Jul 05, 2018 at 12:00 AM
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Software Solutions For Every Stage of the Sponsorship Lifecycle
In virtually every industry, new software solutions are helping drive efficiency and results for the modern sales professional. Sponsorship is no different so in today’s blog we’re taking a look at some of the most commonly used tech for each stage of your sales cycle.
1. Building Your Inventory & Valuation - Before you can package and sell sponsorship, you must determine what assets you have to offer and which business categories can fill these voids either monetarily or through goods and services, otherwise known as Value-in-Kind.
SponServe - SponServe is a software solution that streamlines and enhances your sponsorship servicing and inventory management through simple to use cloud based software that easily allows you to plan and track completion of required tasks, manage inventory, provide on-going reporting and sponsorship acquittal. SponServe also assists you in managing risk associated with single points of failure and loss of knowledge during staff turnover.
2. Prospecting - What companies are you targeting, and why? With thousands of national and global sponsors out there, narrowing down to your best prospects can save you a lot of time. Make sure that you identify different brand categories, industries and companies who are currently spending or interested in spending in your market. Before reaching out, ensure that you’ve familiarized yourself with the sponsor’s objectives, their recent deals, key markets etc. Finally, understanding the company decision making structure is important not only for getting past gatekeepers, but also understanding the different parties that will have input on the decision to sponsor or not sponsor. Find the right contact at the company to reach out to, but also seek to identify and understand the roles of other key constituents within the org or their agency.
SponsorPitch - Not to toot our own horn, but here's our shameless plug… the process mentioned above on average takes ~2 hours per sponsor, but SponsorPitch helps to reduce research time to a fraction of that by offering a real-time online recommendation engine for sponsorship that uses predictive intelligence and analytics to help you find the right partners faster. Fueled by the world's largest searchable, real-time sponsorship deal database, the online platform helps professionals find, manage and measure marketing partnerships at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional methods through an innovative, industry-leading feature set that includes search and filtering, in-depth company sponsorship profiles, reports, recommendations, analytics, alerts, exports, an API and much more. Request a demo here.
3. Securing the Meeting - As we learned from last month’s blog (https://sponsorpitch.com/posts/the-five-factors-affecting-your-email-response-rate) , there are many factors which may hinder a response from your target company. Therefore, it is important to establish relevance and approval before throwing any official proposal out there. Therefore, we encourage the use of professional networks to connect directly with decision makers or with those that can refer you. In addition, make sure to join groups and communities that automatically create common ground with you and the sponsorship POC. For example, mentioning that you are both subscribers to SponsorPitch or members of the same LinkedIn group will ground your ask.
LinkedIn - LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network with hundreds of millions of members, and growing rapidly. Their mission is to connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful. This is done by help you: Establish your professional profile and control one of the top search results for your name; Build and maintain your professional network; Find and reconnect with colleagues and classmates; Learn about other companies, and gain industry insights; Find other professionals in the same industry using groups; Share your thoughts and insights through LinkedIn's long-form publishing platform; Tap into the knowledge of your network; and Discover new career opportunities by searching for jobs.
4. Sponsorship Proposal - Once you’ve earned the opportunity to sell your case, it is crucial that your proposal outlines the following: details and mission of your organization; assets that are currently offered or available; benefits of partnering with your program; and how you plan to measure ROI. For details on how to best incorporate those aspects refer to last month’s blog here. https://sponsorpitch.com/posts/the-five-questions-every-sponsorship-proposal-should-answer
Sportsdigita - Sportsdigita is a sports technology firm that specializes in helping professional and collegiate teams create winning sales presentations to showcase their brands and drive revenue. Sportsdigita is the creative force behind the Digideck. The Digideck is an efficient, fully customizable and easy to use platform which helps thousands of sales reps shorten sales cycles and increase revenue. At the intersection of sales and marketing, the Digideck allows teams complete brand control to ensure messaging is consistent throughout their organization.
Proposify - Put proposals in front of your sales leads quickly before they go cold. Proposify makes it easier to create beautiful proposals faster, so your deals stay hot. With this service, your team can quickly access and collaborate on proposal content while you manage their activity with roles and permissions, commenting, and tracking through version history.It also notifies you every time your client interacts with your
5. Agreement - Once it is time to ink the agreement, you may want to use resources to ensure that your creating a legal relationship between you and the sponsor. The agreement is where all the obligations will be announced in return for a fee and/or service under specific terms and conditions.
LegalZoom - If you're not a major property with an army of lawyers or you're a start-up looking to sponsor for the first time, you may not have experience drafting legal sponsorship agreements. No worries. LegalZoom, the leader in online legal assistance, offers template sponsorship agreements, which can be customized using their their attorney support or your own.
