Oh, how I hate the term / approach “let’s go after the low hanging fruit”. This is usually coming from leadership desperate for money for a project or event that they failed to plan in advance a proper sponsorship strategy.
The answer always is “let’s go after the low hanging fruit right now and we can get what we need then look long term”. To me this is ‘piss poor planning’. It means that you do not understand sponsorship marketing and relationship development. It stinks of a focus on the planning incompetence and emphasis to fill the needs of the budget and the organization selling sponsorship rather than having any regard for the partner. It screams of a misguided belief that the temporary fix of seemingly good short-term solution will solve the problems when typically, this “grabbing low hanging fruit” is the deadly enemy of permanent best!
In case you forgot, grabbing the low hanging fruit was the original sin. Have we not learned?
Truly I understand the philosophy of focusing on those prospects that are seemingly “ripe” for the picking because they seem to fit what “we need” or they “have money” or such. But as we always tell out clients, shortcutting the sponsorship sales process of proper prospecting, full blown discovery session learning about the prospect versus espousing the needs of your organization , ongoing cultivation and ideation on building a program that meets their needs and their budget, engaging your operations people to ensure what you have developed is viable, and then finally presenting a partnership offer and negotiating a close, will backfire. Shortcutting (or going after “low hanging fruit”) will seldom result in renewals and will also typically put a blemish on your organization in the market. So don’t do it.
But probably the #1 reason I hate the term “low hanging fruit” is that if those companies / prospects / suspects were “so ripe for the picking” why have you not already been courting them, secured them and engaged them? I guess I answer that question in sentence two of this TMC!
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