CHAPTER 6

Creating the Offer

Most sponsorship sales efforts start with a template proposal. It has several levels—often gold-silver-bronze—and the entire customization process includes using search-and-replace to create 200 identical proposals for 200 different potential sponsors. Then the next three months are spent trying to get those sponsors to call you back, and the lion’s share of them never will.

Sponsors hate those proposals, and what these boilerplate proposals say about you is that you are inflexible and unimaginative and don’t care what they are trying to achieve. Do yourself a favor and vow never to send another of those proposals. Instead, take the time to craft a customized offer that is not only worthy of their attention and consideration, but genuinely worth a bigger fee.

Customized offers are built around leverage ideas that you come up with that will achieve the sponsor’s objectives. We will say that coming up with leverage ideas isn’t your responsibility, it is the sponsor’s. That said, providing specific, creative ideas that they can use to make the opportunity you’re selling turn into the results they want is totally in your best interest. It makes saying yes much easier for them.

So, as much as you think you’re selling benefits, you’re not. You’re selling a vision for what sponsoring your organization can mean to their brands, and to the people they target. That’s what offer development is all about.

This chapter is full of great case studies to inspire you. You’ll find even more in Chapter 11, “Leverage.”

               More than anything else, you’re selling a vision.

The Event Versus the Event Experience

Before you start developing offers, we need to break something to you: As fantastic as your organization/event/whatever may be, functionally, you’re not really selling very much.

You’re selling a package including some rights to a sponsor designation and some intellectual property (IP) and/or some content, some tickets, hospitality, visibility, and maybe some space or time to do some on-site activity. That’s the start of a leverageable sponsorship platform, but if that’s all you use when creating the offer, you’re selling yourself short. You’re selling your event (or whatever) and missing the huge sponsor opportunities around the event experience.

Let’s just take a baseball team, for example. People don’t stop being fans at the end of the game. They don’t even stop being fans at the end of a season. There is an entire fan experience that sits around the baseball games they attend or watch on television. It starts when they start anticipating the new season and doesn’t stop until the last memory has faded. Fans don’t have to ever attend a game or event or visit your museum to have an experience around that, and if you show sponsors how they can add value to their bond with their target markets within both the event and the much larger event experience, you’re extending the effective time frame, the geographic footprint, the depth and number of “wins” the sponsor can provide to the target market, and your value to that sponsor.

This approach works hand-in-hand with the “punching above your weight” concept to make what you’re offering look, feel, and operate for the sponsor like something much bigger than it really is (Figure 6.1).

Your Team

Developing offers is something that is very difficult to do on your own. It is basically a directed brainstorm and requires different perspectives to do it thoroughly and creatively.

Ideally, you will have several people involved in the process of offer development, but at the very least, ensure there are two of you. The people taking part don’t specifically need to have a role in sponsorship. Some good roles to include are

• Marketing

• Membership or audience development

• Business development

• Communications

• Production

• Executive director

It may also be useful to include one or more board members in this process from time to time, as this will give them some insight into the process and amount of work that goes into selling sponsorship. They may be a little more realistic with their sponsorship targets once they understand what goes into it.

               It is virtually impossible to develop a strong offer on your own.

Offer Brainstorm Process

The offer brainstorm process is something originally developed to help sponsors leverage their investments. (If you’ve read Kim’s book, The Corporate Sponsorship Toolkit, this will look familiar.) But with a few tweaks, this process works very well for finding the ideas that will underpin your offer and make your proposal stand out from almost every other proposal a sponsor will receive.

We recommend that you and your team throw yourselves into this process with some abandon. Let yourselves have the crazy ideas. You’re not committing yourselves to anything, at this point, but it’s only by allowing yourselves to get really creative that you’ll allow yourselves to let go of “how it’s always been done.”

So, choose the sponsor for whom you’re going to develop the offer, and let’s get cracking!

Homework

Before you are ready to lead an offer development session, you need to do some homework. Spending 30 minutes using ABI/Inform Full-Text Online is a very strong option.

Once you’ve logged onto ABI/Inform Full-Text Online, do three searches:

• The sponsor’s category of business and category of your property and “corporate sponsorship” (i.e., “insurance and hockey and corporate sponsorship”)

• Category of your property and “corporate sponsorship” (i.e., “festival and corporate sponsorship”)

• The sponsor’s category of business and “corporate sponsorship” (i.e., “retailer and corporate sponsorship”).

This will provide you with some leverage ideas and angles that you can drop into the brainstorm process to get people going and/or if the process starts to stagnate. Plus, there may be a number of ideas you can . . . how can we put this . . . borrow with pride.

Backgrounding

Before you are prepared to develop the actual leverage ideas, you need to figure out what raw materials you have to work with. So with your team, go through these steps. Capture what you do in a way that allows you to reference it easily later—butcher paper tacked to the wall is low-tech but very effective.

