Three Things Properties Must Get Right to Land Partnership Deals

In working with teams, event producers and other rights holders on their sponsorship sales process, I have found that setting collective priorities for how the partnership development staff organizes and spends its time prior to any conversations with partners is critical to success.

While there are many components to securing sponsorships with targeted brands and businesses, these three steps must be at the top of the list.

Identifying and Packaging Rights and Benefits

Capturing the interest of potential partners requires more than offering a menu of advertising inventory and promotional assets. To attract sponsors and maximize revenue from them, rights holders must:

• Translate assets into meaningful rights and benefits
• Bundle rights and benefits into sponsorship packages that create discrete opportunities for partners at multiple budget levels
• Reserve the most valuable benefits for top-tier sponsors, incentivizing prospects to choose the most inclusive packages and ensuring equity between fees paid and benefits received

Prospecting Potential Partners and Determining Their Needs

Researching targeted prospects is a critical link in the sponsorship chain. Before a property can present a relevant sponsorship opportunity, it must understand the prospect’s business, how it goes to market and its marketing goals and objectives.

Initial intelligence-gathering starts with:

• Reviewing corporate websites for sponsorship policies and guidelines
• Searching news coverage of the company’s sponsorship and marketing efforts
• Reaching out to personal contacts at the company, even if they are not in marketing, to learn about the company’s direction, priorities, structure, etc.
• Contacting marketing staff to learn the company’s marketing objectives, sponsorship experience and decision-making process

Creating Compelling Proposals and Pitches

Regardless of the format, materials and communications introducing a sponsorship opportunity should follow these guidelines:

• Lead with the benefit for the sponsor, not the features of the property
• Be tailored to the prospect’s business and objectives
• Provide specific audience composition data
• Identify key rights and benefits
• Include customized activation ideas
• Address accountability for delivering return on sponsor’s investment

Initial communications with a prospective sponsor should be aimed at securing a meeting. The meeting should be structured to allow for:

• Learning more about the company, its challenges and goals so that the rights holder can develop a sponsorship proposal that demonstrates how it can help achieve objectives
• Building upon initial research to dive deep into the brand’s business. The majority of the time should be spent listening to the prospect, not making a sales presentation
• Signaling to the prospect that an alliance is an investment opportunity, not an expense item and that the property is not interested in selling a sponsorship package so much as aligning in a mutually beneficial relationship
• Following up with a customized, solutions-oriented sponsorship proposal