As a specialist sponsorship consultancy, we’re in a narrow competitive set.
While there are plenty of individuals with experience to spare and share, there are few organisations established purely to solve sponsorship challenges. There are many large agencies which offer consulting services, but the consulting for these businesses is generally considered a loss leader, to draw in the far more profitable business of sales.
So we’ve grown pretty adept at articulating the reasons why a business – often with large and well-functioning sponsorship teams – might benefit from sponsorship consultancy. Here are our top six.
Get yourself some headspace
Anyone working in any size of organisation will know that headspace is often the scarcest commodity. Time to plan, time to think even is precious and rare, squeezed out by the constant pressure of project work, management and reporting requirements and the myriad other tasks which consume the inbox and the working day. As someone who regularly looked forward to family holidays to afford myself time to think – I know only too well. (Reformed now!)
A specialist sponsorship consultancy will take your brief, interrogate it, stretch it, reframe it possibly – but then dedicate the resource to work through and deliver on the thought piece. You can be as engaged as you like with checkpoints so you can keep a firm steer – or just let them run with it and give them permission to think the unthinkable.
Objectivity
It’s hard to stay objective in many aspects of business. All sorts of factors come to play: daily operational closeness, personal commitment to a vision, the team and camaraderie which build around a project, and lack of headspace can all make us become more wedded to a solution or a plan than may be healthy. And even more so in sponsorship which depends on its ability to generate an emotional response.
While objectivity is the hallmark of most consultancies. The ability to helicopter and see the bigger picture with clarity, to bring an analytical mindset and capabilities – all of these help to soften the focus on ‘what is’ and discern what should be. A good consultancy will take into account your operational pressures and constraints but still play the part of ‘critical friend’, to challenge with intelligence and humility, to suggest or even persuade without pressure. Some clients invite us in periodically to review their practice, a kind of strategic housekeeping. Objectivity : critically valuable.
More hands, more grey cells
Smaller teams, especially in global matrix structures where a lean central team is required to ‘manage’ and ‘direct’ as best they can multiple markets can easily find themselves lacking resource. In fact, a wide range of commercial and economic pressures often require businesses to minimise FTE numbers and outsource services.
But even large teams can find themselves short-handed at times – and when shifting a deliverable to the next Q isn’t going to cut it, a good sponsorship consultancy should be able to drop in at short notice, pick up a brief and deliver it straight back to your inbox without you having to drop a step.
Looking for a psycho-linguist?
It’s less true these days, but still to some extent the case that sponsorship teams can lack experience. Not of planning or strategy, or activation or creativity – but of category and operating model. Just as each business is unique, it develops its own unique approach to sponsorship, reflecting the organisation’s culture, its commercial and relationship priorities, its internal heirarchy and governance. All of the above can easily create gaps in the experience and expertise of even large teams.
The value of a specialist sponsorship consultancy is its ability to deploy specialist resource, to offer capabilities, to plug gaps in other words or to extend – temporarily if necessary – your resource. We’ve provided specialists in psycholinguistics (naming rights), gaming, leadership development, art collection, social history, data scraping, advanced data modelling and many more areas, to meet specific client needs. Without any need for procurement or HR.
Supporting your process
So here’s a sensitive one.
Sometimes, especially around large investment decisions such as sponsorship selection, contract renewal or portfolio review, organisations can really benefit from external facilitation and management. These sort of decisions quickly and easily become highly politicised internally, with strongly held and partisan views sabotaging smooth process.
A good sponsorship consultancy, on the other hand, can go a long way to defusing this tension – providing it can clearly add value, uphold a rational and coherent process and demonstrate its own impartiality. And, (it’s not a nice thing to say but it goes with the territory) in cases where opinions and beliefs remain opposed, the consultancy can minimise the collateral damage of intense internal conflict.
Best practice
Plenty more smaller reasons but our fifth and in practice one of the most common reasons for using a consultancy is for capacity-building. It’s the job of any specialist sponsorship consultancy to stay informed and ideally ahead of the curve with industry best practice. So if you want an injection of novelty, freshness and new thinking, a discrete project is a great way to get it.
We would say it, wouldn’t we, but building space in your budget for periodic sponsorship consultancy can be hugely beneficial – really adding the value and, importantly, taking the heat off.
NB Kim Skildum-Reid has a related and very useful post about creating the brief for an external consultant
