In September, I’ll be doing two of my most popular webinars, covering two of the industry’s most vexing subjects.

15 September – Short Lead-Time Sponsorship Sales

Sponsorship lead-time is unforgiving. You only have so much time to get your sponsorship sold before the sales window closes, and as the days tick away, and the pressure to meet targets increases, it can be very frustrating. The plain truth of the matter is that when you’re on a short lead-time, the game does change, and you need a different set of skills to continue playing with any success.

This 60-minute, live webinar combines the principles of best practice sponsorship with strategies, tricks, and angles honed over my 25 years in the industry, providing sponsorship seekers with the unique skills required for selling sponsorship with a short lead-time. Topics include:

• Why lead-time is such a critical factor in sponsorship sales
• What’s realistic for short lead-time sales, what’s not, and how to manage unrealistic expectations
• Tipping the balance toward “yes”, while time is tipping it toward “no”
• Knowing and working all of the angles
• How to structure an offer to reduce the lead-time factor
• Accessing alternative budgets
• Weighing the long term against the short
• Options for turning a bad situation into a good one
• What you absolutely must not do, or risk damaging your personal and organisational credibility

For complete information on Short Lead-Time Sponsorship Sales, click on the registration link, below, or download the full PDF brochure .

24 September – Critical Skills for Sponsor Retention

Please, don’t leave!  Unfortunately, begging is unlikely to get a sponsor to renew. Between the economy and increased scrutiny on expenditures, sponsor expectations have never been higher, and neither have the pressures on sponsees at renewal. The same old offers just aren’t cutting it anymore.

It is easier and cheaper to keep a sponsor than to find a new one, so instead of crossing your fingers at renewal time, you should be taking steps now to ensure you get the renewal when it comes around.

While sponsors are rationalising their portfolios, these are the skills you need to ensure you are in the “keep” column. This 90-minute, live webinar provides sponsorship seekers with the tools and skills to elevate your status with sponsors, effectively showcase your value, renew more sponsorship, and create strategic opportunities to increase investment by current sponsors. Topics include:

• Why sponsors don’t renew
• Sponsor management that will set you apart
• When and how to set yourself up for a great renewal (it’s not when you think!)
• Strategies for keeping your sponsors engaged throughout the relationship
• Fostering outstanding sponsor leverage
• Hot buttons that will encourage your sponsors to invest more
• Helping sponsors understand their results
• Creating useful reports
• Dos and don’ts of negotiating renewals
• Pros and cons of renegotiating mid-term
• Getting your sponsors to advocate for you

For complete information on Critical Skills for Sponsor Retention click on the registration link, below, or download the full PDF brochure.

I am contacted by a lot of sponsorship seekers who are unsure where to start with raising sponsorship, or they are trying to raise sponsorship and it’s just not happening. Many of them have read the books, but realise they need more help and that it needs to be individualised. They also realise they don’t have the budget or time for a full consultancy.

What they really need is a jump start, so by popular demand, I’ve created the Power Sponsorship Jump Start program for sponsorship seekers.

See below for an overview or download the PDF brochure for the Power Sponsorship Jump Start for all of the details!

What is included?

The Power Sponsorship Jump Start is an individualised program of education, coaching, and sales material development. You’ll be working directly with me. The program includes:

Development of a proposal template

Not sure how to showcase your property? What to include in a proposal? Not to worry, as Kim Skildum-Reid will develop a quality proposal template for your property. The proposal will be based on best practice principles and sponsor-side insight gleaned from 25 years of advising major sponsors.

Three coaching sessions

You will receive three coaching sessions for your use over the course of six months. How you use these sessions is up to you, but some suggestions are:

• Collaborating on a hit list of potential sponsors
• Developing customised sponsorship offers to slot into your proposal template
• Offer pricing, including in-kind options
• Negotiation and renewal preparation
• Issues management

On-demand access to webinars

You will receive on-demand access to five full-length webinars for sponsorship seekers, allowing you to quickly raise your own skill level. These webinars include:

• Essentials of Best Practice Sponsorship (90 min)
• Best Practice Offer Development (90 min)
• Best Practice Sponsorship Sales (90 min)
• Short Lead-Time Sponsorship Sales (60 min)
• Critical Skills for Sponsor Retention (60 min)

On-demand advice

Just have a quick question? You can email, call, or Skype me anytime for the duration of the Jump Start.

