How To Use Business Sponsorships To Increase Revenue with Robin Robins - I Love Marketing Episode #204

I'm dean jackson. He's joe polish, and this is the I love marketing podcast. Now, now, prepare yourself for the redhead. Okay, now here's the deal. Robin Robbins is the top marketer in the world, top trainer on teaching people in the IT business how to build and grow their business using effective direct response strategies, all kinds of business practices. Her presentation I saw. I spoke at her conference not too long ago, and she's been in my 25k since the very beginning. It's actually, as a matter of fact. Well, let me finish one thought, because I'm ADD here. Jeez Louise, her time management presentation is awesome. Okay? Because she actually. She's really good with her time. And Robin was on the phone with me one day, I don't know, maybe six and a half, seven years ago, and she said, you know, why don't you start a platinum group for information marketers? And I. I have a platinum group, which is a group I've been running for over a decade, where I give away cars every year, charge people anywhere from 12,000 to 17,000 a year to join the program or the different price points we've had over the years. I said, yeah, I thought about doing that, but it's not that easy. You got to market it and everything else. But if I was to do a group like that, what would you recommend that I charge for something like that? And she said, $25,000. And I said, so if I actually started a group like that, would you join it? She's like, absolutely. And I'd refer other people to it. And so I thought about it for, like a month. And then I called her up and I said, robin, you know, remember you told me about doing that? I said, I go, I think I'm gonna start a group. And I was just gonna start one group. And it was because of that conversation with Robin in many ways that all of this exists right now. Okay.

Like the 10k group or something.

Yeah, exactly.

I know. I totally hosed that one.

Well, no, but it wouldn't have been as good of the people, though, because, honestly, the more money you charge, I swear to God, you just get better quality people. And Dan Sullivan knows that, too, from strategic coaching, probably in so many ways. So, anyway, Robin is truly one of the greatest marketers. She's an amazing person, and she's awesome. So I don't even know what your presentation is going to be about, but you got 10 minutes to talk.

Well, you asked.

Okay, well, so whatever the hell you're going to talk about.

Howdy. Y'. All so I can just do whatever I want?

Whatever you want. You got 10 minutes.

Okay.

Robin. Robin.

Okay, thank you guys.

Thank you.

But you know, Joe actually is. You don't remember this, but it was another convers is what you asked me to present on was sponsorships because I got way cooler shit. But you told me to talk about this, so that's fine, you know, want me to make something else up or.

You can do whatever you want. You're good.

All right.

Honey badger don't care.

