To be successful in sponsorship, you need to ask questions. You need to learn to listen. In fact, in any sales role or real relationship, personal or business, you need to listen and ask questions, and then ask more questions and listen more. Success comes with asking questions and listening—not talking about yourself or your organization.

We work with our property clients on this all the time. Recently, I was working with four different clients and this came up. Well, I brought it up. Getting good at sponsorship takes time, effort, and continued support. Our clients gain success because so many of them engage us at the Partnership Group – Sponsorship Specialists© for our mentoring services. We work with them one on one. We help them build prospect lists. We support them in getting meetings. We go on calls with them. We help them build sponsorship proposals that sell. We do this one on one with critiques, support, and holding their hands to make them successful.

In each of these four cases, it was the same story. They had just completed their first or second meeting with a prospect. I reviewed their CR (contact report) and then we connected on the phone to go through the experience. We talked about what they learned. Each of them felt they were ready to go build a proposal. So, I asked them some questions like the ones below. In most cases, they had vague answers, but nowhere near enough information to build a proposal that would sell. I helped them understand how they needed to ask more questions, even if they had to go back for 3-4 more meetings. Of course, they all pushed back and said something to the effect “I will not get another meeting—I can’t bother them any more.” I quipped back, “You are not bothering them. You are going to help them make more money, and to do so, you need more information.” So you know, each of them did go back one or two more times. For one of them, it was five more times, and for the other two, three more times each! Surprise—no prospect said, “Leave me alone and stop bothering me!” These further meetings were not all face to face. Some were by phone and some by Skype. But each of them got the necessary information to be able to package the right assets from their inventories within the right budget range to build winning proposals.

Here are examples of some of the additional feedback we provided them.

• When they said their goal was to sell more product, we said you need to determine what that means. How much more product? Are they looking to spend $500 with you and triple their present $2 million in annual sales?
• Will they measure actual sales or lead generation?
• “We need to build brand,” they told our client. What does that mean? How are they presently doing that? What are they investing in to build their brand, how much are they investing, and how do they measure ROI?
• When they say they can’t give them a budget, remind them you are no different than their customers are to them. They can’t sell product to a customer unless they know how much money the customer is willing to spend to achieve certain objectives. Imagine a car salesperson—unless the prospect says they have four kids and travel lots to sporting events and want to spend under $25,000, you don’t know whether to show them an Escalade or a minivan!

Ask questions. Listen to the answers and ask more questions.

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