I’m asked about how much sponsorship consulting costs all the time, often in a one-line email asking how much it costs to hire me. But like any good consultant in any field, the cost depends on a lot of factors. Some of those have to do with the consulting project, and other factors have to do with the consultant or agency you’re asking.
So, while you may be here wondering if hiring a sponsorship consultant is going to cost you $10,000 or $250,000 or more, the answer is that it could be more, less, or anywhere in between.
Below, I’ve gone through a bunch of factors that go into the pricing of sponsorship consulting, and how these factors can impact on your results. You can use this advice to identify the factors that will be pertinent to you, and decide where you may be able to compromise for a lower fee, and where you can’t.
This article covers pricing for sponsorship consultants and agencies that do primarily strategic work: Building sponsorship strategies, conducting reviews/audits, highly customised capacity building, coaching, and advisory services. If that’s the kind of work you’re after, this is for you.
This article doesn’t extend to sponsorship brokers, who have a very different model of charging (and I have a separate article for that). It also doesn’t include agencies where their bread and butter is executing on leverage and marketing plans. Both of these can be magicians, and worth their weight in gold, but compensation is structured very differently. Brokers are generally paid via a retainer plus commission, while agencies delivering on plans often have a lot of hard costs to contract and cover, in addition to their remuneration.
Apologies in advance for this long article. I simply want you to have a complete picture.
Before you set your budget for a consultancy, you need to get realistic about the specifications of your project, because they’re going to have a great deal of impact on how much any given consulting project will cost.
First on the list is also the most obvious. The more complex a project, the more it’s likely to cost you for a consultant or agency to properly address it.
A portfolio review for one brand will be less than a portfolio review that goes across 10-20 brands or more. A sponsorship strategy for one or two properties will be less than a strategy impacting dozens of property types or hundreds of individual properties. Projects that span multiple regions and teams will also cost more.
You may think you can get some overarching advice that you can apply to all of the brands, regions, properties, etc, but it won’t work. If you approach it that way – trying to reduce costs by dramatically reducing the nuances addressed – the likelihood is that you’ll end up with something so generic that it’s meaningless and impossible to operationalise.
Most established consultancies work on a project fee basis, and those fees often reflect the value of the work impacted.
Optimising results from a $50 million sponsorship portfolio is going to create a far bigger impact than optimising a $300k portfolio. Yes, the bigger portfolio is likely to be more complex, but not always. A consultant could be hired to work on optimising one sponsorship worth $100 million, while another is hired to work on a portfolio with 100 sponsorships, and a total value of $1.5 million. Consulting for the $100 million sponsorship is always going to cost more.
This refers to additional services, support, and documentation that augments the efficacy of the core project contracted.
Virtually every sponsorship consultancy will include some of these additional deliverables, but when those deliverables become extensive, it’s going to affect the fee.
For instance, I have a service called Sponsorship Systems Design, and part of this service is creating a whole complement of fully customised tools, templates, advice, instructions, idea banks, checklists, coaching, training, and much more for every stakeholder group affected. Those stakeholder groups could be brands, brand groups, subsidiaries, properties, property types, or regions, and could easily reach well past 150 individual deliverables. Is it worth it to build results and consistency across a diverse organisation? Yes. Is it cheap? No.
Additional deliverables don’t need to be that extensive to affect pricing, but understand that if you want your consultant to deliver a significant amount of additional support services, it’s going to come at a cost.
Some organisations are just harder work. There may be an organisational culture of resistance to change. There may be a CEO with far too much inexpert control over the sponsorship portfolio. There may be so much bureaucracy that navigating it becomes a job unto itself.
If your organisation is difficult to work with, or has intractable political issues, you probably already know it, and should be looking for a consultant with a track record of building buy-in and mitigating negative impacts or organisational politics. That’s a specific expertise you’ll pay for, because not every consultant has it. And, frankly, not everyone is interested in working in that environment.
If part of the project is getting your stakeholders bought-in, on board, and involved in the new sponsorship direction – and it should be – the number of those stakeholders will probably impact the price.
For instance, prior to building a sponsorship strategy, I interview all of the key stakeholders as part of my preparation. For most projects, this is fewer than two dozen people, but I’ve still had a lot of projects where buy-in was going to be a huge issue, so I ended up interviewing over 100 individual stakeholders from various brands and regions to start the process of investing them in the results. You might say I should have used a questionnaire to make things easier, but that really doesn’t provide the kind of input I need to do my job, nor does it allow the stakeholders to feel truly heard.
In other cases, a consultant might offer follow-on coaching. Coaching one team is easy. Coaching 15 teams is a big job, and will impact the price.
