Case Study: Sponsorship Sales Success – Association Hustle Podcast Episode 221

On this week's episode, JP Moery covers the three steps to sponsorship success: learning about the program, developing the sales infrastructure, and initiating the direct sales campaign. Learn how The Moery Company helped a small event triple it's sponsorship revenue in one year by applying those three steps.             Transcript: Hello and welcome to JP Moery's Association Hustle Podcast. President of The Moery Company, JP's mission is to arm today's associations with insight and strategy to thrive and a progressively complex and competitive business landscape. 21st century associations must move forward with a little bit of hustle and revenue development at their core. Here's JP. Hi, it's JP Moery! Today's topic: sponsorship sales. I want to tell you a real-life story about incredible growth at a small event. The reason why I want to use a small meeting as the example is because I can really showcase the fundamentals that went into this process that enabled a small program to become quite successful. For those of you that may have diminutive budgets and programs, I'm going to show you a path for growth. You can also implement this for your larger sponsorship efforts, too. Here's the step by step process. Then the results. We meet with the client as the first step in the process and we built industry awareness during a series of one to two meetings. We have a briefing on the event: a general description of the sponsorship ecosystem, the prospectus, the price points, the ability to negotiate (or not), and review the sponsorship inventory. Secondly, we work to differentiate this meeting from the others that the association had, or other sponsorship availabilities, within the industry that could be made available to them. We talk about the audience that they’re going to reach with this specific, focused event. What kind of business development environment is there? Are people actually doing business, speaking to each other, and doing deals?  We want to know that. We also address the benefits of signing up as a sponsor early in the process for branding reasons such as mentions on social media, and things like that. I like to emphasize that if you sign up early, you're going to get all kind of earned promotion as people are starting to register, as they're looking at the program, as they see your logo on the conference website, and more.  I want to make sure that we emphasize the value of signing up early. And then finally, we discuss an administrative launch for the program. What happens with invoicing? What are the standard operating procedures once we get a contract? Who does it go to? Any and all kind of discussions around fulfillment and what the client wants us to do. An industry awareness session, or series of meetings, really gives us the necessary details about the sponsorship program and the event. The second step is building a sales infrastructure. This is really important. We know that without a good sales infrastructure the likelihood to be successful, and actually grow the program, is going to be very difficult. We upload prospects into The Moery Company's CRM and determine key accounts, or the most valuable prospects to sell to. We also determine any "do not call" list priorities, "Hey, the association will take on these two accounts because they're a premier partner and they have a full year long partnership program and marketing effort that we need to be familiar with." Then, we develop talking points for our emails, voicemails, and any phone sales appointments that we may have. This allows us to be consistent when we go to market for the client and have consistent responses to certain questions. We also compile responses to common objections that the association may get in terms of the sponsorship sales experiences they've had in the past. We will design an automated email and social media campaign for the sales launch. And,

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