Background Step 1: Perceptions

Start off by asking your team to list people’s perceptions of the property. Better yet, pull out your brand bullseye and have a quick review. Add anything your team thinks has been missed. Ensure that you also capture misconceptions, because people can have incorrect perceptions about what you do, and you need to take that into account.

Background Step 2: Best and Worst

• What are the best things about this property? What do people tell you they love? What do they want more of? What makes them attend, join, donate, or whatever?

• What are the worst things about this property? What is most frustrating or least convenient? What are the deterrents to attending, joining, donating, etc.?

The idea here is to be honest. Don’t sugarcoat the bad stuff, as this knowledge could prove useful later on.

Event Experience Touch-Points

List all of the ways people interact with the property. Following is a sample list of some typical touch-points for an event. The touch-points for a charity or museum or team or association could be very different.

• Attending the event itself

• Caring about the event, team, cause, etc.

• Anticipation

• Ticket purchase (or other commitment)

• Buying merchandise

• National pride

• Proximity

• Experiencing the event itself via media (broadcast, online)

• Event coverage in media

• Online participation—websites, social media, e-newsletters, forums, reviews, etc.

• Gambling or tipping

• Attending event-themed parties

• Transportation, parking

• Weather

• (In)convenience

• Stories, memories, bragging rights

Brand Touch-Points

Now, think about the sponsor’s brand. Similar to the above, list all of the ways their target markets interact with the brand. Following is a sample of some brand touch-points. Again, while these may be very different from one brand to another, these should provide a good starting point.

• Buying/using the brand

• Brand packaging

• Brand website

• Micro-site

• Social media activities—Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.

• Customer service

• Retail or branch experience

• Advertising

• Promotions—media, retail, on- or in-pack, online, etc.

• Collateral materials

• ATMs

• Loyalty marketing programs

• Statements/bills

• Cards

• In-flight materials

• Service, maintenance, warrantees

• Staff communications

• Staff training, team building

• Shareholder communications

• Retail or broker incentives

• Other sponsorships

               You will probably spend as much time building the background as brainstorming ideas.

 

 

The Offer

You’re now ready to start brainstorming ideas, from which you can choose a few to form the basis of your offer.

Brainstorming Rules

From here on in, there are a few rules:

• There are no rules.

• You own the sponsor’s company. This is a very important part of this process. It must be completed from the sponsor’s point of view, and you may need to remind the team of that from time to time.

• You have unlimited funds.

• There are no political agendas.

• No one will say no to you.

• Anything is feasible.

• You can have any benefits you want from the sponsee (i.e., you).

Now that you have removed all barriers to creativity, you are ready to start!

Brainstorm Step 1: The Experience

Remembering that you are the sponsor, look at your list of the best and worst things about your property.

How can we amplify the best stuff about this property?

• Make it bigger and better?

• Make attendees, fans, or our customers more a part of the experience?

• Extend the time frame?

• Help the target markets achieve their own goals? (Think: Achieve a personal best in the marathon you’re sponsoring.)

• Give them more input, a stronger voice?

How can we improve the bad stuff?

• Improve convenience or accessibility?

• Alleviate annoyances?

• Make it easier for them to be there?

The goal is to provide small, meaningful benefits for all or most of your (the sponsor’s) target market. If someone suggests an idea where only one person wins, ask whether the idea represents a win for lots of people or just a few.

 

 

Another approach is to suggest that it’s just fine to have one big prize, as long as the process around it creates those small wins. Can people showcase their creativity? Vote or provide other input? Create something they can share? There are numerous options to ensure there are wins along the way, even if it’s just one person that gets the big prize.

Brainstorm Step 2: Consumer-Generated Content

Creating opportunities for people to share related content is now a critical part of leveraging any sponsorship. It makes people feel like they are participating, not just spectating, and the sponsor is facilitating it. Ask: Can we provide ways for our target markets to create user-generated content?

• Before the event/season?

• During the event/season?

• After the event/season?

What kinds of content can people create?

• Providing feedback or input?

• Submitting videos, photos, or artwork?

• Submitting stories?

• Participation in Q&As or debate?

• Reviews?

• Crowdsourcing?

• Voting? People’s choice?

 

 

Brainstorm Step 3: Brand Experience

This step looks at the experiences people have with the sponsor’s brand (the touch-points). You will probably be able to use aspects of the sponsorship to make the brand experience better.

Can you use any of the intellectual property to improve the brand experience?

• Sponsorship-driven offers for brand users?

• Expertise, blogs, behind-the-scenes information for your customers?

Can you take inspiration from the event to change or improve your products?

• Sponsorship-themed? Limited edition?

• More creative?

• Easier to use?

• “You told us, we listened”?

