Blog I Corporate Sponsorship Best Practices

The Five Reasons Your Sponsors Ignore Your E-mails

by Chris Baylis | Mar 9, 2020 | Sponsorship, Sponsorship Prospecting, Sponsorship Sales

Email is a fabulous tool to help warm up cold calls…except when it isn’t! I hear from clients and colleagues all the time that their e-mails are not producing results. They send out 1,000 emails and hear nothing back. I have had excellent results using email to help open doors and I see truly horrible examples of email marketing every day. Let’s talk about why nobody is replying to your sponsorship sales emails. You Try to Make the Sale If you sell sponsorship for a living, you’ve had this dream – we all have: you write 10 emails, with sponsorship sales letters and sponsorship packages attached, get 10 responses, all yes with cash in hand. A nice dream…but a dream nonetheless! I can’t say this any clearer than this: You do not want to make the sale on the first call. Sponsorship is a process, not direct mail! If you do, you are leaving money on the table. Big time. What’s the goal of the first meeting? To get the second meeting. How do you get a first meeting? Phone call. How do you get a phone call? A well-written email (assuming no warm introduction, of course). A well written email […]

I Don’t Have Time to do Sponsorship “Properly”

by Chris Baylis | Mar 6, 2020 | Sponsorship

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YtU-ze1UUM I would say that “no time” is the number one reason and most common complaint that I hear from...

Things Sponsors Say: “We Don’t do Sponsorship”

by Chris Baylis | Mar 2, 2020 | Cause Sponsorship, Corporate Sponsorship, Sponsorship, Sponsorship Activation

We’ve all heard it from our prospects, that “we don’t do sponsorship anymore.” How can this be? Sponsorship spending is at an all-time high, is more nuanced than ever before and is more effective and measurable than at any point in the past. Sponsorship encompasses all disciplines within the marketing spectrum…and this brand simply doesn’t do it? What gives? Well, let me tell you what gives! Sponsorship is Broken…and it’s Our Fault When a company says that they don’t “do sponsorship,” what they really mean is that they don’t pay a made up sum of money in order to put a logo on some signs at an event with a poorly defined audience. So, when a prospect says that they don’t do sponsorship, what they are really telling you is that they no longer do bad sponsorship. In fact, for many sponsorship properties, “sponsorship” has become synonymous with this old-school approach. That is, an exchange of money for a handful of low value “sponsorship” opportunities like logo placements and signage. Given how many individuals still sell sponsorship using sponsorship packages, with outdated levels, made up values and little more than recognition on signage…it’s no wonder that brands “don’t do sponsorship”. […]