Since the pandemic, we’ve all become highly accustomed to working remotely. I’ve done several substantial consulting projects entirely remotely, and have yet to meet the clients in person. For some organisations, this works great.
For other organisations – and, frankly, in some regions – working face-to-face is critically important to the uptake of advice and success of the project. If this is the case for your organisation, and you’re going to want a consultant to spend significant time in person – eg, a week with you every month, across the six-month project – that’s going to curtail the consultant’s availability for other work, and will cost you more. If a lot of face-time is what it’s going to take to get a great result from a sponsorship consulting project, however, it will be worth it.
If getting the project done is extremely time-sensitive – to the point that a consultant has to clear the decks of other work and concentrate on your project – that’s likely to increase the fee substantially.
For instance, if a senior executive commits to some huge sponsorship four months out from the event, and you’ve got the directive to make it work, that’s urgent. You need a plan and to marshal the team and your stakeholders, so you can get your leverage into the market well prior to the event.
Thankfully, these super-urgent projects aren’t that common. I’ve had them – for both consulting and expert witness work – and they can be exciting, but they also pose a lot of logistical challenges.
Just as important as what the project entails is who you’re asking to do it, and there are absolutely cheaper and more expensive options. The list below includes most of the reasons why a consultant is going to charge higher fees than another for the same project.
Sponsorship is a specialty, not a sideline. There are many brilliant marketing consultants in this world, but they are unlikely to have the specific skills you need to achieve your objectives with this amazing and complex medium. Same goes for fundraising consultants and sports marketers. But I’ve lost track of the number who list “sponsorship” as one of a dozen or more specialties.
To get a strong result from a consulting project, you want someone with specific, granular expertise in sponsorship. You want someone with an encyclopaedic understanding of best practice, trends, and tactics. You want someone who can rattle off multiple examples of how other organisations have tackled issues similar to yours. This can also be a consultant with specialty expertise, such as negotiating multi-brand sponsorship, short lead-time leverage plans, or working with federated organisations.
This degree of specific expertise will ensure a project that is both more efficient and thorough, but will likely cost you more than a generalist.
What I will caution is that it’s not generally a great idea to hire a consultant that specialises solely in your category – like banking or the arts or professional associations. You really want someone that works across categories, because they’ll be able to bring more ideas, angles, and creativity to the project than someone with a narrower view of sponsorship.
Following on from the previous point, a sponsorship consultant that has been around the block – that has done and seen it all – is going to be far more adept at pattern recognition and issue diagnosis than someone without. They will be able to easily separate the signal from the noise, triage options, and identify a forward plan and priorities, where someone without that experience won’t. Someone with this expertise will charge more, and if your issues are complex and/or significantly affect your results, it will be worth it.
Being known and credible in the industry isn’t a must for delivering good consulting work, but is often very important in getting broad buy-in for implementing that work, particularly with senior executives.
If it’s just your immediate team, and your budget is limited, this may not be a factor. But if it is, you need to secure a consultant that has a profile and track record your stakeholders can trust. That level of credibility is hard-fought, and consultants who have it are likely to cost you significantly more.
This one is more applicable to agencies than individual consultants. With some agencies, a super-experienced, super-credible consultant sells in the consulting service, then it’s immediately passed to a junior consultant to deliver it. I’m not saying this isa bad thing, but if what you want is the principal consultant doing the work on your project, that’s going to cost you more.
There is a hybrid, which is where a senior consultant does the heavy strategy work, and is assisted by someone more junior on the areas of the consultancy that don’t require as much industry credibility or experience. As long as the senior consultant is spearheading and heavily supervising the work, this can be an excellent compromise.
The above factors are things that can put upward pressure on fees. This section is all about aspects of the project and things you might be able to do that could reduce fees.
A greenfield sponsorship consulting project is one where the client isn’t currently involved in sponsorship in a meaningful way, and is moving into that space. There is no review required, and no bad decisions or bad habits that need undoing. It’s a blank slate.
For a consultant, this can be a much more straightforward job and, all other factors being equal, should cost less than a non-greenfield project.
The flipside or a client that wants a lot of face-time is one that is happy with remote – or mostly remote – work. This is generally easier and more flexible for a consultant to deliver, and may net you a reduced rate.
You can try to reduce consulting fees by narrowing the scope of the project, but that may or may not be successful, and it really comes down to how narrow you go.
Often, clients will narrow the scope so much that the consulting project becomes little more than treating the symptoms without diagnosing and treating the larger problems. For this reason, I prefer not to do projects that are very narrowly scoped. I find it painful to identify clear issues and areas where improvements could vastly impact results, but as it’s out of scope, I have to leave it alone. I digress.