 

 

Can you use any aspects of the sponsorship to showcase your brand’s alignment to target market priorities, concerns, or passions?

• What messages can you use?

Brainstorm Step 4: Achieving Objectives

You are now looking at how you can use the sponsorship to achieve brand needs and broader business needs. We’ve included a sample list below. Depending on the sponsor’s category of business, or how the business is structured, you may want to customize it to suit.

How can we use this sponsorship to help us achieve our marketing and business objectives with external markets (end-users)?

• Information, trial, demonstration

• Build followers and/or databases

• Promotional offers

• Loyalty offers

• Endorsement

• “Inspired by” products and uses

• Demonstrate brand positioning

With VIP customers?

• Creative hospitality

• Pass-through rights

 

 

With internal markets?

• Incentive programs

• Staff events

• Volunteerism

• Donations

With intermediary markets (retailers, brokers, resellers, agents)?

• Retail promotions

• Incentive programs

• Creative hospitality

Brainstorm Step 5: Integration

This step is all about ensuring the integration is thorough—across all appropriate marketing activities (Figure 6.2). This saves the sponsor a lot of money—as sponsorship is acting as a catalyst to make the money they’re already spending work harder. Again, this is provided as a sample only, as your list may be very different.

Can we integrate this sponsorship across our existing activities?

• Brand marketing

• Positioning

• Competitive advantage

• Advertising

• Sales

• Website, other web and mobile activities

• Social media

• Loyalty/database marketing

• Public relations

• Promotions

• Sales

• Media

• Retail

• On/in-pack

• Online

• Retailers, resellers, or storefronts

• New product launch

• Human resources

• Shareholder management

Brainstorm Step 6: Vetting

At this point, what you will be faced with is a whiteboard, or a lot of butcher paper, full of a huge array of ideas for your potential sponsor. Some of them will be standouts and others less so, and now you need to pick which ideas you’re going to include in your proposal.

Ask your team to choose the best several ideas (you may amalgamate some ideas).

• Has the sponsor achieved each of their key objectives?

• Have they achieved win-win-win for each of their key target markets?

• Is there anything here that detracts from the event experience?

• Is there anything here that is bad for you?

• What benefits—outside of the normal, hygiene benefits of tickets, signage, hospitality, and endorsement—will you need to provide to the sponsor to make these happen?

And that’s it. It’s messy, but you’ve got the guts of your sponsorship offer. In the next chapter, we’ll go over how to formalize that into a strong proposal and price it correctly.

Special Considerations

When developing offers, there are a few special circumstances that you can address.

Short Lead Time

As you may have ascertained, some of the leverage ideas you’re going to provide to a sponsor could take months for them to implement. What you don’t want is for them to look at your proposal, realize they don’t have enough time to make a leverage plan happen, and tell you they want to talk to you about next year. Instead, you should realize that your lead time is a bit short and select the ideas you provide based on how quick and easy they are to implement.

What constitutes a short lead time? For a significant sponsorship, anything under six months is starting to get too close to plan and implement great leverage. By selecting your leverage ideas appropriately, you can potentially lengthen your sales window by a couple of months.

Creating Offers for Retailers

Retailers have an enviable position in sponsorship, and one that you can take advantage of if you know how.

When you walk around the grocery store, you need to realize that every brand that is on display or being sampled or featured in their weekly sales circular has paid for the privilege. A whole range of payments are made from vendors (the brands that are being sold in the store) to the retailer, but collectively, you can refer to them as vendor allowances.

If you can come up with ways for a retail sponsor to involve a few of their vendors in the sponsorship, they can charge those vendors for the privilege, lowering their functional cost of sponsoring you and making it easier for them to say yes. The activity they’ll charge for generally centers around activity in-store and in media controlled by the retailer, not activity at your event.

Retailers love sponsorships where they can involve their vendors.

Creating Offers for Vendors

The flip side of creating offers for retailers is creating offers for brands that sell through retailers or some other kind of middleman.

These brands pay to be featured by the retailer—it’s that important—so if you can come up with leverage ideas that create value for one of their retail partners, they could get even more bang for their vendor allowance buck. This is often very simple: Look at your best ideas and ask whether there is any way to get one of their key retailers involved.

Creating Offers for Media

Media sponsors tend to want one or more of the following:

• Exclusive rights to the broadcast or other important IP, such as a news­paper distributing an official festival program.

• Increased audience (viewership, readership, listenership). Their ad rates are based on CPM or cost-per-thousand, so if you can help them get bigger numbers, their existing ads are worth more.

• More advertising. Try to provide them with content that will either attract advertisers they don’t normally get (like your other sponsors) or create a forum where their current advertisers can advertise more.

• Profiling specific personalities, shows, or features.

 

 

If you can tick one, or preferably more, of those boxes, you are much more likely to get a yes and the media you need from them.