin to the lottery ticket example from the intro. 

Partnering with a sponsor like this would make your problems go away. You’d have more than enough money to throw your dream gala, sports event, or convention.

The amount of promotion you’d get would be through the roof. With the promotion would come more social media followers, more website traffic, more email list subscribers, and more leads. 

With those leads, you’d have an increase in sales and hopefully customer conversion as well.

The thing with these Fortune-500, household brand, multi-million-dollar companies is that they’re inundated with unsolicited sponsorship requests to the point of being overwhelmed. 

You only have to talk to any brand or sponsor and ask them how many unsolicited sponsorship packages they receive every day. In one case, a sponsor told me that they receive over 10,000 proposals every single month.

That’s right, 10,000 proposals in 30 days! 

Even if a sponsor of this caliber wanted to entertain some of those proposals, they just don’t have time to sift through them. 

So what happens to your unsolicited sponsorship proposal? It sits on someone’s desk, or in someone’s email inbox, unread and collecting dust. Eventually, it’s cleared out and recycled without ever having been touched. 

You had the right contact, so to speak, but none of what you were expecting to happen transpired. 

They didn’t give you boatloads of money or tons of publicity. You were passed over, and now you’re stuck in your sponsorship program. 

The Risk of Getting in Front of the Right Contact at the Wrong Time 

Allow me to illustrate why the right contact alone isn’t enough and why sometimes, the right contact at the wrong time can be the worst potential outcome for sponsorship seekers.

I’ll do so by telling you the story of Sarah, a client of mine. 

You see, Sarah came into things a little more experienced than the average sponsorship seeker. She knew how to get in front of Fortune 500 companies, and when she found a sponsorship prospect of that caliber, she didn’t struggle to land a meeting with the company.

Her boss and CEO, recognizing what a potentially lucrative opportunity this could be, also wanted to attend the meeting with the chief marketing officer of the Fortune 500 company.

So the meeting begins. Sarah tries to pitch her sponsorship package. However, the chief marketing officer didn’t want to see her materials. He just had some questions he wanted to go through.

He asked Sarah about her company’s audience. She gave him a vague response, describing her audience as her conference attendees. When the CMO asked for further audience data, Sarah couldn’t provide it.

The CMO next asked about activation ideas. Sarah suggested logo placement to drive brand awareness, but the CMO told her that his company wasn’t at the brand awareness stage anymore. Instead, they were trying to generate leads, but Sarah had no ideas for the CMO on how to do that.

As you could probably tell, the meeting was a dud. Not only did Sarah blow it with her Fortune 500 contact, but her boss was so unimpressed with the meeting and how it made the company look that Sarah received a warning.

It was then that she called me, in a panic over almost losing her job. She asked me if there was any way to fix the situation.

While I told her yes, there was, it wouldn’t involve the Fortune 500 company she had met with. That bridge was burnt, and there was no way to build it up right now.

Maybe in a few years, Sarah could talk to the CMO again (if he’s even still with the company) and discuss another sponsorship request, but for now, that door was firmly shut.  

Decision-Makers Are Hard to Convince!

Although it’s a harrowing tale, Sarah’s story is hardly unique. You see, even if you have the right materials in front of you, it’s not always easy to convince a decision-maker. In fact, I’d say more often than not, it’s very difficult!

So why am I telling you this? Am I trying to dissuade you from your sponsorship aspirations? Absolutely not.

Instead, I’m trying to drive home the point that when you do finally get that meeting with the right contact, you must ensure it’s the right time. 

How do you do that? It’s not like you have control over time itself, right? That’s true, you don’t, However, you do have control over what you present to your sponsors, which I’ll get to momentarily.

Finding Your True Right Contact

At some point in your business or organization’s history of sponsorship, might a large company be the right contact for you? Yes. 

Heck, that could be the case right now.  

As I always advise on this blog, when selecting prospect(s) to approach for sponsorship, you have to use the right criteria. You shouldn’t select a company based on how rich it is alone or by how well-known the brand is.

Instead, you have to ask yourself two questions. 1.) Would my audience like the products and services this company sells? 2.) Does this company have a problem I can solve?

Sponsorship is a two-way street, remember. In exchange for a boatload of cash, you have to give the sponsor something. Usually, that’s your expertise.

Through an exploratory meeting known as the discovery session, you get to know the sponsor’s problems. You can then craft solutions that may work for them. 

