How to Get Your First Sponsorship with No Following: Justin Moore

22:26Justin Moore:We don't know, this type of thing. But there's a reason, right? Because they don't want to say 10K because if they say 10K, what's your proposal going to be Yeah, B4, 10K, right? And then they have no flexibility to, because remember, they're not just reaching out to you. They probably reached out to 20 people. They have 100K, they have an 85K budget, right? They're trying to Tetris the budget together with the five partners. Everyone's charging differently. And so if you only give them one number and they get to the very end and they only got 5K left, well, we can't move forward with Jack and Zach because we don't have enough money for the 10K that he quoted us, right?

23:02Justin Moore:So by giving them options, you have some package for them to move forward with you at. And so my philosophy on this is you don't need to hit a home run. Every single deal was your sponsorships. You may hit singles. You may hit doubles. You may hit some triples. And great, yeah, maybe one out of every 10 deals is going to be a home run. Sorry, I'm using an American baseball analogy here. But every one out of 10 deals is going to be a home run. But like my wife and I have built an amazing life, an amazing business by hitting singles and doubles all day long. $3 ,000 here, you know,$10 ,000 deal here.

23:39Justin Moore:And it's built up into this large body of work that we've done over the years. And so like that is just such a preferred way to approach these conversations. And then, yeah, so that's 75 % of the time. And then the 25 % of the time, they're going to still tell you no. I don't know. We don't know the budget, whatever. And so I have a very unscientific advice here. You have to pick your hell yeah number. What? So package one, you're still going to give them packages, but like if they pick package one, you're still going to say, hell yeah, let's go. I'm so excited about this. And so that number is completely detached from how large your audience is.

24:16Justin Moore:What is it? 5K? 10K? I don't know. Where if they pick that, you're stoked. If they don't pick it, you're fine. And so I think that this also gives some people some feelings of, okay, great. Like I'll pick my number, whatever it is. and if the brand moves soared, I feel great. I think another thing to maybe consider that'd be great to get your advice on is for people listening, right? They'll have, by hook or by crook, got, okay, I've got my first sponsor. They're on board. But the next battle is going to be, can I keep them for as long as possible? How do you bake in longevity in the best way possible with someone who's brand new to working with you?

24:54Justin Moore:Well, I'll tell you what to not do. Okay. To stick your head and you invoice them. They pay you and then you stick your head in the sand and never talk to them again, which is what a lot of people do. And you know why they do this? Because they're terrified of asking the brand, hey, how did it go? Because they're worried that the brand is going to say, well, you didn't generate any leads or any sales and we hate you now. Never talk to us again. Right? It's this fear. Right? And I get it. I totally understand that. Nelson Mandela has this great quote. I never lose. I either win or learn. And that's my philosophy with this stuff.

25:30Justin Moore:There's only two outcomes when you ask that question. How did it go? They're going to either say, it went amazing. Great. Time to pitch the next opportunity, right? You would have no hesitation doing it in that scenario, right? But more likely, they would say, well, it went okay. It went average. You know, we were hoping that it would, you know, do better, better, more profitable, more leads, whatever. And so you say, great. Thank you for sharing that. Why do you think that is? you actually like solicit that from them well what do you have any suspicions a brand I asked a brand this one time and they were like oh god thanks for asking we actually realized that we sent you the wrong brief we actually now have been focusing on case studies that's been working more successfully for us so let's run it back let's do another one sorry about that let's let's go let's go with the case study angle this time and so it wasn't of no fault of my own right um Or you actually have some humility here and you realize, okay, let me analyze this.

26:31Justin Moore:Yeah, I probably didn't do a good job talking enough about the product. Or look, there's these five comments here of people being like, oh, I tried that six months ago. It sucked. Or it's too expensive. Or whatever. Some objection, right? Your job is to collect those and circle even negative feedback back to the brand. and be like, hey, it seems like there's a perception in the market of your tool that is not great. I actually think this is wrong, like what these people are saying. I would love to have an opportunity to iterate on this and go back into the market and directly overcome these objections in the integration of this thing.