Recommended resources

You will receive a copy of The Sponsorship Seeker’s Toolkit 3rd Edition, as well as a compliment of my white papers. Once I understand your situation, I’ll also provide a list of recommended reading and resources, including specific sections of The Sponsorship Seeker’s Toolkit, other pertinent books, white papers, specific blogs to read, specific blogs and Twitter feeds to follow, and more.

Collaborative workspace

As a Jump Start client, you will have access to a private, secure, collaborative workspace for document sharing, questions, comments, and more.

Who will benefit from a Jump Start?

The Jump Start has been created for sponsorship seekers and is equally appropriate across categories, from arts organisations to festivals, professional development to sports, and many more.

The program is fully tailored to your needs. Below are just a few of the situations where a Jump Start could make a real difference to your results:

• You are just starting to seek sponsorship and are unsure where to begin.
• You have a new property for which to seek sponsorship, and you want to get it off to a flying start.
• Your sponsorship program has gone stale or hit a plateau and needs to be reinvigorated.
• You are moving up in class – seeking bigger sponsors than you ever have before – and want to get it right.
• You were hoping to find a sponsorship broker, but can’t find a good one, so you’re on your own.
• Your sponsorship sales team is new or inexperienced, and you need them up to speed fast.

Not sure if a Jump Start is right for you? Drop us a line with your questions on admin@powersponsorship.com, US +1 612 326 5265, or AU +61 2 9559 6444.

I meet a lot of sponsors, and something that strikes me with alarming frequency is the fact that so many of them are quite aware of what best practice sponsorship is about, and the benefits of doing it, but haven’t taken any steps to elevate their sponsorship approach to that level.

Why would so many sponsors bother to talk such a good game, when they have no apparent interest in playing it? What is stopping them from taking the steps necessary to benefit their brand using a more strategic approach? The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced it’s fear. Below, I’ve outlined the five biggest fears I see all the time.

You’re afraid it will be more work

You’re right. Getting sponsorship to really fly does require a lot of work. The good news is that best practice sponsorship spreads that load to the most sensible people, so your workload is likely to be different, but not bigger.

Here’s the thing, sponsorship does not work in a vacuum. To get the most out of it, it should be used as a catalyst – integrated across your other marketing and business activities. That means, you will be working with decision-makers from across your company and, newsflash, they are all better at their jobs than you are.

Got a sponsorship with a social media angle? Work with your in-house (or contracted) expert to develop the plan and then – yay! – they implement it. Got an employee angle? That’s where the employee experts, HR, come in. Sales? Your sales team is much better placed to develop the promotions and get retail buy-in than you are. The list goes on and on.

If you do sponsorship right, your job changes from “doer” to “wrangler”, as you manage the process through the different departments. And because those departments are already experts, they will be able to accomplish a lot and do it both expertly and efficiently.

You’re afraid of the higher bar

What if you make some changes and, lo and behold, they actually work? Suddenly the bar may be raised on everything you do!

While some corporate managers relish in meeting higher expectations, not everyone is in that category. Let’s face it, some would rather coast.

The thing about best practice sponsorship is that once someone – read: your boss – sees how smart, effective, and creative it is, they will become best practice true believers and you will be a star. And yes, that means higher expectations.

The good news is that once you know how to construct a best practice sponsorship leverage and measurement program, it is easy to replicate the process for the rest of your portfolio. It’s creative, it’s fun, and so very gratifying. Thinking that you shouldn’t make the first jump because the bar will eventually go up is silly and self-defeating.

You’re afraid that if you take a different approach, it will make you look like you were dumb before

I see this one a lot. A sponsorship manager or team wants to make a change, but they don’t want to admit to colleagues and bosses that they had it wrong – or at least not right – before.

