http://sponsorpitch.com 243!5th!Ave!#121 New York, NY 10016

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http://sponsorpitch.com

” "e average sponsorship proposal meets just 44.8% of brands’ needs.” – Sponsorium, October 2009

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MANAGEMENT SUMMARYWhile brands have bene#ted greatly from the

development of Internet software that manages sponsorship related activity throughout their business chains, the sponsorship sales side has experienced only marginal gains. Several tools have been deployed to aid sales promotion (online listing services), contact management (Salesforce) and post-sales activity (Property Port). Surprisingly, a dedicated resource designed to help develop bona #de sales leads from real time data remains elusive.

Considering brands are now making decisions based on real-time data, today’s selling environment demands better information management. To stay relevant, sponsorship sales professionals must understand brand activity quickly and thoroughly. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests current alternatives make adequately meeting this challenge much more di$cult than should be the case in an Internet economy.

General consensus among sponsors is about only one percent of unsolicited proposals receive serious consideration. "is leaves two options for sales professionals: either more proposals can compete to be among the fortunate one percent, or the volume of proposals must decrease as a result of being the product of more research and customization.

Spending more time and money on research and quali#cation in the name of producing fewer, more customized proposals enhances the need for reliable information. However, despite the need to have more insight the resources to capture it remain limited and fragmented.

A survey of today’s sponsorship information market reveals a hodgepodge of resources critical to the #rst stages of prospecting. Individuals tasked with selling sponsorships mostly turn to brand web sites and publications focused on sports business, advertising, marketing, and sponsorship. Search engines and blogs are commonly used, as are mass-market social media sites. Published directories o%er random bits of information about brand decision-makers and deals. While these sources can yield good data, they also may be time-intensive to survey, incomplete, out

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of date, and/or provide limited strategic insight about brands. Accordingly, given the relationship accurate, timely

information has on persuading brands on buying sponsorship opportunities, SponsorPitch believes sponsorship salespeople need a dedicated prospect quali#cation tool that can provide real-time, robust brand intelligence. Combined with a new approach to collecting brand activity data online, this system can reduce research time and free the sponsorship sales force to develop more targeted, creative pitches with more value to sponsors.

SPONSORSHIP SELLING CHALLENGES: Whether the seller is an agency or a property itself, the

challenges of selling sponsorships are almost always the same. "ose selling them must:– !Understand brand messaging, positioning, and target audience–!Know what brands want from sponsorship and if/how the opportunity at hand can meet these wants, preferably before solicitation–!Present turnkey activations and leveraging programs to alleviate the need for brands to determine how a sponsorship will work for them–!Clearly identify the true decision–makers in each organization

Essentially (rightfully), brands want sponsorship sellers to be armed with knowledge as if they worked inside the brands they target. "ey must know things like a brand’s spending activity, audience, business model, marketing strategy, messaging, sales channels/retail locations, activation tactics, etc., to make successful pitches in most cases. "is puts a great burden on sponsorship sales executives. Several interviews conducted with sponsorship sales professionals con#rmed a required minimum of 1-2 hours of research per brand to obtain a cursory understanding of its business and sponsorship activities. Presenting an initial communication capable of securing a conversation or meeting requires approximately 2-4 hours of diligence.

One of the smarter sponsorship sales strategies is to have informal conversations with brand decision-makers that don’t include sales pitches per se. No-pressure conversations can help reveal how content brands are with currently sponsored properties, their future spending plans, and sponsorship objectives.

Published contact directories can help identify relevant brand employees with whom to have these discussions, but many other people likely are trying to contact them to have similar conversations. Moreover, personnel and activity in organizations change over time. Research clearly indicates

that the tenures of high-level brand decision-makers are quite short (generally less than two years for many CMOs, for example).

As the less expensive directories are published, their accuracy can quickly begin to erode. "e more expensive sources require constant reconnaissance by dedicated sta%. "is can drive their cost above $5000 per year and include data for hundreds of brands outside the scope of interest of many properties. "us, the choices are to do in-house research, pay a few hundred dollars for data that may or may not be accurate, and/or spend massively for limited data that means nothing without other research that drives creation of proposal content. In other words, even after a brand’s decision makers are identi#ed, the research and diligence has only just begun.

