1. Your customers are worth more than the number in your deck
I once helped double a world championship’s TV distribution to 186 countries.
The interesting bit wasn’t the country count. It was working out who was watching, what mattered to them, and which partners had a reason to care.
Once the research revealed that the way to position the WRC to our audience was not as a race but as “man and machine battling against the elements in an epic motorsport adventure”, that became the way we positioned the championship.
The sports bodies I talk to can tell me how many fans, members or players they have. Fewer can tell me what those people want, or who owns turning that into revenue.
So I start with three questions:
- Who are your people, beyond the headline number?
- What would they say yes to?
- Who owns connecting that answer to a commercial opportunity?
If the answer to the last one is “a bit of everyone”, that’s usually where the work starts.
And it only works if your members would welcome it. The best partnerships do something for the people, not just to them.
2. Don’t pitch a number. Pitch the people
At the LTA, a four-year participation plan, built with a great team, brought 131,000 more people into tennis.
Good number. But a partner isn’t buying a number.
Who are those players? How often do they play? What keeps them playing? Where could a brand make a real difference?
Same data, different sentence. Those answers give a brand a job to do: helping people start, keep playing, or bring a friend. That’s worth more than a logo next to a statistic.
This is what helped renew Highland Spring as a partner of the LTA. Simon Oldham, Highland Spring’s Group Commercial Director, said: “From encouraging youngsters to pick up a racquet for the first time through the Mini Tennis programme to supporting the elite of the game at the Barclays ATP World Tour Finals, the partnership provides us with an ideal platform to promote our commitment to healthy hydration.”
Try it on your own headline before your next partner meeting: why should this particular business care?
Which number would you most like a partner to care about?
3. I’m 60, and my industry quietly assumes I peaked at 45
I started selling at 22. That’s 38 years of learning what makes people say yes, and I’m still learning.
Sport talks a lot about the next generation. It’s less good at asking what it loses when experienced people leave the conversation.
A 25-year-old doesn’t need a 60-year-old to hand them the answers. And experience is no substitute for fresh thinking. Put them together and you get better questions and fewer avoidable mistakes.
In a business built on relationships, that experience is hard to rebuild.
If your workforce spans several generations, are they all in the room when the big calls get made?
Someone has probably seen this film before. Have you asked them how it ended?
