At the Partnership Group – Sponsorship Specialists™, we provide consultation and counsel to our clients daily on how to grow and maintain their sponsorships. We do this for both our rights holder clients and our corporate sponsorship buying clients. I went back to see what our soundest advice has been in these areas. Here are the Essential Eleven, as I like to refer to them.
1. Know what you have to sell and what it is worth. If you do not have a professional third party asset identification and valuation done (IAV), it is really hard to run a great sponsorship program as a rights holder or property. This allows you to know what you have to sell at any given time and a valuation of each individual asset by an outside third party, which your sponsors appreciate!
2. Be open-minded. This is critical in today’s world. The old adage “we have never done that/it that way before” needs to be ditched. Think outside the box, listen to the needs of your partner/prospect, and adapt to meet them.
3. Be professional. That means dress professionally, present professionally, be on time, meet deadlines, and deliver on what you promised. Having a professionally developed IAV is an important part of the overall professional presentation of your property. On the brand side, be professional as well. Meet deadlines, return calls, and get back to partners. Don’t mislead or be non-responsive.
4. Know who and what you have to deliver. This goes for brands and properties. As a rights holder, this goes beyond your assets. What audience can you deliver? How interactive are they? What is your affinity worth? As a brand, what can you bring to the table beyond cash?
5. Do discovery sessions and meet face to face where possible. Discovery sessions are critical. This is where you build the relationship. Meeting face to face, if humanly possible, is critical, even if it is just one face-to-face visit. Even with LinkedIn, FaceBook, Twitter, email, phone, Skype, and teleconferencing, there is nothing like a face-to-face meeting to build the relationship.
6. Include all the necessary people on both sides. Too often, we don’t include all the stakeholders (especially on renewals). Within the property, it needs to be more than just the person doing the sponsorship. It may be the CEO or ED at your organization or the person working at the grassroots level with the sponsor. For the sponsor, it may be the activation or implementation person as well as the buyer. The agency may be included as well as the VP or CEO of the brand. Include everyone at different times when interacting with your partner.
7. Build the program to meet the sponsor’s need (assets and budget). Far too often, the property learns that the prospect has $X dollars to spend and goes after the whole amount. Then there is no money for activation, new opportunities during the term of the agreement, etc. When building a program for a sponsor first time or to maintain the partnership, determine their needs. Deliver the best and most cost effective opportunity for that partner, not necessarily the one with the largest price tag. The goal is to deliver on the assets they can use within budget, including activation!
8. Set Expectations – over deliver. We need to set expectations. Whether that is when you will get back to the partner on something; when you will have the proposal to them, the answer to the ask, what can be achieved, how much time will be spent or allocated. We always need to set expectations, including outcomes! And we need to deliver on these timelines/outcomes, or better yet, over deliver! Failure to deliver on what you promise can truly hurt your chances of maintaining an agreement.
9. Come with activation ideas on an ongoing basis. This goes for both the rights holders and the brands. Brands love to have activation ideas presented. They may not take them all… or even any of them, but the property’s responsibility is to bring the ideas forward. The sponsor too needs to put forth ideas, and both parties need to be open to ideas versus that old situation noted in #2 – “we have never done that before, so we can’t do it”! In order for either side to deliver worthwhile ideas, both organizations must be open, honest, and forthcoming with goals, objectives, timelines, budgets, and anything else that can affect the process or outcomes.
10. Stay in touch, cultivate, and steward. I always tell our clients the real work begins when the deal is signed. Many sponsorship sales people and development officers think all the work is securing the deal, which is merely the tip of the iceberg. Cultivation and stewardship are critical. Once a sponsor is “signed,” they are “part of the family” and need to be kept in the loop on everything. That means checking in on your partner when something changes, just to see how things are going, with news about your organization, or when you see them in the news. This is a relationship, not a transactional deal, and to maintain a relationship, we need to have ongoing meaningful communication.
11. Evaluate and refresh. We need to evaluate everything we do. Did it work? Did it meet expectations? If not, why not? If it exceeded expectations, why? What can we do differently? A property and a sponsor must do this is together. This is where the communication in #10 comes in. It is through the process of evaluation that we can redesign and refresh our partnerships together to be more effective on an ongoing basis versus only at the end of each agreement.
These are our Essential Eleven-tips to maintain and grow sponsorship opportunities. If you think there is something else, please let me know by twitter, email, or by posting on our blog as available below.