By Pat Kohan | The Art of Coaching Volleyball
You’re a few weeks into your
club season and you realize your teams have qualified for more tournaments than
expected, but you don’t have the funds to front the tournament fees. What can
you do to generate the needed revenue without charging
your players more?
Sell Sponsorships!
Don’t know the first thing
about selling sponsorships? Well, here are 7
steps to guide you:
Step 1 – Define your audience and assets
Essentially, this first step
is about taking inventory on the size of the audience you
can deliver to a sponsor and what assets they can use to connect with
that audience.
Your audience can be defined
by calculating the number of players, parents and coaches who are in your club
and the amount of people that will be exposed to your club throughout the year. These include opposing clubs,
community members, your players’ peers, etc.
Finding the exact size of
your audience is almost impossible, but listing statistics
that include your club size, number of tournaments you participate in or
run and any other community outreach events gives business owners a good ballpark figure.
Once you have provided that figure, you’ll need to list assets that a sponsor could use to connect with that
audience. To start a good list of assets, ask yourself:
o
On the wall of
your facility
o
On your team’s
jerseys, warm-up gear, backpacks
o
Website
o
Tournaments (i.e.
The Jamba Juice Jamboree)
o
Teams (i.e. State
Farm Vipers 16 – 1)
o
Club (i.e. The
Kent Kukamugas)
o
Logo on your
website
o
Email blasts to
your members
o
Social media shout
outs
Don’t stop with just these;
be creative and list everything possible that could potentially add value to a
sponsor.
Step 2 – Create your sponsorship packages
In Step 2, you want to
organize everything you wrote down in Step 1 into packages that vary in
marketing power. Start with an introductory level sponsorship for companies
with smaller budgets, then progress into more expensive packages until you’ve
created a good, better best package list.
- SILVER
o
Logo on website
o
Logo in bi-weekly
newsletters
o
Monthly Facebook
posts or promotions
o
Sign on the wall
in facility
- GOLD
o
Logo on website
o
Logo in bi-weekly
newsletters
o
Monthly Facebook
posts or promotions
o
Sign on the wall
in facility
o
Flyer handout to
all parents in the club twice a year
- PLATINUM
o
Website banner advertisement
o
Logo in bi-weekly
newsletters
o
Monthly Facebook
posts or promotions
o
Sign on the wall
in facility
o
Flyer handout to
all parents in the club twice a year
o
Three email
blasts to all parents about a promotion or service provided
Aside from the basic packages
you just organized, brainstorm how you can build big-ticket items that sponsors
may want to buy exclusive rights to. This could include a special photo
contest, tournament naming rights or the rights to put a logo on every player’s
jersey.
Quick
tip: When creating your big-ticket items, make sure they give sponsors the opportunity to earn a return on their
investment (ROI). This is the most overlooked element of youth sports
sponsorships, and it needs to be a focal point of how your big-ticket items are
set up.
Examples of ROI opportunities
in big-ticket items:
Monthly social
media photo contest sponsor
- ROI – Each month club members can win a $25 gift card if they go to the sponsor’s establishment, buy a product, take a picture of themselves with it, then share it on their social media platforms. The person whose picture gets the most likes wins.
Club hosted tournament-naming rights
- Sponsor will receive naming rights to the Spring Classic Volleyball tournament, which attracts over 50 teams and over 1600 total attendees. As the title sponsor, you will have premium booth space to sell product throughout the tournament.
As you can see, big-ticket
items can create opportunities for the sponsor
to earn a return through a contest or event sales.
Step 3 – Price your packages
Pricing your sponsorship
packages is tough, and there isn’t really a formula to follow that will give
you the exact value of what you have to offer. This means you have to do your
homework to figure out a fair price that sponsors would be willing to pay.
A great place to start is to
calculate what it costs to service the sponsorship package. (For instance, cost
of signs, embroidery, etc.) This way you can make sure you don’t lose money.
From there, you can ask friends and business owners what they might be willing
to pay and you can also talk with anyone else
who has sold sponsorships in youth sports in your area to get an idea of what
the market can bear.
Step 4 – Create your materials
This step is basically
putting together a one-pager (front and back) that displays all the work you’ve
already done.
Your one-pager should
include:
- Overview of your club’s history and season outlook
- Statistics on your club members and the audience your sponsors will be able to reach
- Sponsorship offerings and pricing
- Contact information
This information should also
be put up on your website so that anyone can access it at any time.
Step 5 – Identify potential sponsors
Identifying the right
sponsors to go after is a very important step. It could save you a lot of time,
effort and discouragement if you’re able to target the right businesses right
off the bat. These businesses have the funds, the autonomy to spend, and can
realistically benefit from what you have to offer.
Here are a few industries
that align well with what volleyball clubs generally have to offer:
· Fitness gyms
· Insurance agents
· Banks
· Spas
· Coffee shops
· Sporting goods stores
· Financial advisors
· Realtors
· Furniture stores
· Les Schwab
· Pizza places
· Auto part stores
· Burrito places
· Office supply stores
· Subways
· Smoothie shops
· Nail salons
· Physical therapists
· Dentists
· Massage therapists
One of the easiest ways to determine which businesses to target first is to
find out which parents in your club own their own company and which ones are
employed by companies on your potential sponsor list. When you identify a few
leads that could help you in your search, try striking up a conversation about
their company’s giving policy or what they’ve given in the past to youth sports
teams.
Step 6 – Sell your packages
Now that you’ve defined what
you have to offer, packaged it, up, priced it out and identified
some leads, it’s time to sell.
First things first: Find the
decision-makers in your potential sponsor list, then figure out a way to get your sponsorship information in front of
them. This can be done through email, in-person meeting or over the phone.
Regardless of how you get the
information in front of them, make sure you cater your sales pitch to each business
specifically. Highlight how sponsoring your volleyball club can help them, not
how their money could help you.
If you can’t think of a way
your club could help them, you need to go back to Step 5 and work a little
harder on targeting the right businesses.
Step 7 – Activation
Simply put, this step is delivering on what you said you would
do. To make sure this happens, create systems and checklists to knock off all
your to do’s for each sponsor and carry them out better than you promised.
It also helps to check in
with the sponsor a few times throughout the year to get feedback on the value
you’re providing them and what you could do to increase their exposure or
sales.
Also, a nice touch you can
add is sending them a thank you card or poster signed by all your players and
staff.
What you’ll find is it's the
little things you do in the activation step that make it a no-brainer for the
sponsor to sign on with you next year. So work hard to provide value and this process will keep
getting easier and easier.
The Art of Coaching Volleyball is an educational partner of the Junior Volleyball Association.
For more junior volleyball education visit www.jvaonline.org
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