Sponsors and CRM

The commercial side is chapter IV Partners and it is more than one module. Sponsor Pipeline is the deal record. Sponsor CRM is the relationship. Outreach Tracker is the prospecting before either exists. Proposal Engine and Partnership Studio produce the document you send. Which of them you see depends on your plan — the pipeline is the one every paid tier has.

Before you start

• Your tier structure and what each tier is worth. You can set this up as you go, but a pipeline built before the tiers exist ends up with values that do not reconcile.
• Your categories, if sponsors are attached to specific awards — see Categories and nominations.
• Whoever owns the relationship internally, so the Owner column means something.

1. Set the tiers first

Sponsor Pipeline → Tier Management, then + Add Tier and Edit Tier. Do this before you add sponsors: the tier is a field on every sponsor record, and renaming a tier once thirty deals reference it is a worse afternoon than defining four tiers now.

2. Track the prospects that are not deals yet

Outreach Tracker holds Company, Contact, Stage, Target Tier, Industry, Est. Value, Source, Touches and Last Activity, with Add Prospect, Import CSV and Export. Keep speculative names here rather than in the pipeline. A pipeline padded with hopeful prospects produces a forecast nobody can act on, and the Touches column is the honest measure of whether anyone has actually done anything.

3. Move a deal into the pipeline

Sponsor Pipeline → + Add Sponsor. The All Sponsors table shows Sponsor, Contact, Tier, Contract Value, Paid, Deliverables, Status and Contract End. The tabs are Overview, All Sponsors, Deliverables, Payments, Renewals and Tier Management.

Contract End is the field people skip and then regret. It is what makes the Renewals tab useful, and it is the difference between starting a renewal conversation in good time and discovering in March that a headline partner lapsed in January.

4. Keep the relationship record

Sponsor CRM is organised by Company, Contact, Type, Stage, Value, Last Contact, Next Action and Owner, with tabs for All Contacts, Active Partners, Prospects, VIP and the Interaction Log. Use + Log Interaction, or the per-row Email, Call and Note shortcuts, so the history sits with the company rather than in one person's inbox.

Next Action is the most valuable field on the screen. A CRM with values and no next actions tells you what you hoped for; a CRM with next actions tells you what happens on Monday.

5. Send a proposal

Proposal Engine → Build Proposal takes Company Name, Sector, Sponsorship Tier, Tone, Contact Email, Primary Goal, Budget Range / Custom Price and any personalisation notes. Prefill from Sponsor pulls an existing record in rather than making you retype it, Generate Proposal drafts it, AI Improve rewrites, and Save to Pipeline attaches it to the deal. Templates, History & Versions and a Send Log sit alongside.

Use + Log Send to record Date Sent, Recipient, Send Method, Follow-Up Date and Initial Outcome. That log is what stops two people chasing the same sponsor a week apart.

6. Track what you owe them

The Deliverables tab is where what you sold gets recorded against what you have delivered — logo placement, stage mention, tables, social posts, programme advertising. Fill it in as the deliverable happens, not at the end. It is the evidence for the renewal conversation, and the Payments tab is the matching record for money, which reconciles with Finance and invoicing.

What is not built yet

Two panels in the pipeline say so on their face: the partner overview and the deliverable-tracking summary are not built. The underlying tabs work; the summary views over them do not exist yet, and they say that rather than showing an invented figure.

Common problems

• Contract Value and Paid disagree with Finance. They are different records on purpose — the pipeline is what was agreed, Finance is what moved. Reconcile through the Payments tab and the Invoice Tracker, and expect a gap while invoices are outstanding.
• The forecast looks too good. Prospects have been entered as pipeline deals. Move anything unsigned back to Outreach.
• Nobody knows who owns a sponsor. Set Owner in the CRM. It is the field that makes Next Action actionable.
• A renewal was missed. Contract End was blank. Backfill it across the pipeline in one pass; it takes ten minutes and it is the highest-value ten minutes on this screen.