Part two of Prospecting Circles will focus on three areas: where to search for prospects, using social media for prospecting and better results with prospect management software.

Top ways Joanna, Holt and Ashley find prospects. Let’s go back to the circle strategy I discussed in part one. Just as some prospects are better than others, some prospecting strategies are better than others and should be used first. This is according to my three sales people on the team: Joanna, Holt and Ashley.

In the bullseye, not surprisingly, is prospecting among current sponsors and donors. The latter has proven especially useful to me lately as we just landed a company we’ve been chasing for four years–but only after I found out one of our key donors lived next to the company’s president. It was amazing how much progress we made after she interceded on our behalf. It was so much easier to deal with the president, instead of with his gatekeepers at corporate.

In the second circle, Joanna, Holt and Ashley include vendors and past business relationships. The former is not applicable to every nonprofit, but if you work for a large institution business partners can be powerful (although sometimes conflicting) assets for sponsorship. It’s a minefield, but one worth crossing in our opinion.

In the last outer circle the gang put business journals, competing fundraising events, networking events, Google and the advertisers they see and hear on radio, TV and print.

Prospecting using social media. Blogging, Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin are increasingly useful tools for some members of the team.

Blogging at Selfishgiving.com has given me a cause marketing platform to share with prospects. I can educate them about past programs, discuss trends in the industry and present myself as a credible thought leader on cause marketing. In short, blogging has been a great way to start, to continue and to steer cause marketing conversations with prospects.

After blogging comes microblogging using Twitter. Warning: I’m a Twitterholic so you can’t really take my word for it’s usefulness. You’ll need to try it out for yourself. And while there aren’t a lot of CEO’s twittering their days away on Twitter, there are a lot of marketing, branding and PR people to connect with (and, yes, the ranks of CEO’s and other senior execs twittering is growing!). I’ve nurtured some good relationships on Twitter and it’s been a good networking tool.

I’m not as active on Facebook and Linkedin as I am on my blog and Twitter, although this has improved since both platforms came to Tweetdeck where I can manage everything in one place. What I really like is how everything can be updated at once! It makes being on multiple social media sites a lot easier.

Meet your new sales assistant: prospect management software. You probably feel like you ”tolerate” your prospect management software more than you use it. You certainly don’t feel like it’s working for you and that it’s there to help you raise more money. This may be a function of the crappy software you use, or, maybe, with the crappy way you’re using it. But recognize this: your prospect management software can help you sell more sponsorships and raise more money for your organizations. Period. The sooner you view your prospect management software as the valuable, money-making sidekick it is, the sooner you’ll be embracing a valuable member of the team.

Here’s your new employee orientation.

• Whatever you use, develop a system. We currently use Raiser’s Edge, but I developed my system in Outlook. Current sponsors are designated a “Prospect +”. Companies that aren’t sponsors are “Prospects”. Hospital business partners that are sponsors are “Vendor A”. Partners that are good candidates for sponsorship are “Vendor B”. Former vendors that are neither are archived under ”Vendor C”.
• Record everything. Any communication with or intelligence regarding prospects is recorded. Left a voicemail? log it in. Saw a recent story online on a company’s new product line. Paste the link into a note. Little bits of info may mean nothing, but a string information viewed together may reveal a useful direction or may point you to a more fruitful prospect.
• Let the software do the work. Leave reminders, calendar updates, to-dos and institutional memory to the software–backed up, of course! But the software can only do these things if you enable the system to do this work for you in the first place!
• Track your team’s progress. Raiser’s Edge has a dashboard that track’s the progress of each of my sales people, chronicles their activities, tells me how they’re progressing toward goal, both in activity and revenue. Your software should allow you to track your team’s progress in some meaningful way.

The next post in our series on Selling Local Sponsorships for Nonprofits moves from finding prospects to pitching them.

Note: While cause marketing can seem out of reach for many nonprofits, selling sponsorships for events and programs is a necessity for almost every size organization. That’s why I’m reposting my Selling Local Sponsorships for Nonprofits series from last year with expanded and updated content.

When it comes to selling sponsorships, here’s how I think I can help.

AP course in sponsorship sales. This isn’t Sponsorships 101 where I define terms like “in-kind” and presenting textbook case studies. With over 15 years of experience of selling sponsorships for nonprofits, this will be an advanced placement course in identifying, selling and closing sponsorships. Don’t worry, I’ll go easy on you. I’ve never taken an AP course in my life!

Delivering a pitch that sticks. I’m fortunate that I’ve always been fascinated with two things that I’m also really good at: presenting and selling. I gave up teaching public speaking and working on a doctorate in rhetorical criticism and theory at Penn State so I could put all the great things I had taught and learned to work in the real world. I’ve developed my public speaking and sales skills a lot since I left the classroom, and am eager to share with you what really works with prospects.

The cause marketing twist. A real shocker, huh? Since 2004, I’ve been director of cause marketing for a Boston hospital and have developed initiatives that have taken traditional sponsorships to new levels. This has made sponsorships easier to close and renew, more lucrative and better event drivers. Whenever I deliver Selling Local Sponsorships for Nonprofits, my section on the cause marketing twist is always the most popular and generates the most questions.

But before we get started on these three tracts, I want to briefly mention just how “local” my career selling local sponsorships has been and just how sponsor-centric my current work is.

In this map of Massachusetts the red line is Route 128, a major state highway. About 90% of the sponsorships I’ve sold over the past 15 years have been within that red line. That’s local sponsorship sales!

In addition to being very local, my current position is incredibly sponsor-centric. And with good reason. At the safety-net hospital where I work 50% of the people we care for make less than $20,000 year, which means that unlike most hospitals we have no affluent patient “alumni” to target for fundraising. Consequently, the recipe I’ve followed for fundraising has been a pound of self-interest and a teaspoon of idealism that suits the taste buds of company sponsors.

Last year my team sold well over 200 corporate sponsorships for athletic events, golf outings, dinners and attractions.

In the next post we’ll look at some of the advanced strategies for selling sponsorships, and how every effort really must begin by Working Inside Out.