Internal stakeholders must be engaged to maximise sponsorship opportunities
Sponsorship represents a large investment for professional services firms. In addition to the direct costs, sponsorship draws on many resources, such as fee earners within the practice groups and marketers.
Marketers within professional services firms are faced with a dual challenge. They must manage the sponsorship process, the selection of type of sponsorship and partnering arrangement, implementation, and evaluation of the outcomes. They must also manage, assess and improve the firm’s internal response to the sponsorship. Engaging partners and practice groups is essential to maximise sponsorship opportunities.
Sponsorship, if successfully executed, provides a valuable mechanism for a firm to increase profile and drive sales efforts. Sponsorship offers a firm a means of reaching targets, reinforces messages to existing clients, facilitates loyalty of both clients and staff, and increases the firm’s brand awareness in the marketplace.
To be effective, sponsorship needs to supplement and enhance existing marketing programs through integrating advertising, direct sales, and other marketing activities. Sponsorship offers firms the ability to develop broad, multi-dimensional, long-term partnering arrangements, rather than focusing on one-off events, plus the possibility of aligning actions to corporate social responsibility. By channelling resources into efforts with a social value, firms can build networks, relationships and profile outside of the more usual sporting activities.
This twofold approach for professional services marketers means that they need effective tools to assess the sponsorship proposition, to engage and manage the sponsorship or event manager, and to evaluate the sponsorship in a meaningful way.
An internal perspective
However, for marketers who work within a partnership structure, there is a need to assess the sponsorship response from an internal perspective. This provides an additional layer of complexity because the marketer is placed in a position that may involve criticism of resource provision, unreasonable expectations, and the personal contribution of the owners. To avoid the negative ramifications of such reporting, marketers need to engage partners and staff effectively to maximise the sponsorship opportunities.
Sponsorship management and budget are under the control of marketers. Yet the impact of partners, who have ultimate say in the business, means that there is potential for them to undertake actions, with good intention, that are unforeseen in the marketing mix and subsequently not leveraged to the best possible advantage.
The bind is that partners may spend time on activities that do not enhance the sponsorship and may reduce the effectiveness of the outcome, yet the accountability for the sponsorship rests with marketing. The challenge for marketers is to educate partners about the benefits of a formal process towards sponsorship and how these activities are integrated into the overall marketing mix.
Guidelines to assess sponsorships
To clarify accountabilities and roles, guidelines can be put in place to assess sponsorships. These guidelines can provide information about the existing profiling or relationship-building activities of the firm and request details of proposed sponsorships, costs and anticipated resources.
By communicating sponsorship positioning and guidelines to the firm, particularly in an environment where partners are approached directly by sponsors and make decisions in isolation from existing marketing plans or a holistic firm approach, marketers may limit reactive sponsorships or be able to negotiate unexpected opportunities.
However, guidelines are only part of the answer. A critical issue is to engage partners to support sponsorships and for them to trust marketing to deliver. A sponsorship proposal may offer the potential to yield networking or branding opportunities, but without the commitment of the partners to act may not deliver the expected results.
To ensure that sponsorship accountabilities are appropriately allocated and that partners are suitably engaged, marketers need to provide a robust assessment of a sponsorship, its value, and how it links into the marketing mix of the firm.
This means devising a review process containing critical questions that need to be considered from an internal perspective. Through careful review and analysis of the climate in which the sponsorship is undertaken, the value proposition of the benefits to the firm will be much clearer, which will assist in gaining support for the initiative.
How to assess a sponsorship opportunity
Considerations facing professional services marketers in their internal assessment include:
1. Assessment of the firm’s ability to commit to and resource the sponsorship appropriately. Although direct costs may be agreed, indirect costs such as staffing may not be available. For long-term commitments that may involve pro bono work or provision of technical pieces for a newsletter, marketers need the support of the practitioners, who may be busy with billable work and are often not assessed for non-ledger work. Assessment criteria can include:
- Is the sponsorship in line with the strategic objectives of the organisation? i.e. is it aligned to an industry focus, target activities, competency-profiling plans?
- Are there influential connections associated with the sponsorship?
- Is the sponsorship the most effective use of resources to reach key clients and targets?
- Would the resources be better used in other activities?
- What is the potential value of business generation (in that clients or targets will be present)?
2. The level of support of partners to undertake the sponsorship and suggested behaviours. For example, marketers may regard a personal contact campaign as important, where partners call or meet with clients to request their attendance at an event. Yet with partners’ heavy workloads, not all of these personal contacts may occur and the campaign could be pushed back to marketing to ‘cold call’ or to work on alternatives that detract from the networking benefits.
- What is expected from the firm in resources such as time and ongoing commitment and contributions such as support and the monetary value of this support (i.e. add-on costs), or lost opportunity costs incurred by fee earners attending or committing to other actions.
3. Ongoing follow-up. In evaluating the overall success of the sponsorship, did the firm respond appropriately and will partners commit to actions arising from the activities, such as following up leads and reporting on outcomes of meetings. In many cases, the ability to make contact with targets has been met, but converting the target into a client may take months.
- What type of evaluation or internal reporting and feedback is required?
- Where will this go and how will it be used?
In managing a sponsorship, professional services marketers face a particular challenge in that they must assess sponsorships and resulting benefits from both an external and internal perspective. The ability of a firm to successfully execute a sponsorship depends on engaging the partners to support the market position desired and committing to actions that will enhance the sponsorship.
Clear guidelines will assist marketers to build awareness of the integrated marketing offering and give credence to their assessment of the firm’s ability to commit to the sponsorship and their outline of the accountabilities for the commitment.
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