Sponsorship Leverage Workshop: The Easiest and Highest-Leverage Way to Add Value to Your Sponsors

When I talk to rightsholders about adding value to their sponsors – AKA sponsorship servicing – some rightsholders have no idea what I’m talking about, thinking that their only job after a sponsorship is sold is to deliver the contracted benefits.

Sorry, it’s just not that simple.

Servicing is a critical part of the process. Phone it in – or worse, skip adding value altogether – and you damage the sponsor relationship and could put a renewal in jeopardy. When servicing properly is prioritised and resourced effectively, it’s very straightforward, so there’s really no excuse.

Your goal with sponsorship servicing

Just delivering the contracted benefits, sending out some heavily padded end of year report, and then hitting up the sponsor for a renewal. This isn’t helping anyone. Not the sponsor, and not you.

Instead, you want to add value – literally do extra stuff – for your sponsors. The effort you put into this will pay off in multiples with the degree of engagement and ease of renewal. To that end, your goals for sponsorship servicing are:

• Encourage the sponsor to thoroughly leverage their investment, maximising their results
• Encourage the sponsor to leverage in a way that provides meaningful benefit to your fans, their customers, potential customers, and more
• Facilitate sponsor cross-promotions
• Facilitate sponsor networking (they love that!)
• Ensure sponsors know how to measure their own sponsorships (because you can’t do it)
• Positioning yourself as responsive to their needs, and reasonably flexible

Doing this will not only make your life easier, but it will make your sponsors love and respect you. That’s big.

Where standard sponsorship servicing falls down

For organisations that commit themselves to sponsorship servicing, that’s absolutely fantastic. But… and this is a big but, a lot of times you’re making it really hard on yourself. The focus is often primarily on providing bonus benefits when the sponsor asks for them, which is absolutely fine, but if that’s your main approach, it’s a lot of work.

First off, every time a sponsor wants or needs something, you need to deal with that individually, and that can be time consuming. Then, there are the entitled sponsors that sponsor low and then constantly ask for bonus benefits, when if that was really the level of benefits they needed, they should have invested in a bigger package. Managing that can be a pain in the bum.

The lack of a servicing budget is also a factor. Best practice is budgeting a minimum of 10% of the gross value of the sponsorship (including budget-relieving contra) for adding value. Build it into the sponsorship fee from the start, so it is a formalised within your organisation as one of the costs of having a sponsor. This will help you in two ways:

1. You’ll have a specific budget to add value to individual sponsors, and it can be pooled to add value to sponsors in ways that benefit all of them.
2. You’ll have a financial added-value endpoint for all of your sponsors, so if you have a $15,000 sponsor, they know you have a servicing budget (they should), and you’ve provided added-value close to the budgeted $1500, you can say to them, “We’re happy to provide this extra benefit (or whatever) to you, but please understand, this has nearly exhausted our budget for adding value. If what you really need to do is negotiate a bigger opportunity, we’re happy to chat about that.” Most of the time, they’ll either agree that they probably need a bigger package or wind their necks in.

One solution: Group added value

One big solution to the above is creating a few group added value activities, where you can pool a little bit of servicing money from all of your sponsors to do something that adds real, meaningful value to all of them. Examples are:

• Sponsor networking functions
• Carrying out sponsor-focused market research, sharing the results with your sponsors (some rightsholders limit this to major sponsors)
• Holding a leverage and measurement workshop

That final point is my favourite, and a huge, massive, gargantuan (you get the picture) benefit to you, your sponsors, and the fans.

How training and facilitation adds value to sponsors

Sponsors are busy, and things can fall through the cracks. They don’t want that to happen, but it often does. It can take months to create a strong leverage plan – if they get to it – and they may lean on you for measurement, even though you can’t measure against their objectives and benchmarks. And getting internal buy-in, which is essential for great sponsorship, may just fall by the wayside. All of this is bad for everyone.