Be sure you don’t narrow the scope so much that you’re undermining the success of the project. For instance, if you’ve got a buy-in problem, but “building cross-departmental buy-in” isn’t in your scope of work, your new strategy may never be properly implemented.
This is an option that can very significantly reduce costs, but you have to be absolutely sure that your organisation has both the capacity and will to do the heavy lifting.
For instance, one option I offer to potential clients that I know may be price sensitive is to do one or more strategy sessions, instead of creating a formal strategy and review document. I still do a ton of background work, and bring an enormous amount of intellectual capital to the process, but the process is completely different, with me facilitating a team working session identifying and addressing issues and opportunities, reformulating their approach, and collaborating on a forward plan.
Sounds good, right? But then I leave. The client is left with notes, whiteboards, an AI-generated outline of what we did, a bunch of lists and plans, and they have to formalise it, sell it internally, and make it happen without additional support. For some organisations, this works really well. For others, it falls in a heap.
So, you can absolutely go down this track, and it will save you a lot of money, while giving you access to great sponsorship minds, but you need to have an ironclad commitment to running with it from there. Otherwise, you won’t have saved money, you’ll have wasted it.
Let’s face it… there are a lot of perks in the sponsorship business, and if you’ve got access to something that a good sponsorship consultant really wants, that could net you a discount. This could be hard-to-get tickets, a VIP experience, or whatever. I’ve even had the offer from an airline client of flying my husband with me, business class, so we could extend the trip and have a holiday. (Unfortunately, my husband couldn’t make it.)
If you’ve got some cool perks to offer, let the consultant know when you’re briefing them, and if they’re interested, ask for some consideration on pricing. It probably won’t lower the price by a ton, but it might by a little.
There are also some aspects of the consultant/agency that can reduce the fees they charge. I’ve listed those below, as well as how this could work for you.
This may be a sponsorship consultant that is young and inexperienced, or a generalist that lacks specific, granular sponsorship expertise. I’m not a big fan of putting your future sponsorship results in the hands of either, but they at least should cost you less than an experienced sponsorship specialist.
The exception here is if what you’re really looking for isn’t strategic work, but increasing your capacity with a contract role, in which case, a less experienced consultant could be an excellent option.
This is someone who has probably worked extensively in sponsorship, has ample talent, and has recently left to set up their own consultancy. The upside is that you my get a bargain in the startup stages of their business. The potential downside is that, if they’ve spent most of their career at just one or two organisations, their experience may be deep, but not broad.
This can be a good option for a price-sensitive project, but you want to be sure that they have worked with at least a few organisations and sectors, otherwise they may not have a full complement of angles and options covered.
Right at the beginning of this article, I referenced agencies that make comprehensive leverage plans come to life. They’re magicians. Really. I couldn’t do what they do, and this is the kicker… they can’t usually do what I do, either.
If your brand has an agency doing your sponsorship execution, and you like and trust them, it may be a relatively inexpensive way to build out a sponsorship review and/or strategy, but there are some potential downsides:
I’m absolutely not knocking this type of organisation, and I’m not saying that they’re doing anything unethical. Truly, our industry would be nowhere without them, but you want to think hard about whether any cost savings on a review or strategy is worth the potential risk of less strategic nous or objectivity.
This is more about luck than anything else. As a consultant, I can tell you that all sponsorship consultants have slower periods. If you rock up with an interesting project, and happened to get a consultant during a slow time, or when a client postponed work at the last minute, you may get a lower price.
Many consultants will structure their fees into chunks, with one chunk being paid upfront, and others on set dates or after hitting certain milestones. Many consultants are happy to offer a discount for full payment upfront. (I offer 10%.)
As long as the consultant is reputable and has been in business for a while, there’s little risk to doing this, and depending on the size of the project, the cost savings can be substantial.
I’ve heard it said – and had it used on me – that it should be cheaper to hire a solo consultant than an agency, because an agency has more overheads. This is unrealistic. You’re not paying for infrastructure, you’re paying for experience, expertise, credibility and more. All else being equal, going with an independent consultant is not going to get you a lower price.
I know, you still don’t have a firm number on what a sponsorship consultant will cost you. I wish I could provide that but, as you can see, there are a ton of factors that go into pricing.
What I will say is that it’s always a good idea to provide at least an indicative range to any consultant that you want to provide a proposal. That way, they can either tailor the offer to suit your budget, or decline the opportunity because it’s not a great fit.
And if you’re interested in sponsorship consulting, you’re always welcome to check out what I do and contact me. Links below.
Good luck!
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