In today’s post, I am going to share a case study with you about one of the biggest corporate sponsorship deals I’ve worked on. This is an example of how I closed a major, multi-year corporate sponsor in a way that will surprise you. It didn’t include any fancy sponsorship proposals or a complicated activation strategy but it did require a certain level of comfort with the best sales tool in your arsenal “awkward silence.”
In part one of this series “Sponsorship and Cause Marketing: Common Mistakes” we took a look at sponsorship and some of the things holding back the small shop in that area. In this article, we are going to turn our attention to cause related marketing for the small shop.
I know what you’re thinking “another post about how we should stop using the term ‘sponsor’ in favor of something like ‘partner.’” Nope. In fact, there is no word for “sponsors” because sponsors simply don’t exist. Wait…what? Let’s start with the working definition of sponsor from our friends at Google Translate: