Give yourself plenty of Time –part A: Sponsorship can take 4-6 months to connect with the most appropriate person, negotiate a partnership, and sign a contract. The larger the sponsorship deal the longer it can take to close. Part B: This is also why it’s a good idea to pursue more than one sponsor at a time. Work smarter not harder!
So, obviously there are 2 parts to this tip –for the sake of your attention span and the degree of response required to cover the highlights about this tip, we’re going to break it into 2 parts. Today we’ll start with Part A – sponsorship takes time.
I hate to sound rough around the edges, but the truth is this: if you expect to land a top notch partner with contract signed and activation strategies dancing in your heads within a couple of weeks, or even a couple of months – you’re setting yourself up for some serious disappointment. I like to think of myself as a glass half full kind of person, and we’d all like to think it’s possible we could be that random lucky Joe Smith who within a few days the stars aligned for just perfectly, and we do back flips in celebration of our new partner; but let’s face facts – these things take time. Not only have times changed, making sponsorship highly competitive, but sponsor expectations have risen significantly, and budgets have been cut; and the serious sponsors aren’t going to pick you just because they like you anymore. They need time to review what you have to offer, understand why you are going to impact the business growth strategies they put in place; gain approval from the executive decision makers, brainstorm how to maximize the partnership – and perhaps at this point they’ll be ready to sign a contract. All of this requires multiple meetings, brainstorming sessions, presentations, all leading up to a signed legal document indicating the terms of the partnership. Nobody gets that done in a matter of days or even weeks. Now, clearly there is a range of the level of demands from one type of sponsorship to another – typically the larger the investment, the more details there are to work out…typically. So if you are asking for a smaller investment, it’s possible you won’t have to wait on as much for as long as the decision makers consider you. What we believe to be a standard is that for lower priced opportunities, local opportunities with a clear niche and a clear ROI; the wait time might just span out to be 2-4 months. This is the type of sponsorship request where we encourage the sponsorship representative to have networked efficiently – it can be more about the connections you have made with key influencers for this level investment than for the larger ones. If you have a medium sized opportunity with multi-faceted customizable benefits and packages – you need to expect an average of 6-8 months of time before your deadline to get in front of a sponsor. If you have a larger opportunity with customizable package and benefits to sponsorship, it’s not uncommon to wait a year or more before a sponsorship partner has fully committed and an activation strategy has been established.
I just had a rather lengthy call with a potential client who was desperate for some help selling a sponsorship opportunity for one of their clients. Although they offered the sun, moon and stars for us to support their efforts I had to say no for the reason that the kind of support they were requesting would have distracted from our main efforts to support our SponsorPark members. The scope of services they were interested in were separate from the vision we have for SponsorPark, and our integrity lies in our ability to wholeheartedly commit to our site users offering them the best possible services possible – and in addition, they wanted to sell a MAJOR sponsorship deal for an event that takes place in a matter of a couple months. There is no way a sponsor will be able to take advantage of the most effective execution of activation strategies in that amount of time. It’s like asking someone if they’d like to buy your Lamborghini – NOW. You could hear it in his voice – he was terrified that he’d be unable to find a sponsor for the sole reason of timing; it would likely have been a pretty easy sell had he had a few extra months to work with. This coming from a sponsorship agency – someone paid according to the success of their sales effort – how much harder for someone who would not describe their career to be focused on sponsorship?
A quick thought to keep in mind that might encourage you: sponsors are in the habit of planning out well in advance their sponsorship strategies from year to year. Typically they allocate funds well in advance – sometimes a full year in advance; now there’s exceptions to that for examples: end of year use it or lose it funds. But they are constantly researching so that their money is best spent for future efforts – so while they might not move forward with a sponsorship now – they might recognize it as a fit when they conduct some research for their next year’s investment. Getting exposure with a sponsor for your opportunity is never a bad thing – stay on their radar and you never know when they might shift efforts and remember you. It’s one reason we encourage a lot of our site users to keep their proposal up for an entire year vs. a few months – if it’s annual, it’s worth the investment to keep it up and in the spotlight for a sponsor to see at each stage in their partnership discovery efforts. You never know if tomorrow might be more beneficial than yesterday was. It just takes one interested sponsor to seal a deal.