Okay. Yeah, Honey badger don't care is right. Especially a red headed honey badger. Like in a whole new level. All right, so what we're going to talk about is how to add an additional profit stream to, to your business. That's a real key term, is profit. Because I think a mistake a lot of business owners make is that if there's enough gross around here, there's gotta be some net. And that's not necessarily the case. So I'll set the table for you a little bit. I am an info marketer. My niche is the IT industry. I've been doing this for about eight years. We're about $5.6 million a year company. I've got six and a half employees, seven if you count. So I'm part time, so we do fairly well. And I'm in a smallish niche. My total universe is about 40,000 that I could possibly sell to. So at some point you get to where you can sell only enough kits and you do as much as you can and then a client acquisition gets more expensive. And so I needed to find ways where I could add profit streams to my business that wasn't selling more kits. And so I started thinking about sponsorships and how do we generate revenue through sponsors. So for the last year or so we've been focusing on this. And I'm going to tell you, this is really relatively new for me. I think that there's a whole big huge untapped opportunity in sponsorships that I haven't even really tapped into. But to give you an idea, like this year we've sold $388,000 in traditional sponsorships. Now that's pure profit. Now here's the thing. The only expense for me is the commission I pay a salesperson. Because we sponsor things. We're talking about tables in the back of the event and product launches that we do where we are getting paid just to put someone's logo on a website or we are getting paid to have someone have a table in the back of the room and so it is pure profit because it doesn't cost me. There's no cost to that other than a salesperson having to do that. So this year, 388,000 so far. By the end of this year we're on track. As long as we don't screw it up. We should do half a million. And again, that's pure profit, other than what I've had to pay a salesperson. And I really think that this is an untapped opportunity. So what do you sponsor? It could be anything from product launches, any event you do, pretty much anything you do. Even our high end coaching. I'm gonna give you a case study here in a minute where our next meeting is more than paid for. Double before we've even started the meeting. That's not including the fees of the sponsorships that I'm getting. So let me give you a first case study. I'm not gonna name names of companies. Cause some of these high tech companies you would recognize, some of them you won't. And it's irrelevant to the conversation. But I had a tech company that sells to the clients that I sell to, they sell a software program and I approached them about doing a marketing training program. The cost to them was zero. The only thing they had to do was promote it to their list. So long story short, I delivered a co branded marketing program for their clients that they launched. The clients paid for it. That's how I generated revenue. And that one sponsorship, it's been about three years and we have generated $2.3 million in sales from that alone. And again, the marketing cost to me have been nothing because the sponsor is essentially marketing and endorsing it to their list. So that's one, that's another example of a sponsorship. It's not like a table in the back, but it's another sponsorship. Another case study I recently did, there was a, it's an online backup company, cloud backup. They want it, they have resellers. So if you think about it's like a Ford dealership, Ford manufactures it and then they have resellers that sell Ford trucks. Well, I, my market are the resellers of the technology for these vendors. And they want their vendors or their resellers to be more successful. So we sold this one backup company 100 licenses to our program. They paid for it. But what was great about it was that I talked them into doing a big launch. So not only did we, we sold them 100 kits, but we talked them into doing a series of videos like Brendon Burchard style videos, but to their list. So not only did we generate the, I think it was. And I wrote that's why I have cards, to make sure I get the numbers right. So we sold the kits, which was about, I don't know, 100,000, 130,000 in revenue we got, plus then we got the leads and we did our own launch on top of that. So that whole exercise generated $275,000 in sales. And again, the cost was nothing really because it was a digital product and they're doing all the marketing other than the cost of shooting the video. That was really all it. And because we had their umbrella, we launched it to their list. So we generate a bunch of leads and this is not including backend. I'm talking, this is just what was generated off of that. So that's another case study. And then we just recently sold a sponsorship to a big tech company. And I won't mention the name because you'd all know who it was. But essentially we have our high end platinum group. And these people come in once a quarter. And I sold this sponsor, they wanted to get in front of them and I sold them on the idea of scratch that I didn't sell them on the idea. Let me talk about creating it with them. All right, So I don't sell them. I kind of find out what they want and we create it together. All right, you don't go and sell sponsors. It's more effective if you help them, if they help co create it, because they'll be more bought into it. But essentially what I'm going to be doing is creating three campaigns, three marketing campaigns for my clients that I will deliver at my sort of high end platinum, like Joe's platinum meeting. And they're gonna pay me $135,000 to do that. Now what's great about that is I have to do that anyway for these meetings because when they come in, I give them new marketing ideas. So essentially all I have to do is craft these three campaigns around a certain type of technology which they all sell and they will all benefit from. And they all want a shiny new penny anyway. So I'm getting paid $135,000 to do something I would do anyway. And then we get the umbrella sponsorship of this name brand company is now sponsoring me, gives me a case study and all of these things. I could tell you the hardest one, it's like the first olive. It's the hardest one to get out of the jar is always the first one after you get one Then you can sell more. So I'm actually interested in building successes out of this because I think the price can go up and up and up. So let me to give you like a couple little pointers. Competitive leverage is one of the best things you can do for selling sponsorship. So I mentioned we sold $388,000 in Pure Sponsor, what I call Pure Sponsor. It's a table in the back that's a logo on a website. And we only take a very small number of sponsors. So the revenue we charge or the money we charge for our sponsorships are double industry norm. And that's because of the scarcity. If you're just starting out, I'll give you a great strateg. Early in the beginning, I learned it from a guy. Have you guys ever read the Power to Get In Anyway? Read that book, the Power to Get In. It's called the Circle of Leverage. But basically, here's what you do essentially is you write a letter. You find out who the top executives are in these larger companies. And these are not one person making a decision. Usually it's a committee, right? There's more than one person. There's usually a main decision maker, but there's other influencers. Find out who all those people are, find out who their boss is, and find out who their boss's boss is. You send in a letter, FedEx it or email it if you've got their email address, if you've done that. And essentially the letter says something to the effect I'm writing to you, you, you and you and you name all the people so everyone knows everyone's copied. So I get this and I know my boss and my boss's boss has now been copied on this communication to find out who is the most relevant person or people to deal with regarding how I might help your organization. Blah. And then you go on to talk a little bit about the benefits. The key thing is then just to be completely transparent, I am also talking to competitor one, competitor two, competitor three. Now what I've just done is create chaos internally because a lot of times if you're dealing with sponsorships, you're going to be dealing with somebody in a department that is in the sponsorship or marketing department. These people don't have the power to say yes, but they have the power to veto you. And a lot of times they don't want to hear about new programs because that just creates more work for them. So you can talk about more sales, more opportunities, more clients. They don't care if it's more work for them, they're not interested. But by copying their boss, boss and making sure they understand that not only does everybody around them, their peers in the organization and their boss's boss knows, but also it's going to. Their competitors will create a frenzy. All right. And they will call you back. The first time I did this to sell sponsorship, literally within minutes I had the CEO of a 20 million dollar company on the phone immediately saying, we want the sponsorship because one of his competitors, he hates it. Everybody has that hated competitor. So that's also how you do this. You create stuff scarcity. You use that approach to come in. Now, how you keep these people long term is you got to treat them with like a customer. So you don't just sell them something like. Joe asked me about sponsorship. He said, let me see your sales letter. There is no sales letter. It is about that, you know, using some of the marketing tactics we know to get in the door. But to get the repeat business, which is how we're building, what we are building and the reputation, you really got to take care of them. You've really got to over deliver. And there's like a ton of other things I could talk about in this category, but I have literally 18 seconds left. So good luck and hang in there. All right, I think I have 12 seconds for a question. All right, there you go.