How to Find Sponsors for an Event
Has your company ever thought about organizing an event? While it’s a lot of work, putting together an event can create many opportunities for your business.
Here are a few of the potential benefits:
- Thought leadership
- Additional revenue stream
- PR
- Exposure to new customers
As a growth marketer, you might be put in a position to help with the planning process. One of your responsibilities could include securing sponsorships.
Think of your event as a rocket ship waiting to launch. What you need is some help to make it happen. For Elon Musk, it’s getting that NASA contract. For you, it’s finding sponsors for an event.
Yes, I did just compare securing a contract with NASA to getting sponsors.
But let’s be honest. Sponsorships are the lifeblood for events.
While looking for sponsors is just one piece to the event puzzle, it’s crucial to your success. Finding sponsors involves a lot of hustle compared to other marketing initiatives. In this post, I list the steps for finding & pitching sponsors for your event.
Step 1: Identify Your Killer Value Proposition
A Killer Value Proposition (KVP) is a clear description of what your event is and why someone should sponsor it. Think of your KVP as the foundation for laying out your proposal.
Best Practices for writing your KVP:
- Should only be a couple paragraphs max
- Tie in event mission & who your audience is
- Summarize benefits
Think hard about your benefits from the perspective of a sponsor. Does your event provide brand recognition? Will the sponsor get a bunch of leads via your attendee list?
Understanding the benefits will make finding sponsors for events that much easier.
A great resource for building your value proposition comes from Jason Zook of GetSponsorships. He created a Value Proposition Builder that you can grab here. I highly recommend using it.
Step 2: Sponsorship Research
When finding sponsors for events, always start with your existing network. This is sales 101. Getting a warm intro will always have a higher success rate than a cold call or email.
When thinking about who you want to target, ask these questions:
- Who is sponsoring events like yours?
- What products or services does your target audience use?
- Who is the point of contact?
For point of contact, look for employees with ‘marketing’ or ‘sponsorship’ in their job title. They are more than likely the decision maker.
As you build your list, you’ll want to create a spreadsheet to keep track of your outreach progress. I wouldn’t worry about investing time & money in a CRM. A spreadsheet in Google Docs does the work. Here’s one you can copy and use for your own sponsorship prospecting.
After adding all your warm contacts, it’s time to do some hunting. You should now have a solid idea of who your ideal sponsor is. Now we just have to find them.
Let’s say you’re running a marketing conference that draws in attendees from all over the world. To begin looking for sponsors, start with looking at other events in that niche. A simple Google search usually does the trick:
Google spits out a bunch of great resources you can now dive into. Any variation of the “EVENT NICHE + 2016” query should return similar results for your event’s niche.
From here, click on the first resource and start combing through the list. Each conference website lists their sponsorship partners.
Open up your spreadsheet and start adding these companies in. Do this for a couple more conferences and you’ll have a pretty large list.
Now let’s find the decision makers for these companies via Linkedin. Instead of searching inside of LinkedIn, use Google to find profile data via their advanced search operators. This way you won’t be limited in the amount of profile data you get to see.
In Google, use the following advanced search operator: site:linkedin.com/in/ AND Company Name AND Job Title
Go through your list of companies and start plugging in this search. Interchange job title with ‘marketing’ & ‘sponsorship’ to see if it brings up more targeted results. You can also click through to their Linkedin profile and see if sponsorship is one of their responsibilities. As you find targets, open up your spreadsheet and add each decision maker in.
The last step is finding the email. There’s a bunch of ways to find someone’s email but my favorite tool is Email Hunter. You type in a company website and it’ll return a bunch of valid emails. Find the one associated with a decision maker and you’re on your way. Alternatively, you can use a Gmail plugin called Rapportive. Here’s a great video that walks through how to use it with Google Spreadsheets.
Step 3: Cold Email Pitching
Now that you have a list, the next step is pitching your targets. The focus here is going to be on cold emailing. There are other forms of communication but I’ve found cold emailing to be less obtrusive and easier to scale. It also takes a lot less energy for the recipient to respond to an email.
Cold emailing has to be done right to make this work. Sending an email that’s all about you or making it too salesy will turn off your sponsorship targets. Let’s break down the sponsorship letter template below:
In this template, let’s pretend we’re organizing a craft beer conference. We’re looking for sponsors in the craft brewery space. AlphaBrew, a brewery conveyor vendor, is a potential target. As you can see, doing the research beforehand makes creating a great email a lot easier.
Let’s first look at the length of the email. The first touch needs to be quick and to the point. As a marketer, you can relate to getting unsolicited attention all the time from sales people. The last thing you want is a 10 paragraph email in your inbox. Also note the format. By breaking up the email into bite-sized chunks, it makes for a better reading experience.
You want to make the cold email all about them. This is not the time or place to word vomit all 10 perks of being a platinum sponsor. More than likely, only a few of those perks are actually relevant to your target. Get in the sponsor’s shoes and try to understand what makes them tick.
Why should they sponsor your event?
Figure out the answer to this question and you’re in business. If they care about audience size and you sell out every year, tease that in the email.
The last pivotal part of the email is a clear call-to-action. Your goal with this email is to set up a meeting. It is not to sell a sponsorship on the spot. If it was that easy, you wouldn’t be reading this post. Get to the meeting and then you can do your best Glengarry Glen Ross impression.
Step 4:Navigating the Responses
After sending off your cold emails, don’t expect a bunch of positive responses. My absolute best cold emails hover in between a 30–40% reply rate. Out of those, some are straight “no, I’m not interested” responses. Don’t let this deter you. Sponsorship sales is a numbers game. You only need a small fraction of your target list to sign on the dotted line.
Many won’t respond to your first email at all. This is completely normal! The key is to ALWAYS follow up until you get a “Yes” or a “No”. Marketers are super busy so there’s a good chance that they just haven’t had the chance to get back to you. Following up keeps you at the top of their inbox.
Steli Efti of Close.io talks about this followup philosophy in a podcast interview he did with Rocketship.fm. While he talks about following up from a startup lens, the same thinking applies to finding sponsors.
Here’s a list of common objections when pitching:
- I’ve never heard of your event, why should I sponsor it?
- You guys are brand new, I don’t know if you can hit your ticket sales projections.
- These sponsorship tiers aren’t in our marketing budget.
- I’ll review this with your marketing team and get back to you. Can you send over the sponsorship proposal in the meantime?
Make sure you have well thought-out answers for these. The more prepared you are in conversation, the better chances you’ll have of turning that NO into a YES.
What’s Next?
Remember that finding sponsors is just one part of the process. You still need to create a proposal deck and negotiate a contract.
Much like retaining customers for a SAAS product, it’s always easier to keep your current sponsors than it is to find new ones. Help them achieve their goals and set them up for success before, during, and after your event. When next year’s event rolls around you’ll be thankful that you did.
PS. We’re obsessed with event marketing over at Ticketbud. If you like this post, you should join thousands of other event planners and marketers who get actionable tactics for selling more tickets. Subscribe here.
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