Chris Baylis is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Sponsorship Collective.
After spending several years in the field as a sponsorship professional and consultant, Chris now spends his time working with clients to help them understand their audiences, build activations that sponsors want, apply market values to their assets and build strategies that drive sales.
Chris studied at Trent University and Mohawk College before he began his sales career in high tech and insurance. After several years in the sales industry, Chris decided to make the move to sponsorship.
The reason for Chris was simple:
“Sponsorship means you have to be an expert in sales, marketing, experiential, lead generation, account management and strategy. This challenging blend of skills is what makes sponsorship so fascinating but also incredibly complicated.”
Chris has been active in the sponsorship industry since 2007 selling sponsorship for a variety of organisations and every type of sponsorship opportunity as an employee, department leader, board member, consultant and volunteer.
After five years as a consultant with international consulting firm IFC out of London, England Chris decided to launch what is now The Sponsorship Collective. And the rest is history.
And it all began with a blog.
The problem, according to Chris, is that there was simply no information about best practice sponsorship when he began in the industry. Everyone was guarding their secrets and there was nothing by way of blogs, publications, or networking groups. And this is exactly what Chris decided to change.
When it was first launched, the goal of the blog was simple: to share sponsorship best practice with the world. Today, The Sponsorship Collective has been featured in countless publications, podcasts, websites, blogs, magazines, webinars and books. The Sponsorship Collective has also produced hundreds of YouTube videos, webinars and hundreds of thousands of words on the blog (at last count, enough to fill five business books on the topic).
In addition to speaking at conferences and stages across North America, a sample of publications featuring Chris Baylis include in Hopin, Blackbaud, several articles and references in Eventbrite, Inside Sponsorship, Cause Talk Radio, CSAE, The Partnership Conference and The Selling Show to name only a few.
Sponsorship is, at its heart, a marketing practice and marketing is nothing without audience experience as the main focus.
This is exactly how Chris thinks of sponsorship.
“Everything has to start with audience data and experiences focused on creating value for audiences. Most people think of sponsorship as simple logo placement, which could not be further from the truth” says Chris.
Because of Chris’ focus, The Sponsorship Collective takes an “audience first” approach to sponsorship. Starting with audience data, then moving to creating engaging activations before moving to valuation, sales material and then a “discovery based” approach to sales.
Here is a sample of the most recent articles written by Chris:
Everyone knows how to write an email nowadays, right? You type something into a subject line, add a few paragraphs to the body, maybe double-check that the recipient’s email address is correct, and voila. Your email is ready to go through cyberspace to the other...
I’ve been talking a lot about sponsorship assets and valuations on the blog lately, and I’m not done yet. Today, I want to take you inside a training lesson I offered to those in my private Sponsorship Collective Facebook group. If you’re not a member of that group,...
Today, I want to talk about one of my favorite sponsorship topics that’s definitely everyone else’s least favorite. You saw it in the title. It’s sponsorship valuation. Don’t get me wrong, I completely understand why so many sponsorship seekers hate the valuation...
When you walk into a discovery meeting, what do you say? Do you crack a joke? Ask about the weather? Try to make small talk about current events? (Given the state of the world anymore, definitely not that!) For sponsorship seekers, having a sponsorship sales meeting...
Late last year, I hosted a special training session with my exclusive Facebook group of sponsorship seekers. That training was about the various paths you can take on the road to sponsorship. Today, I’m opening up that training to you, fellow blog readers, so you can...
There’s one mistake I see sponsorship seekers make that can kill their sponsorship programs dead. They don’t have any audience data. Zero. Zilch. Nothing. Not a chart, not even basic segments. In today’s post, I want to explain why that’s such a fatal flaw in your...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y45Boa-8KE It doesn’t matter if it’s in our personal or professional lives (or even both): rejection hurts. It’s not a great feeling to be told no, but do you know what’s even worse? Being misled and given a vague answer. As I’m sure...
Like on the dancefloor, in sponsorship, having the right moves is everything. Unlike dancing, in which you’re allowed to freestyle, successful sponsorship requires following a set number of steps or moves that progress your prospects through your sponsorship pipeline....
What does your sponsorship journey look like? Without a documented methodology for how you get from Point A to Point B, your company or organization is forced to start from zero with each new sponsorship prospect. This can create stress where there doesn’t have...
Besides “gold, silver, bronze package,” perhaps no other words in sponsorship are a red flag more than “my opportunity is different.” If you’ve been around the block enough times in sponsorship like I have, then you’ve heard somebody say this. Maybe you were even the...