CHANGING FROM AN INDIVIDUAL TO COLLABORATIVE APPROACH

Clearly, the challenge of gathering brand intelligence is daunting, particularly when assessing many brands. "ough everyone acknowledges the need to deliver informed, tailored proposals to quali#ed decision-makers, only so much time can be spent on research before salespeople must consider matters of e%ectiveness, e$ciency, and their other duties. "e principal frustration comes down to this vexing dichotomy: –!Spend more research time on each company, generate fewer proposals, thereby increasing invested time on each and the opportunity cost of rejection–!Spend less research time on each company, generate more proposals, but reduce their quality and response rate because they are less targeted.

Another matter to consider further is the perspective of brands, particularly large and more visible ones, which can easily receive more than 500 sponsorship solicitations per month. Essentially, not only are the same brands being pitched misguided proposals, many people spend many hours duplicating e%orts researching virtually the same data and attempting to answer the same questions. When factoring in how few proposals receive serious consideration, most prospecting research done by the universe of sponsorship salespeople is simply wasted. Worse, the totality of sponsorship sales e%orts produces so many unwanted proposals that brands would rather say no to everything than spend time trying to #nd the appealing one percent.

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to prospect research might seem to preserve a competitive advantage, the true added value for properties lies in their assets, attributes, creativity and ability to execute a given sponsorship opportunity. Even if brand activity data is shared between other sales executives representing di%erent properties, the sale does not hinge upon the intelligence each one has. Instead, it hinges upon a property’s ability to assimilate data, generate e%ective ideas, and convince a brand buyer that the property’s ideas and assets will deliver value. Sharing information between peers would therefore save time on research and make prospecting for leads exponentially faster. "is in turn would lead to a higher percentage of valuable proposals for brands, better outcomes, and ultimately more deals.

Optimally, one salesperson would research a few brands and share the intelligence gathered with other salespeople collecting data on other brands.

"is would create a dynamic whereby everyone who contributes receives exponentially more information than they individually collect. Whereas one person might need more than a month to investigate and assess 100 brands, 10 collaborators could collectively spend less than a week to size up those same 100 brands. Individuals acting exclusively in their own interests have no chance of matching the productivity of a group of dedicated collaborators working together to increase the value of a resource.

THE CASE FOR A NETWORKED BRAND SPONSOR INTELLIGENCE

DATABASE"e assessment of current industry conditions,

demonstrates sponsorship has clearly been left behind most other industries because it has failed to evolve to the new real-time information-sharing standards of the Internet. "is suggest there is an

opportunity to take a great leap forward given the fact most people are now comfortable embracing the ethos of the social web, i.e., giving is the new taking, through sites like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Digg, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Jigsaw, etc. Internet users know they receive much more information from these applications than they individually contribute to them due to the network e%ect. In turn, they perceive information as a commodity and implicitly understand that user-generated and third party content drives the quality of their experiences. "us, they appreciate the value of sharing and are willing to assume the responsibility to do it themselves, a philosophy not yet e%ectively embraced by the sponsorship industry.

As a multi-billion dollar industry, sponsorship and the sales professionals who fuel it deserve a resource that:–!Provides access to targeted real-time data about brand sponsors while reducing time spent qualifying leads–!Aggregates strategic conversations among properties with insight into and interest in the same brands–!Allows time saved on prospect research to be put toward developing greater value propositions (better assets and activations) in sponsorship proposals.Accurately and e%ectively customizing and

articulating sponsorship o%erings to decision-makers that clearly demonstrate understanding of brand needs is now an imperative in the sponsorship industry. "is requires the ability to keep pace with information more quickly than current practices allow. "e collection of relevant, accessible, real-time brand intelligence can: drive faster development of more informed proposals; foster collaboration among property peers researching or already servicing like-sponsors; and leverage the comfort with social networking applications into value for sponsorship sales professionals. Perhaps more importantly, a dedicated intelligence tool will result in more, better proposals and be an impetus to lift the value sponsorship can bring to brands. Simply stated, an interactive brand intelligence

database driven by collaboration is the best way to bring researching sponsorship prospects and qualifying sales leads into the 21st Century.

”McDonald’s gets 2,700 unsolicited sponsorship proposals each year and rejects every single one of them.” – John Lewicki, McDonald’s Director of Sports Marketing

For more information: Kris Mathis Michael Munson kris@sponsorpitch.com mike@sponsorpitch.com