I have to 100% transparent here. Before we get into this week’s TMC I need to share, in case you don’t know, I am a consultant who works for a company that provides consulting services and products (advice, strategy, insights etc.) to people like you and your organization. We make a living off of helping you! That said, my goal is to ensure this TMC is NOT a sell advertisement for us or other third-party agencies who can assist you, but rather some insights to the why and how to engage them. Let me know afterwards if it was insightful / helpful or seemed like 700+ word sales message.
Why would you ever outsource your work to an outside third party? Whether that be a third party sponsorship sales agency to sell sponsorships for you or a third party activation company to plan, develop and implement your corporate activations or a firm that helps you determine what assets you have to sell and their market value or assess a sponsors’ sponsorship portfolio or build a strategy or policy or a firm that mentors and supports your team to build strong and productive in-house capacity to be successful long term?
There are people out there that can help you with any or all of these areas. They are (ok most of them are) experienced professionals who can support you to be successful. But I got asked the question recently by someone… “why would I hire a consultant or third party to do work I can do myself?” Somehow, I was ready for that… I gave a series of responses and reasons… some of which he nodded in agreement and some he did not. Then I began to ask some of our existing clients as well as prospects we were trying to get to hire us, a single simple question… “why did you or will you hire a consultant, not specifically us, but in general an external third party to do this work?”
When I take the feedback, I got from clients and prospects along with my own replies to that inquisitor, I was able to come up with these two core insights on why you might want to hire a third-party consultant to assist you. This does not imply you should, it is just a list of reasons why others have done so.
- Because I don’t have the staff to do this work and thus need to outsource it. In some cases that means they cannot hire more staff, but the way the organization works, they can hire contractors or consultants to do work but cannot add to fulltime payroll. Or for others they believe their staff is not qualified so they hire consultants to do the heavy lifting while training the staff to do it after the consultant is gone. Or in some cases the work is “project based” such as needing to develop an Inventory Asset Valuation (IAV) or have 150 part time staff for 8 weeks in the summer to activate a sponsorship coast to coast across the country. These were the main reasons for hiring a consultant or third party under the premise “my staff cannot do the work”.
- We don’t have the time to do this work. Often organizations have staff that “could” do the work like analyse the sponsorship portfolio or build out an IAV or sell sponsorships or ideate concepts for activations, but if their staff did this, they would not be doing their core work that they were hired to do / paid to do. So, for example, one client said to me once “It takes 300 or so hours to do our IAV. I could do it but that is 2 months of my time not doing all the other stuff I need to get done. So, it is more cost effective to outsource the IAV than try and get that work done in-house. As well, he said, I wear blinders. I have been with this organization for a long time. If a third party is doing the IAV they will see opportunities I do not. So based on staff time, cost and future opportunities it is more cost effective to outsource this work to professionals”. And this goes for any type of pf consulting.
If you want to learn more about the how to leverage, manage, benefit from consultants and third party agencies register for Canada’s #1 sponsorship marketing conference, the Western Sponsorship Congress® – Alberta Forum. Register today for awesome savings!
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