How to Close More Sponsor Deals (4 Easy Strategies)

Event sponsors help you fund your event beyond growing ticket sales or registrations. Having a successful sponsor sales funnel and earning sponsor renewals will help you ensure your event is fully funded and can endure for years.

You just need to start the conversations, stop losing deals to follow up, and simplify autorenewals. Stride Events offers tools that help you do just that:

1. Track Sponsor Outreach & Set Reminders
2. Sell Sponsorships Online
3. Email Sponsor Invoices & Track Sponsor Payments
4. Manage Sponsor Renewals & Autorenewals

1. Track Sponsor Outreach & Set Reminders

Take notes of who you’ve contacted, their interest level, conversation details, and even send emails directly to sponsors all from one place.

You’ll stop bothering companies who aren’t interested and focus more on the businesses that are. You’ll stay on top of your conversation details with notes for each prospect. You'll know the specifics of what your sponsor prospects are looking for, which will help you build relationships and close deals. You won’t forget to make a call or send an email because you can create reminders for yourself.

If you need to send a quick follow up email after a call, you can do it directly from the same place where you keep your notes without having to open your email account in a separate window.

Stride Events’ Sponsor & Contractor CRM makes it easy to keep all of this information organized in one place and it’s fully integrated with our Checklist project manager.

2. Sell Sponsorships Online

Sell sponsorships without doing any outreach – create a branded sponsorship page. Stride Events sponsorship pages include:

• Your logo
• Custom colors and photos
• Details about each sponsorship level
• Customizable tiles for sponsor levels
• Ability to complete credit card transactions online
• Ability to request sponsorship invoices

You’ll also benefit from a free listing on our event sponsorship opportunities page, which makes it easier for businesses to find your event and sponsor it.

You’ll save time on sponsor outreach because you’ll sell some sponsors without needing to have any conversations or follow up.

3. Email Sponsor Invoices & Track Sponsor Payments

As your closing sponsor deals, you also need to track payments. Stride Events offers quick invoice creation and sending. All you have to do is add a sponsor, specify the email and price, then click send.

Invoices can be paid online or via check. You can mark check payments or mark free sponsorships if you’ve negotiated a trade for products or services instead of money.

Payment tracking is automatically synced with your forecasting report, so you can understand your sponsor revenue in real time.

4. Manage Sponsor Renewals & Autorenewals

Keeping your sponsors is much easier than finding new ones – Stride Events makes it easy to customize how you manage your renewal process.

Customize a renewal email invitation. Choose a date for it to send automatically, and set a date for sponsors to be deactivated if they haven’t renewed.

Select which sponsors you’d like to send this email invitation to and which sponsors you’d like to handle renewal conversations with yourself. Focus your efforts on working with your biggest sponsors, and use the email invitations for smaller sponsors or the ones you sold online.