Here’s the good news: You have a window of opportunity. Best practice sponsorship is not so common that you will look like you were late to the party. It is new enough that you can say you’ve been doing some research on global best practice and you want to overhaul the approach. There is absolutely no shame in that, so take ownership and lead the process. Be the spearhead. You’ll look like a visionary.

You’re afraid the sell-in will be tough

This is a valid fear. Sometimes corporate cultures just don’t readily embrace change and knowing you have to fight inertia is enough to stymie any attempts at progress.

Education is your friend. Distribute white papers (“Last Generation Sponsorship” is a great start). Involve colleagues in leverage brainstorms. The fastest thing you can do, however, is to host some in-house training with someone who really knows best practice sponsorship and how to teach it. Show your colleagues the light and they will see the possibilities for your own brands.

You’re afraid the perks will dry up

Sponsorship managers – particularly at bigger companies – are on a pretty good wicket. They get invited to a lot of events and get a lot of tickets that mere mortals dream about. It’s so good, that it is perfectly understandable that you don’t want to change anything, just in case you miss out.

It won’t happen. There is every chance that your portfolio may change to better reflect brand and target market needs, but you’re still going to get all the good invitations. As long as you still have a hand in decisions, you will not miss out.

There you go. Five fears you really don’t need to have. There are no excuses. Get out there and embrace best practice – for your brands, your career, and yourself. You won’t regret it.

Here’s the thing… I’m not sure what to call what a sponsor does with their sponsorship. Way back when, it was referred to as “maximising” a sponsorship, then “leveraging”, and now much of the world (but not so much here) uses the term, “activation”.

I have to say, I naturally gravitate toward “leverage”. I think it is more accurate, as those activities serve as a multiplier – a “lever” – on the results achieved. That said, if I’m confusing people, I’m open to change.

So, I’m throwing it to you. I really want your opinion. Do you have a preference for “leverage” or “activation”? Most important, why do you feel that way? Or do you think they’re more or less interchangeable?

This blog is full of how-to about selling sponsorship. I thought I would do a quick round up of some of the very common ways sponsorship seekers undermine their own efforts.

1. Make assumptions about the sponsor’s objectives
2. Make assumptions about the sponsor’s target markets
3. Don’t customise the proposal (AKA use “search-and-replace”)
4. Take a shotgun approach
5. Offer sponsorship levels
6. Your tone is arrogant
7. Your tone is needy
8. Start the sales process with the proposal
9. Submit the proposal to the Sponsorship Manager
10. Submit the proposal to the CEO
11. Submit the proposal via an online form
12. Submit the proposal to an agency
13. Any kind of hard sell
14. Threaten to sell to a competitor
15. Send a “letter of request”
16. Corner the sponsor at a function
17. Include a lot of irrelevant props (DVDs, etc)
18. Concentrate on your needs, not the sponsor’s needs
19. Structure your proposal as follows: Loads of pages about your property, benefits list, price
20. Don’t give the sponsors enough lead-time to get a leverage program in place
21. Make a pest of yourself
22. Approach sponsorship as a “numbers game”
23. Claim your property has “broad general appeal”
24. Put a junior person in charge of sponsorship
25. Invoke guilt
26. Put the sponsorship out to tender
27. Tell the sponsor they will be “a good corporate citizen” or “give back to the community”
28. Spam the industry with your uncustomised proposal and a 5 GB attachment
29. Emit any sign of desperation

I was tossing up between that title and “No, I haven’t fallen off the edge of the planet”.

You’d be justified in thinking so, considering how quiet I’ve been recently. Quiet and un-prolific don’t really come naturally to me, but I’ve had some extenuating circumstances. Without going into the gory details, about seven weeks ago, I was totally blindsided and am now suddenly single. So, there you go.

My brain has just not been in the game. Or rather, it hasn’t been in the sponsorship game – not as much as it should be. The good news is that I’m feeling a lot more like my normal self. I’m back to writing and am beavering through all of the blogs I’ve left half-finished over the past couple of months. You’ll see a lot of new content being posted at a pretty rapid pace, so don’t panic if your RSS feed starts to clog up with my back-dated blogs. It’s temporary. I’m catching up.

