From Cold Calls to Closing Deals: Mastering Sponsorship Prospecting Techniques 

I’ve been helping clients with their sponsorship aspirations long enough to identify common stumbling blocks among sponsorship seekers. Prospecting is certainly near the top of the list. 

What is it about prospecting that sponsorship seekers struggle with? They usually focus on the wrong criteria, chasing the almighty dollar and getting nothing out of their efforts. 

This guide will examine why you need to prioritize prospecting and reveal my expert insights into how to start doing it. 

Why Is Sponsorship Prospecting Important?

So why does prospecting matter? Let me count the ways. 

Allows You to Prioritize the Right Criteria in Your Search for Sponsors 

Going back to my point from the intro, beginner sponsorship seekers select prospects based on one or two criteria. 

It’s either how big the brand is (i.e., household name status, Fortune 500 status, etc.) and/or how much money the brand has.

The mindset is that working with a large brand will catapult your smaller company or organization into the stratosphere.

Sponsorship seekers also assume that if a company has billions of dollars, surely, there’s enough to go around for them.

It all sounds good in theory, right? Definitely.

However, in practice, companies that large and with that much money rarely give the smaller fish the time of day. 

You can call, send emails, and mail in sponsorship forms until you’re blue in the face. You’re unlikely to hear back, and if you do, it will be a rejection. 

Once you begin following a prospecting protocol and basing your sponsorship partners on less flimsy criteria, you will begin getting responses to your outreach. 

Helps You Find Hot Leads

Hot leads are the most receptive to your audience and thus the likeliest to agree to a sponsorship arrangement. 

They can seem impossible to find for beginner sponsorship seekers, but that’s because they set their sights on those big brands. Ultimately, those are about the coldest leads you could pursue.

Prospecting will allow you to track down more warm and hot leads, so you have a lengthy list to work from. 

Connects Audiences to Brands They’re Interested In

Another benefit of prospecting is driving the customer experience. 

Your event, program, or opportunity is all about your customers. You don’t have an event if they don’t attend. 

You want sponsors your attendees care about at your event, as they will be so engrossed they’ll eagerly sign up for your sponsor’s email list, try their free samples, or participate in their contest or giveaway.

In other words, they’ll interact with the sponsor, increasing outcomes for the sponsor and helping you deliver what you promised. 

Compare that to a big-name brand you brought on just for the name recognition. Your audience doesn’t necessarily care about this brand, and they don’t know how much money the brand is giving you.

Even if they did know, why would they care? It’s not like any of that money is going into their pockets. 

All they see is a big, sponsored activation they feel lukewarm about at best and disinterested in at worst. Your sponsor’s activation is a dud, you don’t deliver, and the sponsor pulls out of a future partnership. 

Betters the Likelihood of You Being Able to Help the Sponsor Achieve Their Goals

Here’s another side effect of working with a brand you have little to nothing in common with. You can’t necessarily assist them in reaching their goals with your activations and assets.

When their target audience and your audience don’t intersect, anything you could offer the sponsor is lower value than a brand that has the related audience. 

A sponsor isn’t likely to agree to work together in a scenario like that, but let’s say theoretically they were interested. You would fetch so much less on your sponsorship property than if you offered the same assets and activations to a more engaged sponsor that wants your audience. 

9 Sponsorship Prospecting Techniques to Master

Do you see the difference between prospecting correctly versus doing it your own way? I hope so! 

This next section will help you expand your prospecting abilities to the benefit of your future sponsorship engagements.

1. Audience Surveying

The most important prospecting technique is surveying your audience. 

This might seem completely unrelated to sponsorship at first, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. 

Sponsors don’t buy your assets and activations. Well, technically, they do, but what they’re really doing is buying access to your audience. 

You already know the importance of a connection between the sponsor and your event attendees. Fostering that begins with knowing the brands your audience resonates with, and that means sending a survey.

This article highlights the types of questions you should ask on your survey. The questions should focus heavily on each audience member’s decision-making capacity, job title, industry, buying behavior, demographics, and preferred brands. 

Here are some other best practices for audience surveys as you get the prospecting process underway:

• Give your audience ample time to respond to the survey. A turnaround time of two to four weeks is good.
• Announce the survey before you send it out. This will build interest.
• Send the survey via the format most popular with your audience, or–even better–send it in multiple formats so everyone is happy.
• Offer a discount code or enter your participants into a giveaway to motivate more people to answer the survey.
• Make the questions easy to answer. A multiple-choice format is faster than open-ended questions, increasing the participation rate.

2. Selecting the Hottest Prospects

You got some responses, which is awesome. You shouldn’t expect a 100 percent participation rate for your survey. That’s unrealistic. However, if a quarter of your audience replies, you’re onto something. If it’s more than a quarter, you’re in great shape.

Which brands does your audience mention using the most? Those brands go to the top of your list. There’s a direct connection between your audience and the sponsor, increasing sponsor engagement during your event, program, or opportunity.

However, you can’t blindly add every brand to the list your audience mentions using. You must research each to learn as much background information as you can. Along the way, you can determine which brands to set aside or disqualify outright.

For example, a brand that doesn’t gel with your company or organization’s vision isn’t the best partner. It’s not worth alienating your audience for money or promotions.