If you can’t offer a company anything, then they’re not the right fit for you. End of story. 

Further, if you feel like you’re selling out your audience just to get in front of a high-end sponsorship prospect, then they’re also not the right fit.  

The Right Contact Alone Isn’t Enough 

Do you know the old saying, “be careful what you wish for because you just might get it?” That’s not some scary phrase to discourage kids from wishing for a large sum of money or something.

It’s because sometimes, getting what you want is a problem. 

All those who believe that their biggest problem is getting in front of the right people change their minds once they actually get in front of the right people.

That’s when it becomes obvious that the sponsorship seeker is unprepared. Here’s what I mean.

The Wrong Opportunity 

Listen, Sarah made a lot of mistakes, but one of her most egregious was failing to present an opportunity to the CFO of the Fortune 500 company she spoke to. She didn’t really have any opportunity to offer, just basic logo placement.

In exchange, she thought she’d receive tens of thousands of dollars in funds. That’s not how it works.

Sponsorship is all about marketing. In this case, the CFO told her what his company needed–lead generation–and Sarah had no solutions to offer.  

That’s why I always recommend that sponsorship seekers have a discovery session before trying to sell a sponsorship prospect on anything. Many sponsorship seekers think that presenting some opportunity is better than none, but it isn’t.

Imagine you were on a second date with someone, and you made them a nice, home-cooked steak dinner. However, you didn’t bother to ask about your date’s preferences, and it turns out they’re vegan. 

That’s what Sarah’s experience was with the Fortune 500 CFO. She was trying to jam a square peg into a round hole by offering logos when he wanted lead gen. 

Learn about what your sponsor wants, then you can present the right opportunity. More so, you must bring up your opportunity in marketing terms. Marketing is the language of sponsorship and proving you can speak a sponsor’s language will help you go far.

Lack of or Poor Discovery Session 

Let’s talk more about the discovery session, shall we? 

I want to underscore my point from the paragraphs above one more time, just because it’s an important one to make. 

Discovery is not about sales. If you’re bringing anything but your list of questions and a notepad to annotate important points, you’ll likely find your own dream sponsor and blow it like Sarah did. 

You have to be willing to set the sales aside until you have the information to sell the sponsor the right product or service. If you don’t, it’s like serving meat to your vegan boyfriend or girlfriend. It shows how little you know about them when you really should.

The best way to think of a discovery session is this. Imagine you’re an investigative journalist writing a piece. Your goal is to find out as much about the brand and what they’re trying to achieve, including what they’ve tried, why it’s not working, and what it will take for something to work. 

Once you have those answers, you can revisit your opportunity to determine whether it aligns with what you now know about the sponsor. 

If you haven’t yet created an opportunity for the prospect yet, you can determine which assets and activations you have in the pipeline that can assist them. 

Between the two options, I recommend sitting on any kind of asset or activation planning until after the discovery session. You’re saving time since you won’t have to go back later and retool your offerings. 

Unfocused Sponsorship Proposal 

Ah, the sponsorship proposal. To many sponsorship seekers, it’s a chance to write in rich detail about your company or organization’s history, your illustrious cause, and why you so desperately need this money. You’ll even include tiered assets and an order form in the proposal, right?

Wrong. Way wrong, actually. If that’s how you write a proposal, you’ve checked off almost every item on the things you should never include in a sponsorship proposal.

The average proposal includes about six pages of content. You’ve got your brief title page, then a paragraph about your company or organization (you read that right, a paragraph), a paragraph about your cause, then it’s straight into the audience data. 

It’s okay if, between that and your case studies, your proposal ends up being longer than six pages. However, it’s not okay if the proposal exceeds six pages because you decided to share your entire life story.

I’ll repeat for you now what I said in the aforementioned article: sponsors are marketers looking for marketing data and solutions. Your cause is not marketing data, and your company history? Not a marketing solution.

I don’t want to sound harsh by saying a sponsor doesn’t care, but a sponsor doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter how good-intentioned your cause. A sponsor just doesn’t care because it’s not driving their goals forward. 

Fortunately, I have a whole book of templates, including templates for writing the sponsorship proposal, so you can easily reformat yours. 

The Wrong Renewal Strategy

Let’s say you followed some of my tips and tactics and finally got in front of that Fortune 500 company. Better yet, they agreed to work with you. Score!

