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:
Do you know what ABC means in sales? No, I’m not talking about the first three letters of the alphabet. It’s an acronym that stands for this: always be closing. If you’ve ever worked in sales or you currently do, then you understand this rationale. Your boss wants you...
Sponsorship prospecting is one of the areas that sponsorship seekers usually struggle with, which is fair. Determining which companies to reach out to versus those not to requires a keen sense that you’ll finesse the more you use it. In this post, I’ll help you...
When sponsorship seekers come to me, frustrated that their sponsorship program isn’t getting them the results they want, they usually assume they have to make wholesale changes. Sometimes, I recommend they do. In other instances, you only need some small tweaks to...
If you’ve been a long-time reader of the blog, then you should remember this post about the ways to (unknowingly) destroy your sponsorship program, or maybe this one. Well, I’m back today with another post in that same vein about what not to do when starting your...
If there’s one area of your sponsorship program that I push hard on this blog, it’s audience research. I feel like I have to because having data on your audience is such an integral part of achieving sponsorship sales. Without knowing who your audience is, you can’t...
There’s a misconception among sponsorship seekers that you have to build a relationship with your sponsors to increase the chances of working with them again. And while I agree that sponsor relationships are important, they’re maybe not quite as important as you’d...
What’s holding you back from achieving your sponsorship sales goals? This isn’t always the easiest question to answer, and not just due to matters of pride or ego. Sometimes, it takes a second pair of eyes for you to realize a mistake you’ve been making. I tend to be...
Online forms are undoubtedly convenient, which is why every company these days has one. Besides the standard contact form, on the sponsor company’s website, you might have seen a sponsorship form as well. What exactly is this? A sponsorship form is an online form that...
In a recent post, I discussed when sponsorship is considered advertising versus when it isn’t. Today, I want to talk about sponsorship in marketing, specifically, a type of sponsorship known as brand or branded sponsorship. What is brand sponsorship? Brand sponsorship...
Few types of sponsorships are bigger and more profitable than sports sponsorships. That’s how the world has gotten such superstar team-ups as Coca-Cola and the Olympics. Companies are willing to spend millions of dollars to sponsor sports, but why? What’s in it for...