Five Sponsorship Sales Operations Metrics Your Team Needs to Embrace!
For sponsorship rights holders - like sports organizations, venues, music festivals, charities, and beyond - data and analytics have become an integral part of the job. Over the past 10-15 years, the industry has widely adopted social analytics, media equivalency values, fan survey insights, as well as sponsorship sales and performance measurement practices. Various metrics have become commonplace and common parlance among sponsorship professionals across the globe.
But there’s a gap in the sponsorship analytics revolution that needs to be brought to light. Internal metrics that help sponsorship rights holders optimize their sponsorship sales revenue and servicing activities are rarely discussed.
Here are five key metrics and insights that should become a core part of all rights holders’ sponsorship management practices:
1) Allocated Revenue Inventory Breakdowns
While most sponsorship agreements have one investment amount on an annual basis that covers the entirety of the deal, there are benefits to breaking out how that investment amount would be allocated across the different assets in the agreement. This exercise creates “Allocated Revenue” values which can be very useful for sponsorship sales planning.
Tracking how much of your sponsorship revenue comes from assets within a particular property, channel, and/or asset type can provide meaningful insights around which inventory is driving sponsorship success – and maybe more importantly, which inventory is not contributing to the bottom line.
2) Asset Utilization aka Sell-Through %
Understanding what inventory has been sold and what remains to be sold is the core purpose of Asset Utilization / Sell-Through metrics. PandoPartner’s Asset Utilization Dashboard allows you to see the available quantity of specific assets - ensuring that when you choose to include assets in a sales package, that you are not promising more assets than what is currently available in your inventory.
Additionally, when calculated across many assets, these metrics can help your team understand the value of your unsold inventory - which can be an indicator of unrealized revenue potential.
3) Priority Asset Rankings
Focusing sales efforts on high value assets sounds like a no-brainer. However, this is often easier said than done when you have a million competing priorities on your plate. When your organization has a vast inventory that consists of many different asset types and variations, sometimes things can slip through the cracks.
Ranking your Priority Assets provides sponsorship salespeople with a list of valuable assets that are quickly approaching their start date – meaning that the Rankings account for how soon the window will close to sell the asset before it is live. These Rankings highlight which assets your sales personnel should be prioritizing in your sales efforts, in order to have the biggest impact on organizational revenue.
4) Asset Overcommitment Risk
It’s not uncommon for multiple people at your organization to be pitching the same assets to different prospects at the same time. This is especially common for high value assets that are limited in quantity. But if all these prospective opportunities were to close, you may not have enough asset units to satisfy all the proposed terms.
In PandoPartner – the Sales Operations dashboard calculates which assets are being offered in live packages/opportunities at a combined quantity that is more than the remaining available units.
Actions you can undertake once your team knows this information include: 1) Adjusting the quantity of that particular asset if possible and/or 2) Preparing a list of similar assets that could replace the overcommitted asset if needed.
5) Agreement Margin and Markup
While revenue is the name of the game in sponsorship, seasoned sponsorship professionals know that not all assets are created equal from a profitability standpoint. Some assets have significant hard costs associated with them, while others have an opportunity cost (often, a ticket asset that’s included in a sponsorship deal would have been sold anyways if it were not transferred to a sponsorship deal). By tracking and comparing sponsorship margin amounts and percentages across packages and sponsorship agreements, sponsorship salespeople can continue to optimize their efforts to drive the most impact on the organization’s bottom line.
On a related note, analyzing Sponsorship Markup (secured sponsorship revenue - rate card value of the assets in the deal) of your sponsorship agreements allows for feedback loops to validate whether or not your team’s asking prices/rate card values are achievable. Oftentimes, there are patterns that can be gleaned from these insights – like which industry categories are willing to pay well above/below rate card values, or what properties and asset types command higher sponsorship fees than a fair market value might suggest.
Now, while these metrics aren’t the easiest to track, taking the time to set up structures to monitor these values will provide you with invaluable insights regarding your sponsorship operations. Not only will you be more knowledgeable when it comes to understanding the value of your inventory, but you will also be able to leverage these insights to help your team accomplish your goals.
