Why No One Responds to Your Sponsorship Pitch!

By Larry Weil | September 22, 2017
Larry Weil, The Sponsorship Guy - The word Nope on a piece of paper pinned to a cork notice board

Let’s not kid ourselves. You don’t want to answer the phone and get a sales pitch and neither does your prospect. So how do you sell without a sales pitch?

Stop selling. Put yourself in your prospect’s shoes. If someone sends you an email, reaches out on LinkedIn, leaves a voice mail or actually reaches you live, what would keep your attention?

Think about it. REALLY. Stop and think. How many emails do you scan the subject line and delete? Do you let the phone go to voice mail if you don’t recognize the number? Why? It is literally the only way to get anything done. You have to make choices and your prospect is exactly the same. Your beautifully crafted email with the attached overview, never get’s opened.

I use an extension for Chrome called Yesware. One of the things it does is track open rates. Another thing it does is show you if someone opened your attachment. The bitter truth is most of your emails will never get opened. I was shocked to find that a typical slide deck gets about 2 seconds a slide and maybe 10 seconds on one slide and 90 minutes if they leave for lunch in the middle of your deck.

Here is what works:

  1. Be specific about what benefit your bring. Not some generic B.S. about being the leading blah, blah, blah.
  2. Understand the job of the prospect and what they are evaluated upon. What is success to them.
  3. Keep it short. It is actually harder to write something short and concise, but it is worth it.

Here is an example from real life. I was prospecting using the LinkedIn “In Mail” function:

Here are the first post (didn’t work) and 3 weeks later the second post (which did):

How NOT to use LinkedIn to Sell Sponsorship
Using LinkedIn to Sell Sponsorship

Hey, I wrote both of these. The first one is to vague in the subject line and talks about someone else. then the close is weak. the second one gets right to the  point: Lead Gen. I make the connection to the service they provide and that I understand how they measure performance. By the way. This is the CMO of a nationally known company, that I am not connected to.

Writing is a skill. Selling is a skill. Keep learning and practicing. And don’t give up.

For more details, please contact me.

Posted in Sponsorship Blog