3. Augmenting the Rest of the List

Do you have at least a dozen hot prospects on your list? That’s really exciting. You went from having zero prospects to a great resource to start with.

Why put the kibosh on your progress now? You can expand your list of prospects further. 

Some of you reading this may wonder why you should continue when you already have your hottest prospects. 

Companies drop out left, right, and center. You might discover that a prospect spent their sponsorship budget, is unavailable, or isn’t interested. The more backups you have, the easier it is to move on down the line when you don’t get a reply from one prospect (or not the reply you wanted). 

So how do you build out the rest of your prospect list?

You already identified the hottest prospects, but what about warm prospects? Advertisers that work with the brands your audience mentions using should be the next group on your list. 

They’re not as hot as the brands your audience mentioned in the survey but warm enough that you can fall back on them if needed. 

You can expand further by deducing which companies should advertise to your audience based on the latest additions to your list. These prospects are cooler but still valuable.

The coldest group is the competitors of every brand on your prospecting list. However, building out your prospects list like this can create 60, 70, 100, and sometimes even 200 brands to potentially work with.

4. Segmenting Your Audience 

You have some great prospects to reach out to, but it’s not quite time.

Sponsors want audience data, and nothing generic, either. They crave highly segmented, specific audience niches or groups. 

Fortunately, you’re in a great position to produce this data, as you already have the audience survey results. That’s half the work right there.

The other half is splitting your audience into small segments, as small as you can make them. This is time-consuming but worthwhile work. 

What are some criteria to segment your audience? Try job titles, income (down to specific dollar brackets), industry, city and town (or even borough or neighborhood), buying behavior, age, number of events attended, etc.

You might only have 20 or 30 people in some niches, and that’s okay. This is not a situation where the more, the merrier. You want unambiguous data to feed your prospects. 

Remember, sponsors buy audience access. Segmenting your audience tells the sponsor all they need to know about where they align with their target market.

5. Cold Calling Prospects

With your audience segmentation taken care of, you’re now ready to reach out to prospects. 

By this point, you should have narrowed it down to several prospects you’re interested in working on for this sponsorship property, with a few backups in mind. 

Do you have a colleague of a colleague or a contact three degrees deep who knows someone at the sponsor company? If so, awesome! However, if not, don’t sweat it.

You can always cold call or send a cold email. Contacting someone out of the blue is intimidating but will become easier the more you do it. 

What do you say on the phone or in an email? I have email templates for you to check out here, but don’t overthink it. 

You’re not trying to close a sales deal yet or send your sponsorship proposal. You’re only reaching out for one purpose.

6. Discovery Session

That’s right, it’s the discovery session. 

The discovery session is your chance to ask the sponsor your burning questions after researching them. 

You want to focus on information you can’t find online, such as what their quarterly income looks like, what their lead gen strategies are, what their customer loyalty rate is, what their upcoming products and services are, what their social media engagement is like, and questions of that nature.

Five important questions to ask a prospect during the discovery session are:

• Who comprises your target audience?
• How do you participate in sponsorship?
• What does your target audience value?
• What are your sales goals for the year?
• What do you think are the most important parts of a sponsorship package?

7. Brainstorming Assets and Activations 

After a successful discovery session, your mind should be overflowing with ideas. This is when you should start ideating activations and assets and putting together a sponsorship proposal, not before the meeting or in time for it.

When you develop your sponsorship property like this, you’ll ensure you built it custom from the ground up. The assets and activations you share with the sponsor will be tailored to their needs instead of you trying to shoehorn in unrelated assets.

In other words, you aren’t squeezing a square peg into a round hole, wondering why it won’t fit.

The brainstorming phase is supposed to be full of loose ideas. Your plans might morph at this point, especially if you ask the sponsor for feedback on your activations and use their feedback to improve your concept.

8. Value

You’ve got your audience data, assets, and activations. Next, you can value your sponsorship property.

Valuing is how you determine what your property is worth. You take it asset by asset and activation by activation, comparing the market value against the perceived cost of your services. 

Naturally, you will increase the costs of some assets and reduce the prices of others. When you tally everything up, this is the value of your sponsorship property.

You must know your value walking into a sponsor meeting, as you should propose a sum from the sponsor that’s close to that value. 

A sponsor might offer you more if they think you have an especially high-value audience with many segments they want to acquire in their target market.

9. Propose Sponsorship 

You’re now ready to propose a sponsorship arrangement with the prospect. Put your audience data into an attractive graph or table, list your assets and activations, and briefly describe your company and opportunity. 

However, don’t list prices for your assets and activations. You should know your value going into sponsor negotiations but keep it to yourself until you and the sponsor begin talking dollars. 

Hopefully, the sponsor will accept your terms, and you two can begin negotiating and building an efficient sponsorship deal.  

Ready to Begin Prospecting? 

Sponsorship prospecting begins and ends with your audience. Their preferred brands should become the prospects you pursue the most steadily, with other brands added to the mix to fortify your list. 

Do you need help identifying your audience, valuing your assets, and pitching to sponsors? The resources here on the Sponsorship Collective blog and my free Facebook Group are great places to start. You can also book a call with me.