Earlier this week, I introduced you to Emily Taylor and SponsorPark.com, which she co-founded. Today, meet Kris Mathis and his creation, SponsorPitch.
SponsorshipStrategist: Why did you create SponsorPitch?
SponsorPitch was initially born in 2008 from a collection of my experiences buying sponsorships for an agency here in New York. After spending a few years in grad school, I started talking to some of the sponsorship people I knew about what resources they used and to my surprise/horror found that some amalgamation of CD-ROM’s, hardcopy sourcebooks and vastly overpriced contact lists were still the norm. It didn’t really seem right. Whereas most every other industry had seen a rapid transformation in efficiency between 2000-2010, the sponsorship powers that be really didn’t evolve much over that time for one reason or another. So I thought let’s try to create a resource in the cloud that shares sponsorship information and connects people in a targeted, time-sensitive and cost-efficient new way.
Our model has evolved over time, but the basic premise is as true today as it was when we started: better research and more targeted relationships lead to better ideas.
SponsorshipStrategist: Tell us about how SponsorPitch works.
After joining at sponsorpitch.com, you’re asked to create a basic profile about your experience in the industry. In creating a profile, you can list whether you are working with any brands (i.e. sponsorship buyers) or properties (sponsorship sellers) as well as any sponsorship deals that you’ve done in the past, your networking interests and contact information. This gives others in the SponsorPitch network an idea of your level of experience, which brands and properties you are either currently representing or have worked with in the past and how best to contact you.
Once you’ve created your profile, you can search properties and connect with their sales executives using Sponsor Pitch’s Property Index or search, filter, research and connect with sponsors using SponsorPitch’s Sponsor Index.
Since SponsorPitch is a network, our information is indexed coherently so you can see long-term patterns like new categories, spending trends and activation ideas taking root, but it’s updated in real-time so you get the information specific to your needs, as it happens, by following people, properties and sponsors that you’re interested in.
You can also browse through new jobs, follow the industry’s latest happenings on our blog and a few other things. From the CMO suite to your first internship, there really is something for everyone.
SponsorshipStrategist: What are the patterns you’re seeing now? Who is signed up already? What is the ratio of sponsorship buyers and sellers? Nonprofit and for-profit? And what kinds of properties do they represent?
SponsorPitch is used by sales professionals at most of the major sports leagues and many front office teams – agencies like IMG and Octagon; live music pros at places like Live Nation and AEG; the biggest theme parks in North America; municipal marketers and of course, many non-profits. Marketers from brands like UPS, Sony, GoDaddy, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Sports Authority and many others use SponsorPitch, as well as ad agency professionals representing a whole host of other brands.
Earlier this month, we welcomed Major League Soccer to SponsorPitch. Through a new partnership with their league office here in New York, front office executives at all 19 MLS teams will have access to professional membership. You can read more about how they’ll be using SponsorPitch here.
And then there are some patterns that we never imagined when we re-launched earlier this year. For instance, while we knew the Sponsor Index would be a huge hit with sponsorship sellers, we didn’t think about how marketers would use it to keep track of the activity in their business category. For instance, the sponsorship manager at a major automobile company now has access to a real-time snapshot of what 40 other auto manufacturers are doing with less than three clicks using SponsorPitch’s Sponsor Index. Now replicate that across 1,500 other brands.
One of the earliest a-ha moments was when we saw how popular our blog and twitter feed were becoming back in 2009. I’d throw a few things up with the “#sponsorship” hashtag that I had read and found interesting. Then we’d come back the next day and be amazed at how many new people started following our updates and reading our blog. It kind of snowballed from there as we started to see that sponsorship professionals were starved for real-time information, for new leads, deeper connections – at a time when most of the big players in our industry were still trying to figure out what social media was. At the time, we didn’t have the website infrastructure to organize and customize all this information for them. Now we do.
SponsorshipStrategist: How do sellers use it?
SponsorPitch helps sponsorship properties accomplish in minutes, with the help of others, what used to take hours in isolation. Our research shows that sellers typically spend about two hours researching a brand prior to sending a proposal, and probably spend just as much time trying to determine which brands might be a good fit in the first place. Now imagine a place where a lot of that work is already done for you. Starting a sponsorship search from scratch is tough. Rather than seller’s recreating the secondary research of their peers throughout the world, they can come to SponsorPitch and in seconds see which brands are in over 300 business categories, who their competitors are, what they’ve sponsored, who makes sponsorship decisions within the company, how to submit a proposal, who within the network has worked with them in the past and more. From the seller’s perspective, that saves a lot of time and let’s you get to the point where your addressing business challenges for qualified leads that much faster. Here’s an example of how professional members research at the speed of SponsorPitch.
Functionally, here are some of the things you can do with SponsorPitch:
SponsorshipStrategist: How do buyers use it?
SponsorPitch helps add valuable context to the hundreds, often thousands, of opportunities that brand marketers look at each year. With SponsorPitch, marketers can not only better understand the landscape of opportunities and what they offer to their brand, but also the demonstrated track record of who they’ll be working with in a sponsorship deal. The interactive nature of our network means that sponsors can go from research and discovery to real business solutions without all the inefficiencies that are typically associated with cold calls, sifting through proposals, pitch meetings and the like. From the buyer’s perspective, here is an example of how professional members research at the speed of SponsorPitch.
SponsorshipStrategist: Do you see SponsorPitch as the primary way people buy or sell sponsorship?
