Your Parents Were Right. Do Your Homework Before Going to Bed.
Posted: 2/23/2010 8:49:51 AM by
Jon Kander | with 0 comments
Last week I was able to get out of the office for a few days and attend the National Sports Forum in Baltimore. I’ve attended the conference for three years straight and always come away with multiple takeaways. This year was no different.
One of the sessions I attended was a sponsor panel hosted by Bill Sutton with John Cordova (Coca-Cola), David Palmer (P&G), Matt Lederer (Comcast), Marke Dickinson (AAA) and Drew Hiddings (Hershey’s). A focus of this discussion was that properties need to do their homework (e.g., research, understand a prospective sponsor’s business model/objectives) before reaching out to a company with a sponsorship opportunity.
According to all of the panelists, they receive far too many proposals where a property has not considered their respective company’s objectives or needs. Instead, it is evident that the property is just trying to sell out their available inventory. Speaking to the panelists’ point, I always encourage my clients to research what a prospective sponsor is currently sponsoring as well as how it is activating each of its partnerships. This provides a great deal of insight into what are a prospective sponsor’s objectives and makes it easier to craft a sponsorship package to meet those objectives.
In advising my clients, I recommend they read through the company’s website, review its annual report, understand the company’s current sponsorship portfolio and other marketing activities/messaging as well as determine where there may be gaps (and, more importantly, how they can fill those gaps). By spending a little bit of time researching a company and understanding its marketing/business objectives on the front end, my clients have been able to benefit in numerous ways on the back end.
First, they can determine if their property would be a good fit for a prospective sponsor. This can save them from a lot of conversations that have little to no chance of leading anywhere. This allows my clients to focus on genuine prospects, not “maybes.”
Second, initial sponsorship discussions can be more fully developed. The focus of the initial conversations is not spent “getting to know” the company and figuring out what sponsorship rights, benefits and activation platforms it would be interested in. Instead, the property is able to ask intelligent and probing questions that can build momentum towards forming a partnership. Now, discussions can immediately focus on how the two organizations can mutually benefit from partnering with one another.
The above sentence brings up another key point discussed during the sponsor panel. By doing one’s homework on the front end, a property can prioritize which companies it would rather have as a corporate sponsor. The “halo effect” from a partnership is not wholly experienced by the sponsor. A property also has as much to gain by partnering with a blue-chip company. Beyond receiving an annual monetary/in-kind payment, partnering with a P&G or Budweiser can bring a certain modicum of prestige to a property (as compared to having Pabst Blue Ribbon as a sponsor – no offense to PBR, which I love.)
I realize that telling people to better understand their prospective sponsors’ business model/objectives and to “do their homework” on the front end is not a groundbreaking idea. However, each conference I’ve attended the past twelve months (NSF and IEG) has had key decision makers on the sponsor side reiterating this message; so, apparently, it is still not followed through universally.
How do my readers on the sponsor side react when they receive a generic sponsorship offering? Are you able to tell when a property has done their homework prior to reaching out with a sponsorship opportunity? On the other side, have my property readers noticed a change in the way discussions go when they have done their research prior to having some initial sponsorship discussions.
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Filed under: prospecting, how to get sponsorship