More good news is that I’ve come up with a new service for sponsorship seekers, which will be launched next week.

The upshot is that I’m very glad to be back in this game, working and writing and offering advice on a subject that I really love: Corporate sponsorship. Thank you all for your patience while my brain has been otherwise engaged.

People are afraid of change. At least that’s the sense I get when talking about best practice sponsorship. It is all so new and different that people assume it will be difficult.

It’s not actually difficult, but I do get that it can look daunting to start. For those people who want to do sponsorship better, but want to take baby steps, I’ve created this guide.

Step 1

You need to start changing your thinking, so some light reading is your first step. There is tons of content on this site, but to give you an easily digestible start, I recommend these two white papers:

• Last Generation Sponsorship
• Sponsorship in a Scary Economy

Step 2

You’re realising that you could be doing better, but not sure where to start. Here are a few blogs that outline where most sponsorship seekers get it wrong – helping you to put some dynamite under those old habits – and how to do it right.

• How Do I Get Sponsorship for My Event?
• The Problem with Sponsorship Levels
• Five Things a Sponsorship Seeker Must Bring to a Sponsor Meeting

Bonus reading for non-profits:

• Non-Profits, Watch Your (Sponsorship) Language!
• Overheard: The World’s Worst Sponsorship Advice for Non-Profits

Step 3

You’re starting to get hungry to put some of this into practice, so you need to equip yourself.

Order The Sponsorship Seeker’s Toolkit 3^rd Edition.

While you’re waiting for it to arrive, start following the blogs of these very smart people, below. Note, I have left out a number of big names who do blog, but aren’t all that insightful, taking an approach something like, “I’d like to bring your attention to this issue. It sure is a big issue and I recommend you keep it in mind. The end.”

• Partnership Activation Blog by Brian Gainor – http://www.partnershipactivation.com
• Sponsorship Blog by Linda Antonidis – http://sponsorshipblog.com/
• The Business of Sports Blog by Russell Scibetti – http://www.thebusinessofsports.com/
• Culture Scout Blog by Patricia Martin – http://blog.patricia-martin.com
• Chris Reed on Partnership Marketing – http://community.brandrepublic.com/blogs/chrisreed/default.aspx
• SponsorPark’s blog – http://www.sponsorpark.com/blog/
• Kim Skildum-Reid’s Corporate Sponsorship Blog (yes, that’s my blog) – http://blog.powersponsorship.com

If you’re on Twitter, you can start following some of the best thinkers in sponsorship, sports marketing, and fundraising. I’ve compiled a list of my favourites you can check out:

http://twitter.com/KimSkildumReid/sponsorship

Step 4

The book still hasn’t arrived, but you want to get going.

Download the Generic Inventory – a big list of all of the creative benefits you can offer, but probably haven’t thought of. Spend 30 minutes customising it for your organisation.

If you’re relatively new to marketing and sponsorship, you should also download “Cheat Sheet: Marketing Terms a Sponsorship Seeker Must Know”, so you can start talking the language.

Finally, get a library card. You heard me right – you need a library card. Why? So you can avail yourself of the best free resource for business information on the planet: ABI/Inform Full-Text Online.

You can enter – Google-style – keywords and it will search the full text of articles on thousands of business publications around the world and bring you back the whole articles. You can mark the ones that are interesting to you and e-mail them to yourself. The kind of things you will find:

• Examples of best practice sponsorship
• Examples of interesting, out-of-the-box partnerships
• Examples of interesting, out-of-the-box sponsorship benefits
• Precedent to add weight to that great sponsorship idea you have
• Background on how other sponsors use their sponsorships of art galleries/festivals/whatever
• Background on what multinational sponsors do in other countries (you’ll make yourself look really smart if you do this!)

The kicker is that mostly only university and major public libraries have a license to this. The good news is that you should be able to get a library card and pin number to remotely log into the online materials from your office. That’s what I do with the State Library of NSW. Just call and ask your closest major library about the process to get a card and pin number because you want to access ProQuest databases from home (ABI/Inform is a ProQuest service). Note, do say “home”, not “work”.

