Speaker 1: I have a question for you. If I were to ask you, do you know what your sponsor is actually buying when they sign up with you? Could you tell me? Most people think they know exactly what the sponsor is purchasing when they sign up, and most people are completely wrong. Hey everyone, Chris Bales here from the Sponsorship Collective. Today's video was inspired by the Peter Drucker quote, Now before we unpack this quote, make sure you hit the subscribe button and the bell icon so you never miss a new video. And it would mean a lot if you could hit the thumbs up button. It really helps the YouTube algorithm and lets us know that you want us to keep making videos like this. So most sponsorship professionals would say that they know exactly what the sponsor wants. It just so happens the sponsor wants exactly what they sold them. If they have a gold, silver, bronze package, they just happen to guess perfectly that the sponsor wants the list of assets that they put in their chart on page 32 under the silver category. Or if the sponsor said we want awareness, then the sponsor must want awareness, right? Pretty common misconception. The sponsor wants something more than anything else. And if you can't say what that one thing is, you're certainly under delivering on your sponsorship program. There's a very good chance you're going to lose your sponsor. Let me share a story with you. A friend of mine took over in a really senior leadership position selling sponsorship. And in her first week, she reached out to all of her sponsors. She brought the sponsorship package that her predecessor was using and a pen. She sat across from each sponsor and said, could you do me a favor? Here's the sponsorship package that you used to make a purchase with us. And here's a pen. Could you just go through this list of benefits that we sold you and cross out all of the ones that you don't really care about? Pretty bold question. She just said, we sold you all of these things. Why don't you tell us which ones you paid for and really don't care about? In every single case, without exception, these sponsors crossed out more than half of the items in this list of benefit. More than half. They didn't care about the free tickets. They didn't care about all the social media posts. They didn't care that they were thanked from the stage. They sure didn't care that their logo appeared in a bowl of logo soup on a sign near registration. As they went through this list, they removed all the things that really didn't matter to them, that weren't required for the outcomes they were trying to achieve. When they got to the end of this list of this process of removing the assets they didn't care about, this friend of mine said, so why did you sign up with us? And in every case, they said for the three or four benefits left here and these two other benefits that we get that no one has really bothered to ask us about. In other words, in every case, the sponsor was purchasing this kind of random assortment of assets in a gold, silver, bronze package in order to get a benefit that wasn't even listed in the package. So this friend of mine said, what if we threw this package in the garbage and I only deliver the things that you actually want? How would that work for you? Overwhelmingly, everybody wanted to move forward in that basis. So they went through the event, they went through the campaign period, they went over the course of the season, working together in this new way, not worried about the assets the sponsor didn't care about, delivering all the assets the sponsor really did care about. Well, when this individual produced the fulfillment reports at the end of the year, she delivered them and said, look, here's proof that we did everything we said we would do. What if we doubled down and I gave you twice as much of the things you want? Would you be willing to step up your investment with us and spend twice as much money? Well, around 30% of these partners said, yes, I would be interested in doubling my investment. Now, if you would have asked this individual's predecessor, do you know what your sponsors are after? They would have given the same answer we all give. Of course, they want awareness, they want silver sponsorship packages, they want free tickets, they want social media and shout outs from the stage. And this person would be completely incorrect because they never bothered to ask the question to the sponsor. What is it that you're really after? What are you really purchasing by working with us? And how can we help you increase those benefits? Now, if you want to learn to practice sponsorship like the individual in this story and actually create win-win partnerships, take a look in the comments below for a link to some free training I put together called How to Grow Your Sponsorship Program. See you there.