You want to work with them again, right? More than likely, yes. That will mean having a sponsorship renewal strategy, something sponsors are often sorely lacking. 

As your event, program, or opportunity draws to a close, you must produce a report detailing your return on investment in the form of a chart or table outlining all the deliverables you promised and what you delivered.

When the sponsor sees on paper how advantageous this working relationship was, they’re going to want to work again next year (most of the time). Sometimes, they’ll even be so keen they’ll sign a multiyear agreement. 

However, timing is important here. You don’t want to wait months until your event or opportunity ended. 

In that time, the sponsor gets fuzzy on the details, and much more importantly, they could sign on other partners and spend their sponsorship budget for the quarter or the year (or at least allocate it).

Don’t delay. The best time to talk to a sponsor about renegotiating a contract is within three days of your event, program, or opportunity. That means you must start on the post-event or fulfillment report pretty much as soon as your event wraps. 

No Audience Data or the Data Isn’t Well-Defined Enough

This is one of the biggest ways that I’ve seen sponsorship seekers shoot themselves in the foot. 

Audience data is everything in sponsorship, and without it, your sponsorship program stalls out. 

Sure, maybe you can tell your sponsorship prospects what percentage of your audience are kids versus adults or which ones are in Canada versus the United States, but is any of that information useful?

On its own, no.

What age criteria do you use to define a child? Are they ages zero through five? Five through 10? 

Where in the United States are your customers? East coast or west coast? The northeastern United States or southwestern?

Sponsors want audience data they can sink their teeth into. If you’re talking about adult customers, they want to see customers and their spending behaviors across their 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s so the sponsor can track which audience group is spending the most money.

The sponsor then wants to know what the people in these audience segments do for a living, how much money they make, whether they’re married or single, whether they have kids, and where they live.

I won’t get into the details in this post, but I’ve talked extensively about niching down your audience data on the blog. I recommend you read that content if you haven’t already.

At the very least, you want 25 data points on your audience to present to a target sponsor. Besides the basics like age, gender, geography, marital status, occupation, and income, you can also use data points like:

• Customer longevity (how long the customer has been associated with your business or organization)
• Amount of money spent per year/quarter/month
• Brands consumed
• Number of your events attended
• Decision-making capacity

Don’t Know Their Own Value

Every company and organization is worth something, whether it’s $10 or $10,000. 

If you don’t know what your company is worth, and if you haven’t taken the time to value your assets, then how can you confidently step in front of your dream sponsor and convince them to give you money?

How do you even go about determining your worth? Your company’s worth is very much dependent on your audience, especially how valuable your sponsorship prospect perceives your audience.

That’s why you need to know your audience inside and out. The more detailed audience data you can feed a prospect, the easier it is for them to determine a fair value for your audience and thus your assets. 

If your audience is very covetable to the sponsorship prospect, then they might be willing to pay top dollar. 

Yet if you don’t know what you’re worth, it’s like going to the pawnshop with an expensive painting. The painting doesn’t look that great to you, so when the pawnshop owner says they’ll give you $300, you take it.

You figure you’re getting a good chunk of change, and so you go home happy. 

Then, several months later, you’re watching TV and there is the painting you owned selling for $300,000. Whoops! It turns out that you way undersold, and all because you didn’t know the painting’s value. 

Don’t make these kinds of mistakes in your sponsorship program or you’re leaving money on the table!

No Activation Ideas

I said before that it’s your job to solve the problems of a sponsorship prospect in exchange for their services. To do this, you need activation ideas.

Activations are experimental marketing moments or opportunities that link your sponsor and audience. An activation is supposed to fulfill one need of your audience and one need of your sponsor at the same time. 

When you meet with a sponsorship prospect in the early days of negotiations, you don’t need a dozen activation ideas. Most of the ideas you come up with might not even make it to the event or gala you’re planning.

The point is that you should have something you can spitball with the sponsor. This shows that you’ve been thinking of the sponsor’s issues and put care into crafting a solution.  

Conclusion

The heart of the problem is the belief that your sponsorship opportunity is so good that anyone who hears about it will jump at the opportunity.

Unfortunately, this isn’t how it works.

To sell sponsorship, a process must be followed, and you have to do your research, especially audience research. Once you have followed the process, you can then begin prospecting for sponsors. 

I know it seems counterintuitive, but until you are ready, the last thing you want to do is get in front of the right person.

You might blow what could have been a great sponsorship opportunity!