Step 5

The book has arrived! Go straight to the section on Sales. Read it, take notes, and pick a couple of your current sponsors coming up to renewal that you will try out the techniques on. What techniques? Distilling it down to the most important sales basics:

• Fill out the Sponsor Information Checklist as much as you can.
• Contact your sponsor and request a meeting. Tell them that you are going to be taking a new approach and want to ensure you understand exactly what they are trying to achieve, so you can create something really effective for them. In that meeting, fine tune your Sponsor Information Checklist.
• Get some colleagues together and go through the leverage brainstorm process to get some great ideas to build your sponsorship around.

Step 6

Okay, so you’ve got a couple of receptive sponsors itching for your great new ideas, but you don’t know how to package them.

First off, start with the sponsorship proposal template in The Sponsorship Seeker’s Toolkit 3^rd Edition. Be absolutely sure to customise it, so it looks like your organisation, not the generic version you get in the book. Dress it up, include pictures, make it sexy.

This blog will be very helpful in getting you to the right price:

• Sponsorship Pricing Basics

And there is this YouTube tutorial:

Sponsorship Proposal Basics in About 10 Minutes

You’re on your own

If you follow all of these little baby steps, and use a couple of your current sponsors as guinea pigs, you will start to get feedback that will tell you this approach is what sponsors are hungry for. It will start to feel like the obvious and natural way to go about sponsorship and you will start devouring everything you can about the whole process.

Once that happens, you don’t need baby steps anymore. You’re starting to see that it works and will be flying!

If you’re anything like me, you love to see a plan come together – all the pieces falling into place to form a seamless, cohesive whole. I get all a-tingle just thinking about it.

Sponsors do this all the time. They plan and execute leverage strategies that are things of beauty. But as glorious as it is to have a “perfect” leverage plan in place – and as a bit of a perfectionist, it pains me to tell you this – your leverage will work better if you leave a few holes and some of the edges ragged.

The first reason you want to somewhat under-produce your leverage program is that marketing that looks too slick, too manufactured, pushes the cynicism button for consumers. Think about it: You have invested in the privilege to connect with your target markets through something they already care about, and then you opt for slick , often highly brand-centric, commercialism. It’s a turn-off. The good news is that the alternative works a lot better.

My favourite reason to under-produce is that it leaves space for the target markets. Let them fill in the blanks, create the content, provide input and feedback. In short, allow the consumers to be the architects, not only of their event experience, but of their brand experience around that event.

A great example of this is how Orange leverages their major sponsorship of the Glastonbury Festival. Their leverage plan is stuff of legend, and you really need to check out their micro-site to appreciate it. While you’re there, however, take a good look at how much of the content of that site is generated by their customers and music fans. They don’t overly stage-manage the content. Instead, they showcase the passion of music fans in all its imperfect glory. When they combine that willingness to share the platform with their customers and music fans with the rest of their creative, responsive leverage plan, the put their brand in the unassailable position of both adding real value to, and aligning with, their target markets.

The good news for sponsors is that social media has made sharing the platform much easier, but if you’re going to do it, you actually do have to share. Creating a Facebook page is all well and good, but if you aren’t showcasing fan comments on your main page, or delete any negative comments, you’re missing the point. Creating a sponsorship-driven Twitter account is fantastic, unless all you do is post outbound marketing messages and never respond to anyone.

When it comes right down to it, as a sponsor, you should not be providing an experience, but sharing it with your target markets. The idea of being a “brand hero” is self-centred and (thankfully) dying. Instead, be a brand fan. Jump into the experience with your target markets. Revel in it. Share it. Reap the benefits.

I get dozens of emails and social media approaches every week from people looking for sponsorship of their website, business, television show, documentary, education, or whatever. My issue with this isn’t that they are contacting me – I’m happy to hear from any of you! – but that so many seem to have a misguided notion of what sponsorship is.

In the case of website, television, and documentary “sponsorship”, 99% of the examples I see aren’t sponsorship at all. Offering banner ads, product or logo placement, acknowledgements of support, backlinks, etc does not equate to a sponsorship, but a media buy. (And “sponsoring” the telecast of an event is not the same as sponsoring the event – it’s also just a targeted media buy.) I’m not saying these investments don’t have value, but it really is an entirely different animal.