So imagine this instead…

• You invite all of your sponsors and as many of their team as can make it (really encourage this!) to a leverage and measurement workshop facilitated by someone really good, with high credibility in the industry. This is important, as it will drive more participation by sponsors and their teams, who they may want to skill up.
• They turn up – warmly welcomed by you and your team – and spend the first hour or so learning about best practice sponsorship, how it works, why it’s important, and illustrated by a bunch of super-creative case studies. Then, they get workbooks. Yes, workbooks. When I do this – and I’ve done it literally hundreds of times – I put them to work!
• Before we start the leverage process, I tell them that they’re likely to have some ideas that may require an adjustment in their benefits – swapping a couple of benefits out for something that works better for their ideas. I tell them that you’re very open to having those conversations, positioning your organisation as flexible and responsive. This does not mean changing the term or fee, just swapping a couple of commensurate benefits.
• Then I walk participants through the process of developing a creative and strategic draft leverage plan right there in the room. They have a creative brains trust with their team. They’re building buy-in. And they’re learning a skill that they can apply to any other sponsorships in their portfolio.
• We may even take a beat and do a quick exercise facilitating cross-promotions between various sponsors in the room. This works super-well.
• The final step is that I show them how to measure their own sponsorships. It’s not rocket science, and once I do that, they’ll stop asking you to provide some kind of ROI.

And they do all of that in the space of 4-6 SUPER FUN hours. The leverage plan that could take them months to do, if they do it properly at all, done. At least some of the buy-in, done. Measurement strategy, done.

Without a word of a lie, I did this almost every year for several years for one rightsholder. The room was always full, and there were LOTS of repeat participants. When I asked them why they were back, given they already know how to do the leverage process, they all replied something to the effect of, “You make us buckle down and concentrate, so this is the most efficient way to do it.” Yay for that!

How a sponsor workshop positions you

Not to put too fine a point on it, but doing this for your sponsors positions you and your organisation as a bunch of bloody geniuses.

You are demonstrating that you care about their results. You’re demonstrating that you understand that they’re busy and giving them the time and space to focus on this. You’re giving them free training for their team with someone really good. And if you’ve got a bunch of sponsors that are suddenly upping their game with how they add value to the fan experience, your fans win too.

And it’s all relatively cheap. Amortising the cost of a top facilitator, with a track record of running these things well, across all of your sponsors is a very small investment each, and the benefits are enormous.

Let me kick your sponsors’ arses

One of the secret superpowers of getting a great facilitator – and I do this all the time – is that you can let me (or whoever) kick your sponsors’ arses for you. In the nicest possible way, of course!

You may not be in a position to do it, but I can tell them to measure their own sponsorships. I can tell them that if they don’t leverage, they won’t get a good result. I can debunk old-school thinking.

The bonus for you and your team

There are two big bonuses for you and your team that I haven’t addressed yet:

1. Your team will also participate in the training, building their skills, as well. They’ll be better at helping sponsors build leverage plans in future, and lots of the skills are transferrable to offer development and the sales process.
2. Your team will wander the room with me – or just sit down with various sponsors – helping them build their plans. In the process, your team will learn a lot more about those sponsors. They’ll learn what’s most important to the sponsors, what they need, how they think about the sponsorship, and even some of their limitations.

Both of these will serve your organisation well for a long time.

Important: Don’t skimp

One caveat on all of this is that you shouldn’t skimp on the facilitator. Getting someone known and respected will show the sponsors that you’re serious about their results. Get someone with fewer skills or a lower profile, and you risk looking like you’re cheaping out on your sponsors. And if you’re thinking of facilitating it yourself – which you may have the actual skills to do – remember the bit about the facilitator being able to say things and kick arses that you really can’t.

Again, it’s worth getting someone good, and if you look at it as an investment across your entire portfolio of sponsors, it’s probably a drop in the bucket.

The upshot

Sponsorship servicing is multifaceted. There is definitely a place for providing bonus benefits and taking the sponsor to lunch and all the standard stuff yada yada. But those aren’t your only options. Think about high-leverage group strategies, like sponsor networking, sponsor-driven research, and especially a leverage and measurement workshop.

If you want to discuss, just drop me a line.

Need more assistance?

Additional resources

• The Sponsorship Seeker’s Toolkit 4th Edition (book)
• White papers and templates (no signup required)
• Self-paced online training for rightsholders – Getting to “Yes”

Working with me

If you’re interested in working with me, I can provide the following options. Just click through for more information, and drop me a line if you want to discuss.

• Strategic sponsorship consulting
• Sponsorship strategy sessions
• Sponsorship training (in-house, group, and partner training)
• Sponsorship coaching and advisory services
• Sponsorship Systems Design™ (for large, diverse, and/or federated organisations)

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.

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