Archive: Sponsorship Prospecting

“What do you mean you sold the last spot!? We’ve worked together for years and you sold my sponsorship package to my competitors?” My heart sank. I had an irate sponsor on the phone, or former sponsor in this case, who clearly wanted to come on board but I didn’t give him the chance to. My reasoning? I didn’t want to be pushy or rude and I assumed his responses to me were polite “no thank yous.”

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 […]