A sponsorship is a collection of benefits and entitlements that provide a brand with an opportunity to get a marketing result. The way they get that result is through leverage – proactively doing things with the benefits to achieve specific objectives. Leverage could include adding value to their target markets’ event or brand experiences, promotions, involving their staff, integrating with other media activities, creating social media platforms, and much much more. Sponsorship is mutual and about nurturing relationships, and has both the emotional weight – people really caring about what is being sponsored – and the critical mass to be a catalyst for other marketing activities.

A media buy is an outbound communication strategy. It is buying time or space in which to showcase a brand or brand message. Media buys are what they are, and are not leverageable. If you can’t imagine a company running an ad or embarking on a PR campaign or developing a staff program or creating a social media hub around what you’re selling, it’s not sponsorship.

As an example, I was recently approached by someone looking for “sponsorship” of their website. They were offering banner advertising, links, branding all over the site, and participation in the e-newsletter. That may well be a valuable investment, for the right brand, but it’s not leverageable. Seriously, can you imagine any brand taking this up and then running a series of magazine ads themed around their activities on that website? Embarking on a social media campaign? Creating a staff program? Me neither.

Of course there are exceptions, but not very many.

And for all you little companies with great ideas, but no cash, again, that’s not sponsorship. You are looking for a financial backer – an investor, silent partner, or white knight – who will provide some cash in return for (probably) an equity position. And people looking for someone to “sponsor” their educations are looking for benefactors.

Before your organisation looks for corporate sponsorship, you need to ensure that what you are offering really is sponsorship, and the easiest way to find out is to ask yourself whether it is leverageable or not. If it’s not leverageable, it’s not sponsorship, and it’s time to take a different approach.

If you’re really selling a media buy, then those are the sales channels you need to use. If what you really need is a backer, your first call should be to your accountant. Don’t seek sponsorship if that’s not what you’re really selling, or you could waste a lot of time and effort going through a very tough process that is destined to fail.

Developing your sponsorship offers and sponsorship sales are two very big subjects - closely linked, and together, the key to increasing your sponsorship revenue. To do these subjects justice, we need more time than the standard 60-90 minute webinar, so have broken it into two webinars that work very well together. You are also welcome to register for just one.

For complete information on both of these webinars, click on the registration link, below, or download the full PDF brochure.

21 July – Best Practice Offer Development: Who to target, what to offer

This 90-minute, live webinar will take you through the mindset and process for developing compelling, value-packed offers that will capture potential sponsors’ attention and differentiate you from the competition. There is no guarantee a potential sponsor will say “yes”, but using these techniques will considerably increase your chances. This is a perfect compliment to Best Practice Sponsorship Sales on 4 August. Topics include:

• Creating a well-targeted hit list
• Prioritising: Who are your most promising prospects
• Getting the background information you need to create a great offer
• When to contact the sponsor and what to say
• The critical importance of getting to the big ideas
• The creative offer development process. Note: This process will be delivered in case-study form, enabling participants to see an offer develop
• Creating a benefits list that works

4 August – Best Practice Sponsorship Sales: Turning your sponsorship vision into revenue

This 90-minute, live webinar will show you how to formalise your offer, get it to the right person, follow up, negotiate, and close the deal. This webinar is the perfect compliment to the Offer Development webinar on 21 July, covering topics such as:

• What must be included in your proposal
• Proposal “extras” that can make a big difference (and what to avoid)
• Structuring your proposal for maximum impact
• Making it easy for the sponsor to sell the offer internally
• Pricing your offer correctly
• Protecting your creative ideas
• Getting your offer to the right person (and who to avoid)
• Must-know negotiation tips, tricks, and what you should never do
• Valuing in-kind sponsorship
• Formalising the agreement

Both webinars are offered twice, to accommodate different time zones. Below are some indicative times. Please be sure to check the time and date in your region. I recommend http://everytimezone.com. Please indicate your preferred session when you register.