Yes, we believe that research and relationships are the two most essential ingredients to being successful in sponsorship, whether you’re buying, selling, activating, servicing, measuring or anything else. I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon.
That’s why a network is infinitely more powerful than a marketplace of cookie cutter proposals. At the end of the day, the best person to represent your brand or your property - is you.
Our job is to give you the new relationships and the real-time data to make you shine.
SponsorshipStrategist: Tell us a success story of a cash-on-the-table deal that happened because of SponsorPitch.
We’ve been hearing success stories at all levels of the industry since we launched. Here’s one of the earliest examples, but you should realize that unlike a marketplace, deals are really just one aspect of the bigger story of what’s going on at SponsorPitch.
We’re not trying to automate transactions across the industry or create a crowded marketplace of aimless proposals. Sponsorship when done best is a collaborative exercise. You need the right information and often, the right connections to play the game. Once a year at a conference or once a week in a catch all industry report isn’t good enough anymore. What SponsorPitch is doing is putting useful information and the most valuable connections in the right hands so you can have the right conversations at the right time. This may mean an agency getting a new client or a seller finding a new partner. It could mean a brand manager impressing their CMO with a more thorough analysis of their category on command or a seller being able to recite a prospect’s existing deals in a chance meeting. For the first time, we have the social tools to assemble a network that can make, and help our users commercialize, these connections in real-time.
A marketplace of generic proposals simply can’t do that.
SponsorshipStrategist: How does SponsorPitch differ from SponsorPark and the IEG Sponsorship Marketplace?
There is a human and social element to SponsorPitch.
That’s really the most striking one. Instead of looking at a marketplace of goods, SponsorPitch maps and aims to expand the lifeblood of the industry, it’s social connections, which are built on the information, trust, relationships and experience that our members bring into, and exchange, using our network.
Networked research is really a fundamentally different approach than the industry’s old school pay to access a sourcebook or blow your research budget once a year to network at an annual conference. Our data is updated by our users daily and our network is essentially a 24/7 conference every day of the year. So we’re coming it this from a vastly different angle and approach.
The good news is our users are the real winners from this and you can get a feel for what they are saying and how they use SponsorPitch here. Since our network is fueled by them, we can offer a real-time resource at a lower cost and with more flexible terms. That’s a pretty powerful combination, right? One example is rather than pay a big annual upfront fee as you would with other services, we have a monthly option that you can turn off at any time so you don’t get locked into something that you may not use.
Obviously, there are some other differences. We’re a four person self-funded start-up. IEG is owned by a $15 billion company.
Everyone on our team, which has about 50 years of sponsorship experience between us, has taken on this mission because we care about what happens to the industry. Because we know how frustrating it is to try to get information about brand needs only to have a brand manager blow you off. Because we’ve been in the position of the brand manager or agency, where you’re buried in proposals and don’t have time to respond to twenty different cold calls. Because we think the exchange of more information creates better ideas, and outcomes, for both sides of the table. And that’s why we’ve been willing to work so hard to turn, with relatively few resources, an idea into a reality.
SponsorshipStrategist: What’s the greatest value SponsorPitch offers?
When you combine the right information with the right relationships, you position yourself to have the right conversations at the right time. You’re no longer just one of 3,000 sponsorship proposals that McDonald’s receives each year. You’re an answer to a problem. That’s the value of SponsorPitch.
SponsorshipStrategist: What are your aspirations for SponsorPitch?
Just the other day, I heard a story about a professional member in West Virginia, who represents an amazing property, but has little experience in sponsorship sales connecting with a sponsorship agency a couple hours away, also in West Virginia, that has over a decade of experience in sponsorship sales and strong connections throughout the industry. They exchanged messages through SponsorPitch and then took the conversation offline. In the old days, the same chance connection might come once a year at a $1,500 conference, a long ways away from West Virginia or through an annual sourcebook. Today, it happens less than a week after both members join a website.
Which is why an agency CEO up in Vancouver says, “It’s like making connections at a conference without the cost of a flight and hotel,” and why a sponsorship manager at a Fortune 50 company tells us that a SponsorPitch profile and a professional membership add to a salesperson’s credibility and separate them from the thousands of other proposals they receive each year.
My goal is to see these stories replicated again and again across the entire industry as the word spreads about what we’re doing.
SponsorshipStrategist: How much does it cost? It’s free to join and create a profile as it’s been since we launched in 2008. Our professional membership option is $35/month or $24/month if you pay for an entire year upfront. Professional membership allows you to search and filter about 1,500 of the most actively-spending sponsors by things like location, category and past spending patterns; get real-time updates about the sponsors, properties, and people you choose to follow, such as when new decision makers, sponsorship deals or community experts are added; access company descriptions, competitive snapshots, detailed spending history, decision maker contact information and insights from other users that have partnered with it in the past; tap into what we are told is one of the best jobs resources in the industry and several other things.
A few of our members recently came to us and said they found our jobs section useful, but weren’t currently employed, so we also added a special jobs plan at a discounted rate for them.
SponsorshipStrategist: What else should Sponsorship Strategist readers know?
There’s a lot more in motion that we’re not ready to talk about yet. That’s just what we’ve done so far. Without all the professional SponsorPitch members that have gotten behind our vision, I can assure you that none of this would have been possible.
Please share: what are your experiences with SponsorPitch?
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