I often find clients (on both the brand and the property side) too secretive. They are not fully open with their partner. They don’t reveal all their objectives or fail to provide all the information. Or they are not comfortable with being open and honest with their partner, they cannot say “I am not happy with our deal anymore” or “I think you are favoring other partners more than you are us” or “you fail to activate, and it is essential that you activate to get the best ROI”. Often, we are too scared to be truthful of honest with them because we fear repercussions. So, we tell them what the want to hear versus what we need to hear.
For those that know me, you know I often compare sponsorships / partnerships with marriage. There is the dating phase, then the honeymoon phase then the real work starts. And if you keep secrets in a marriage or don’t communicate well or fail to be honest and transparent the marriage tends to fail. The same is in the sponsorship / partnership game. We need to be honest and transparent with our partners. We need to feel comfortable to communicate opening and say how we feel at any time. Over the years I have had to resign accounts because I just felt they were wasting their money with us because they were not listening to our advice. At other times I have had clients tell us they were not happy with the results… in each case we were both open and honest and transparent and probably in 90% of those situations we resolved the issues and continued to work together. In the other 10% we went our separate ways and still correspond and stay in touch. The “marriage” ended but we were still friends.
I was recently chatting with an old (lol… old as in long time ago not that they are a senior citizen) client and she shared this story with me that I thought I would share with you:
I had a sponsorship client years ago that called me who expressed they were not happy because they felt they were not getting as good as a program/benefit as their direct competitor. I listened to what the client had to say to understand their concerns before responding.
I then replied, “I can appreciate you may have concerns but with all due respect if you remember you were offered this program first and turned it down saying you didn’t need it. And I then thanked you.” I then called their competitor who never hesitated and was immediately onboard. The reality was the first company that turned down the program didn’t have the innovative capacity or didn’t take the time to see the program’s full potential. They just had numbers in their mind. If they had applied some imagination and innovation to the program, as I had then provided to their competitor only after they accepted the sponsorship program, they would have dominated their market.
Alas, their competitor was gaining significant market exposure as a result, and the reason they were not happy. So, I then created a complimentary program for them to sponsor in another area for this unhappy client. While it wasn’t as good as the program they had declined, they still gained solid market exposure and were then happy again. I gained additional revenues just from being open and creative in meeting a client’s needs. Creativity drives all sponsorship, and I would suggest the client holds this responsibility more than the organization providing the program. The organization provides the “lens” for the client who as a partner should be contributing just as much or more if they want to achieve a higher ROI. My analogy is – when you buy stocks in the stock market, you still have to put in the work to manage the portfolio.
Sage advice and a great story I think we can all relate to.
I find attending conferences and workshops with really allows me to learn. And the reason is these people at the podiums sharing their insight and knowledge are transparent, open and honest. They tell their stories. They share their insights. And the audience, the delegates can take that knowledge away and apply it to their own situations. Imagine having access to probably over 400 years of combined knowledge shared with you in 2 days. You can have all that and more. Just register for Canada’s #1 sponsorship marketing conference, the Western Sponsorship Congress® – Alberta Forum. Register today for awesome savings!
© 2025 All rights reserved.