Is It Time to Re-Engineer Partnership Sales Operations?

As the nature of the business relationship between marketers and sports, entertainment and other properties has evolved over the past few decades, many in the industry have suggested changing the terminology used to describe those alignments from “sponsorship” to “partnership.”

The impetus behind such a switch is a desire to distinguish between the buying of standard packages of benefits—mostly designed to generate visibility and awareness and essentially not much more than glorified media buys—and more fully integrated and activated associations that leverage the emotional connection between stakeholders and the teams, events and organizations they are passionate about.

I attempted to resolve this issue in a previous post by drafting an updated definition of the term sponsorship, but let’s face it, there will never be universal agreement on what is the “right” word.

Regardless, the distinction between asset buys and activated alignments is an important one. As I was reading through the steady stream of sponsorship announcements that land in my inbox each day, the thought struck that maybe it is time to codify the difference between the two when structuring “sponsorship” sales operations.

Within most rights holder organizations, a single team is responsible for securing revenue from corporate and brand marketers. That group sells everything from basic benefits packages of IP rights, signage and tickets to customized partnerships involving naming rights, exclusivity and co-branded content development.

Account management is most often organized around industry verticals, with individual salespeople responsible for becoming subject matter experts and making outreach to all targeted prospects in their assigned categories. The results of their efforts could be a five-figure signage buy or a seven-figure multi-faceted partnership.

That system generally works, but could it work better if there was a division of labor between one sales team focused on selling the less complex packages of assets and another concentrating on the higher value rights and benefits?

Selling full-fledged partnerships takes a considerable amount of time, research and effort to identify a prospect’s needs and decision-makers and craft tailored offers. Selling lower-level media-like assets can usually be done more quickly and with less work.

Freeing up a property’s best revenue generators to spend time on prospective partners with the most potential value, while allowing others on the team to not waste time pitching partnerships to brands that only want a smaller role could create efficiencies that would allow sponsorships to be more profitable for rights holders.

In other words, it may be time to own the fact that not all “sponsorships” are “partnerships” and instead of trying to make them something they are not, embrace the difference and capitalize on it.