The Nine Paths to a Sponsor 

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 supercharge your sponsorship strategy as this year continues. 

The Nine Paths to Sponsorship Within a Company 

Does this scenario sound familiar to you? You select a Fortune-500 company as your sponsorship prospect because you know the company has deep pockets. 

You pick up the phone and talk to their customer service department about sponsorship, or perhaps you send an email to the company’s general email address.

Days pass by, then weeks, and months. All along, you hear nothing. 

You need a surefooted path to get you the outcome you’re looking for, which is sponsorship sales. Here are the paths you can take to achieve that outcome.

Marketing

Sponsorship, at the end of the day, is really just a marketing discipline. 

If you don’t know how to market your audience, market your assets, and market your activations, then you’re going to struggle long and hard to find a sponsor.

Marketing is something that your company or organization should be able to do rather innately, especially if you’ve been established for several years or more than a decade. 

After all, you have to market products and services to your customers all the time as well as to new customers in the hopes of converting them. 

When you speak the marketing language well, you can connect with a marketing exec at the sponsorship company and easily get on the same page as them. 

Who are those people? I recommend you plumb the depths of the prospect company to find marketing execs on the C-level as well as the VP level. Continue to the manager level, the director level, the coordinator level, and even the admin level.

Sales

Going hand in hand with marketing is sales. Your next route to sponsorship could entail you speaking to the director of sales, the vice president of sales, the sales coordinator, or even a sales manager.

You need someone who can provide you with cold, hard numbers such as your target sponsor’s last sales quarter or current sales predictions. 

Once you see this information, you can then come up with more tailored, handcrafted solutions that can fill in the gaps in the sponsor company’s earnings, boost their sales, and win them more customers.

Sponsorship Department 

This next path to sponsorship might sound obvious and like the first place to start. It’s the company’s sponsorship department. 

The thing is though that despite how many companies will gladly partner with viable organizations or businesses like yours, not all these companies have a dedicated sponsorship department. That’s why this isn’t the first path to sponsorship. 

The sponsorship department is usually staffed by a sponsorship manager. Under them may be sponsorship committee members who may or may not dedicate all their time at the company to the company’s sponsorship endeavors. 

At the very least, start with the sponsorship manager if there is one. If not and the sponsorship department is composed only of sponsorship committee members, then each of the members is about on equal footing with one another.

It won’t matter so much which one you talk to as long as you can get in touch with someone. 

The sponsorship department is going to have the clearest understanding of what a sponsorship entails, how much money this company can provide you, and what kind of assets and activations the company is looking for.

Communications

Working your way through your prospect company’s various departments, the next vector to check, so to speak, is the communications department. 

No, marketing and communications are not the same things. The company’s marketing department is more concerned with promoting products and services to encourage a sale. The communications department, on the other hand, spreads brand awareness.

The two departments rely on each other, and both usually benefit when one wins, but they’re not identical.

In the communications department at your prospect company, start with the director of communications or the VP of communications. 

Then move on to the public relations director, the director of external communications, the director of internal communications, and the marketing communications director. 

You can keep going to the media relations coordinator, public information specialist, public relations coordinator, publicist, PR specialist, or marketing communications associate.

Now, will the prospect company have such a robust communications department? Maybe, but then again, maybe not. I threw a lot of communications job titles at you, but even if the prospect company staffs a few of those parties, you’ll be on the right path.

Branding

While the communications department can establish and fortify a company brand, the bulk of the branding responsibilities lies in the branding department at the prospect company. 

Try to get in touch with the brand manager, brand strategist, director of brand marketing, or the director of brand strategy.

Product Development 

The sixth path to sponsorship is to talk to the prospect company’s product development team. 

As the name implies, the product development team comes up with the idea for the products that may eventually roll out onto store shelves with the company’s name branded on them. 

These are the people who will know the product best besides maybe the marketing department, as the product development team came up with the original prototype. 

The job roles in product development run the gamut according to the industry the company is involved in. 

That said, the hierarchy goes something like this: associate product manager, junior product manager, product manager, senior product manager, product lead, product director, VP product or head of product, and chief product officer or CPO.

HR

It’s rather unconventional to call a human resources department and ask for sponsorship dollars, and that’s not what I’m going to tell you to do. Rather, if you can get an in with someone in the HR department, that usually lends itself well to a warm introduction.

Customer Retention

Sponsorship is about providing an optimal experience for a target audience so that both partners benefit. Who would know more about your prospect’s target audience than their customer retention department?

Okay, in some cases, a company doesn’t have a whole department, but just a few pros who specialize in customer retention. These professionals might have such job titles as customer experience agent, customer experience specialist, and customer success advisor.

Community Investment/Philanthropy/Foundation 

Is your organization a nonprofit or does your company frequently work with nonprofits? If so, then you have a secret ninth road to sponsorship prospects that you can utilize. 

You want to find the community investments leader, foundation leader, or philanthropy leader within this nonprofit or charity. 

