The Compete-At Blog

As a producer of sporting events, dealing with sponsors is a crucial aspect of your professional life. If you want to win at the game of accumulating great sponsors – and who doesn’t – it helps to understand the process. Landing and working with a sponsor for your event is a process that goes through several stages, much like life. That is, it starts at the beginning, matures and grows, and then ends.

If you do your job right, you’ll create - to be Disney-esque about it - a veritable circle of life. Renewing itself over and over again, well into the future.

It all begins by understanding the steps. The process of sponsorship entails several “life stages”: Identify; Recruit; Evaluate; and Fulfill. Each phase is quite distinct in what it demands of you.

The first step is Identify. You can think of this as the infancy of the process. Everything is fresh and new. This is the stage in which you look at your options and identify potential sponsors. In this step you decide not only whom you are going to approach but what value you bring to them. How does your event advance their particular message or mission? How does it reinforce their image or brand? What angles for marketing can you offer them? Are you really a good match for each other? Do your ideals, styles and demographics mesh?

You also need to Identify your own needs during this phase. Your time is valuable. You can’t afford to waste it. You must choose sponsors that offer you clear value and with whom you can “close the deal.” Those are the ones for whom your “product” meets their needs and offers a benefit worth the cost.

The next step is Recruit. This is the “growing up” phase of the life cycle – your seeds of an idea now grow from a vague impulse into a full-fledged proposal. You’ve chosen the sponsor you want to approach; now you must focus on pitching and selling them. Actually, the word recruit is preferable to “sell” or “pitch,” because it emphasizes the two-way nature of the relationship. Again, you want to pursue sponsors for whom the arrangement will be mutually beneficial.

Toward that end, you need to understand your candidate’s mindset, needs, values, brand and decision-making process. A few simple pointers will go a long way to ensuring a successful recruitment phase.

• Under-promise and over-deliver. No one will ever fault you for giving more value than you promised, but the opposite is certainly not true.
• Know what is important to your sponsor. Signing a prospect that is not a good fit with you is a bad deal for everyone.
• Be honest. Don’t “play” your prospect. If you don’t know the answer to a question, don’t make something up. Tell them you will find out the answer and get back to them.
• Be professional. Return phone calls and emails promptly. Keep and send out meeting notes. Make sure your printed material is polished and professional. Check in regularly with the sponsor and make sure you are meeting their needs.
• Follow through. If you say you are going to do something, then, as Nike would say, “just do it.” Remember, you are only as good as the last promise you kept.

The third stage of the life cycle, Evaluate, may be the hardest step. This stage is rather like watching your adolescent leave home. The “child” takes on a life of its own. The proposal – and the control - moves out of your hands. Your prospective sponsors will be doing the evaluating, not you. They will be weighing your proposal on its merits. You have to let go, sit back and see how they react.

One way to help ease the anxiety is to actually provide the decision criteria they can use in evaluating your proposal. Most of the decision-makers may not be used to weighing proposals, so offer them an evaluation framework for judging yours. It’s sort of like setting the rules to favor the home team.

Before letting your proposal “leave home,” ask yourself a few questions. Have you considered the dynamics of the decision makers? Have you addressed everyone involved in the decision process? Did you provide all the information requested? Double-check and make sure you have followed through on all your commitments.

Finally comes the “senior” phase of the life cycle. Your proposal has matured into a real business deal. Fulfillment is the most important step in the process and the key to your future success. This is the stage where you actually organize and produce the event. This is where, like a grownup, you deliver what you promised. Here are a few guidelines for a successful fulfillment stage:

Keep your promises and follow through. If something is not going as you hoped, talk to the sponsor. Be open. Solicit their input and make them part of the solution.

Keep in contact with the sponsor throughout the event cycle: planning, promoting, registration, event day and post-event. Simple relationship management will go a long way toward ensuring a positive result.

After the event, have a post mortem with the sponsor. Discuss the results and ask for feedback. What could have been done better? Where did we drop the ball? What aspects did you like best? How can we improve the process next time around?

Assuming you and your sponsor have agreed on some measures of success, discuss how the event measured up. Did the event participants offer any feedback? Did they purchase additional products and services, if such were offered? Did they sign up for future events?

The key to success is to understand the life cycle from start to finish. Each stage is different, but they’re all focused on the same goal: signing and re-signing great sponsors for your event. As Stephen Covey says in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, “Begin with the end in mind.” If you implement this process skillfully it will create an ever-renewing “circle of life” from event to event and sponsors will be approaching you.