Docusign - DocuSign® is the leading eSignature brand. Accessible from around the world, global enterprises, business departments, individual professionals, and consumers in all industries solve their paper problems by replacing manual, paper-based methods with DocuSign. The result is accelerated transactions that increase speed to results, reduce costs, improve visibility and control, and delight customers. DocuSign helps you keep business digital with the easy, fast, secure way to send, sign, manage and store documents in the cloud.
6. Activation and Fulfillment - When you’re delivering assets in which you’ve promised sponsors it’s . As the partnership program carries out, both parties should reap the benefits that were strategically conceptualized and contracted. It is extremely important to carefully track what is owed – and that it is executed correctly and on-time in a way in which you can later analyze the performance of each deliverable.
Trak Software - Trak is a collaboration tool used by organizations who buy, sell or consult on multi-asset corporate partnerships.It helps accelerate and simplify sponsorship execution of each partnership; so sponsorships are executed with the correct artwork, the right people, and every inventory item is maximized.Giving everyone time back to strategically build, plan and THEN activate their partnerships instead of getting bogged down with complex partnerships (which is what everyone wants and needs) because their disjointed rows and columns (excel anyone?) and inefficient processes (more meetings phone calls and emails) can't handle the volume of exchanges required to pull them off.
Sponsor Locker - Sponsor Locker is a cloud-based management platform that enables brands and their marketing agencies to optimize the value of their sports and entertainment sponsorships. By integrating everything into a single database - while still allowing individual applications and features to be implemented and used separately if desired - Sponsor Locker helps sponsors see what they have and where they stand, improving collaboration, decision-making, activation and guest experiences across their entire sponsorship portfolio. For contract and asset management in particular, the software organizes and asses the agreements and sets renewal and opt out reminders. In addition, it compares contracts by factors such as annual cost, term dates, opt-outs and exclusivity.
KORE Konnect - Round out the buyer-seller ecosystem with KONNECT™, KORE's next generation Sponsorship & Partner Engagement™ application for properties, brands, and agencies who need real-time communication and visibility into their partnership and activation status. Brands can plug into their property partners and collaborate on deliverables, content approval, deal points, and even share impressions and results. Always know what activities are outstanding and what assets have or haven’t been activated.
Rival IQ (Increase social engagement) - Break through the noise with fast, impactful analytics about how your social media efforts are received by your audience. Know exactly which posts get the best response, and compare them to other posts including your competition. Customize, schedule, and export reports that give you key metrics to drive engagement and justify your social media campaigns.
7. ROI / Analytics – Recapping the sponsorship program is crucial to retaining sponsors and proving the worth of working with you. Results are what completes the transactions and prompts a bigger and better renewal conversation. Of course, it is important to understand what metrics each company will use to measure success. However, there are many strategies and services to organize and prepare your evaluation to show they’ve earned back what they spent and maybe more.
GumGum Sports - GumGum Sports is a division of GumGum that leverages GumGum’s computer vision technology to help brands, agencies and rights holders go Beyond The Broadcast™ to capture the full media value of sports sponsorships that include visible signage across television, streaming, and social media. By analyzing live broadcasts, social media and digital streaming, GumGum Sports provides accurate, timely, and comprehensive media valuations. They enable rights holders to retain and grow partner revenue and give sponsors the ability to track and optimize media value across a portfolio of sponsorships.
Hookit - Hookit is the leading sports sponsorship analytics and valuation platform. By integrating machine learning with deep data analytics, Hookit provides actionable insights to help you maximize your sponsorship goals and gain a competitive advantage.
Block Six Analytics - B6A's analytics-fueled technology enables companies to maximize ROI on their sports sponsorship spend across all advertising channels. Sports properties, agencies and brands are using B6A's platform to create a truly interactive experience focused on delivering sponsorship value. Their machine learning technology helps our clients generate incremental revenue growth and reduce reporting costs. They use our technology and analytics to determine the value of television viewable billboards, signage, and calls-to-action, and social media conversation.
CoverageBook - Smart automation in PR – it’s time back for you to invest in the work that delivers the results worth reporting on. They’ll help you deliver concise reports that your clients will love you for – in which you show a return on the costs.
Lithium- Measure and improve the performance of your community and social programs to drive real business value. They capture millions of digital interactions daily and provide you with the right tools to gain deep insight about your customers, optimize team productivity and prove ROI.
Blinkfire Analytics-
Blinkfire Analytics provides a social media analytics and publishing platform for professional sports organizations, their players and agents, and the brands that sponsor them. The platform sits in the middle of the teams, players, brands, and fans to provide intelligence on social media publishing and sponsorship sales. Blinkfire's key technology allows publishers and brands to analyze social media consumption and brand engagement, not only in text, but also images and video. Concentrated first in the world of sports, we are able to paint a 360 degree engagement picture for teams, players, and brands– allowing all to better engage their fans and sponsors.