You’re not asking them for sponsorship dollars though. If anything, if you even mention the word sponsorship, these parties will tell you that their charity or nonprofit doesn’t deal in sponsorship.

And that’s true. They do corporate philanthropy. So why do I want you to contact the above parties? 

Well, when you’re in touch with a foundation leader or a CI leader, you can then ask them who you should contact to help more with the nonprofit’s marketing goals, communications, or sales goals. 

This is what gets you on the road to sponsorship. 

Tips for Finding and Connecting with Target Sponsors

Now that you know the avenues you can use to connect with the right parties at the prospect company, it’s time to make the first contact. These tips will help you navigate this tricky part of your sponsorship program.

Comb Through LinkedIn to Track Down Names 

How do you know who’s who in your prospect company? You can use a valuable tool called LinkedIn.

If you have a LinkedIn account, it’s free to look up any company you’re curious about. If the company populated the information, then you can see who works in which department and holds which job title. 

You might even be able to glean information such as how long that person has worked for the company. 

I’m not saying you have to use LinkedIn to reach out. If anything, I would tell you not to do that. 

LinkedIn hides messages if you’re not within a certain circle of contacts. Plus, LinkedIn isn’t really a part of my communications cadence, which I’ll share with you a little later in this section.

You merely want to use LinkedIn to see a company hierarchy for your prospective sponsor company. Write down names and job titles and then log off. 

Find Someone You Know Within the Sponsor Company

The great thing about having so many potential parties in the sponsor company to contact is that the chances are pretty good that you at least know one of them.

If you don’t, then maybe your co-founder does or one of your colleagues. Perhaps a big client has a connection. 

You don’t want to play seven degrees of separation if you can help it. The flimsier your connection to your prospective sponsor, the less effective this method is. 

If you tell them that you know them through a colleague’s sister’s mother-in-law’s dog, they could find that a little off-putting.

Now, if you were to email the same prospect and tell them that you know them through your colleague’s major client, that’s different. The degrees of separation don’t keep going on and on. 

What if you dug through your contacts list 100 times but you’re just not finding any connection to the target sponsor? It does happen. 

In a situation like that, you’ll have to go in cold. It’s not ideal, but it happens. 

Use My Email Templates to Make First Contact

I’ve mentioned my email templates enough, and now it’s time to deliver. In my post entitled The Art of Sponsorship Sales Emails, I have plenty of useful tips for writing an email subject line that will get your prospects curious. I also have the promised email templates whether you’re writing a warm email or a cold one.

Don’t Be Afraid to Follow Up 

In most cases, silence is a brush-off. As I talked about in this post as well as this one, your sponsorship prospects lie to you all the time. 

The reason? They don’t like confrontation and saying nothing is a good way to avoid a confrontation.

That said, in some cases, a prospect could be interested but they’re busy, so they forget to respond to you. In a situation like that, sending them a little nudge is perfectly acceptable.

I follow what I like to call a communications cadence. You can use this cadence whether your prospect is warm or cold. 

I take the person at the top of the totem pole in one of the departments above and I send up to three emails. These emails aren’t back to back to back, of course. Rather, they’re spaced out over days. 

Then I’d pick up the phone. After that, it’s two more emails and then another phone call. 

If I can’t get in touch with whoever’s at the top of the totem pole after following that cadence, then I move on down to the line to the next person, and then so on and so forth all the way to the bottom of the totem pole if I have to.

Now, sometimes, you might connect with an admin assistant or even a manager (if you’re lucky), and they’ll refer you back to the vice president. Yet when you contacted the vice president initially, they were not the least bit responsive to your calls.  

Well, things are different now. The manager or admin assistant will warmly introduce you to the VP, and now they are responsive. 

Make the Goal the Discovery Session 

You’ve finally gotten your prospect to pick up the phone. This is an exciting moment for sure!

While a little bit of lighthearted banter back and forth is a great way to break the ice, I always caution sponsorship seekers to avoid being too friendly. And yes, there is such a thing as being too friendly.

When you’re buddy-buddy with the sponsor, you lose focus on them as a potential business contact. Rather than talking about the sponsor company’s needs, you’re sharing photos of each other’s pets. Instead of discussing activations, you’re talking about what you each did last weekend.

Friends are great, and I recommend having them. However, if a friendship is occurring at the expense of your sponsorship program, that’s deleterious.

When you call or email a prospect, you want to keep your objectives clear. Your goal is to schedule a discovery meeting. That’s it. 

Once the prospect agrees to a date and time (and possibly a place) for the meeting, you two can go your separate ways until you meet again. You don’t have to befriend a prospect to get them to agree to be your sponsor. If anything, the personal entanglement can make a professional relationship iffy. 

Conclusion 

The next time you begin a sponsorship program, stop thinking about sponsors in terms of companies. Companies are full of people, and you want to connect with people. 

I hope this article helps you prioritize doing just that!