Pre-printed levels and benefits.
I know it’s not your intention, but this approach makes you look lazy and unsophisticated. You are much better off skipping all of the visual impact of a brochure and putting your efforts into a highly customised, crash-hot proposal that makes it easy for your contact to see the value and sell the concept internally. Substance trumps design every time.
And for those of you who think a prospectus will get you in the door, so you can follow up with a customised proposal, think again. Most of you will get one shot – ONE – to pitch, so it has to be your absolute best effort.
If you are asked to just “send me something”, that’s still no time to fall back to a prospectus. In that case, you’ve got a few options – read “What to Do if a Sponsor Says ‘Just Send Me a Proposal’” – but a prospectus isn’t one of them.
I have nothing against PowerPoint; I use it all the time. It’s a fantastic tool for stand-up presentations. What it’s really bad for is sponsorship proposals, and 99.99% of the time, that’s what the term “sponsorship deck” is referring to.
Here’s the thing: A sponsorship deck doesn’t have the structure to provide the amount of detail you need to provide so a sponsor can sell the idea internally and make a decision. It just doesn’t.
If you are going to do a stand-up presentation, go ahead and use PowerPoint, but ensure you do three things:
It needs to be very specific about how what you’re proposing will help them enhance their relationships with their target markets and achieve their marketing and larger business goals. No two decks should be the same.
PowerPoint shines when there are few words, allowing you to talk the presentation, answer questions as you go, and work collaboratively. Keep every slide simple.
You can keep the slides simple because all of the written rationale and ideas will be in the full proposal that you leave with the potential sponsor. This will have lots of detail and words, but so long as it is arranged sensibly, it will be easy for a sponsor to digest and use internally.
For a crash course on what belongs in a proposal, watch my video tutorial, Sponsorship Proposal Basics in About 15 Minutes. For everything you need to know about creating a customised proposal, including a template, get The Sponsorship Seeker’s Toolkit 4th Edition. I also have a self-paced, online sponsorship training course, covering the whole sales process, with lots of inclusions. Check out Getting to “Yes”.
If you’ve been lucky enough to get a preliminary meeting with a potential sponsor, don’t waste a single minute of it showing them a bloody video. It’s not going to sell the sponsorship and just burns (pun intended) the precious time you could be using to deepen your understanding of their brand, their target markets, and their objectives, so you can put together a truly compelling offer.
There you go, three new swear words of sponsorship that all sponsorship seekers should immediately ban. If you do, forcing yourself to rethink what you’re actually trying to accomplish and not the mechanism you use to do it, you’ll change your whole approach. That new approach will be something that will work better for you, make sales a whole lot easier, and get you more yeses from better sponsors.
Those are your new swear words of sponsorship, but take heart that you’re not alone, and check out “The New Swear Words of Sponsorship: Sponsor Edition“.
For all you need to know about sponsorship sales and servicing, you may want to get a copy of The Sponsorship Seeker’s Toolkit 4th Edition. You may also be interested in my white papers, “Last Generation Sponsorship Redux” and “Disruptive Sponsorship: Like Disruptive Marketing, Only Better“. I’ve also got self-paced, online sponsorship training courses for both sponsors and rightsholders. Get the details and links to course outlines and reviews here.
If you need additional assistance, I offer sponsorship consulting and strategy sessions, sponsorship training, and sponsorship coaching. I also offer a comprehensive Sponsorship Systems Design service for large, diverse, and decentralised organisations. Please feel free to drop me a line to discuss.
Please note, I do not offer a sponsorship broker service, and can’t sell sponsorship on your behalf. You may find someone appropriate on my sponsorship broker registry.
© Kim Skildum-Reid. All rights reserved. To enquire about republishing or distribution, please see the blog and white paper reprints page.