27:05Justin Moore:You know, last time you say, last time I did that, you know, I talked about this. I had, you know, Joe Schmo say, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, what you didn't know, Joe Schmo, is that the brand has completely retooled their software in the last three months. So you really need to try it again because they built it from the ground up again or whatever, right? Right. Brands are desperate for this type of market feedback because oftentimes, especially if you have a content format that's not public, a podcast where you're getting DMs from people, a newsletter where people are replying to the email.

27:32Justin Moore:Yeah, if it's a YouTube video, they can see public comments or social media posts or whatever. But a lot of times this feedback is private. Right. And so that's gold if you can provide that back to them. And so step eight in my eight-step sponsorship wheel framework is analyze, where you're submitting what I call a post-campaign report to the brand that gives them not just the quantitative data of how many views and downloads or whatever the content performed, but qualitative feedback on actually market insights that they can use, not just for you, but other partnerships that they're working on.

28:03Justin Moore:And so now they start to look at you as not just some random commodified vendor or partner, some row in a spreadsheet. It's like, no, we're getting really valuable data from these dudes, and we need to keep working with them. so if you were building the ideal sponsor for someone right now right given the market where we're at the different channels that are on offer what does a sponsorable thing look like in terms of audience type are they sat across multiple channels only one are they forward thinking with like what what are you thinking is like this is something that's kind of future proof for a for a brand to potentially sponsor.

28:47Justin Moore:I'll tell you what my philosophy is when I negotiate with sponsors these days. I think about myself as a triage nurse. So a patient comes in, they walk into the emergency room or they walk into the triage, urgent care or whatever. And the first question they ask is, what's wrong with you? What's your ailment? Right? That's my job is I'm asking them that. So what most people do is they beat people over the head. They don't even ask the question. They'd be like, here's the five packages. You want to sponsor my podcast and my newsletter and my social media and my YouTube or whatever. And the brand's like, I guess, I guess I'll pick packages too, but I don't really want some of those things in there, but I guess that's all we can do.

29:25Justin Moore:Instead, I'm saying, okay, let's have this, you know, discovery call and brand over here. Let me turn you by the shoulders here. The podcast is going to be great for you because you say you want awareness great i will do a back catalog dynamic insertion across all the episodes of my podcast i'm getting 50 000 views a month or whatever um you should sponsor that uh for the next 30 days or whatever that's great for you brand b over here you want to uh uh rub shoulders in person with you know creators and get feedback and just be an advocate of the industry great you should sponsor my in-person event sponsor games let you go over here and do this thing so that's the exercise that i'm doing and so uh if you're a creator if you're an entrepreneur thinking about this i think um that having enough content formats so you can serve a brand partner and by the way serve your audience serve your customers it's not just about you know serving brands all day long um but like because you know the reason that i have you know a youtube a podcast a newsletter a blog, in-person event, a book, like all these things is that they were all in service of helping my audience and my customers learn in different modalities, for sure.

30:37Justin Moore:But now that I have these, I very much think about these as strategic assets, different types of inventory that I can offer to brands based on their ailment. I think, Justin, we're very aligned in our sales methodology and our sales approach. It's very much, it's all about you. Let's find the pain first. But let's, So we take it back to like probably the starting point. Obviously, we're an agency that does outbound. If somebody's, let's say they've hit their first 10k, they've been grinding away 10k on Instagram or TikTok or LinkedIn, they're like, cool, I've got a pretty loyal, small audience now and they're happy.

31:15They want to proactively start reaching out. They don't, nobody's knocking on their door. Where do they start?

31:23Justin Moore:Well, I'll tell you what to not do is sit alone in a room and ponder, hmm, what brands would I love to collaborate with? Oh, this mic. Yeah, sure. That would be – I would love to work with this part of Riverside. I'm recording the podcast on them. I would love to work with them, right? This is what a lot of people do. They just sit in a room and randomly think. The better thing is to involve your audience in this conversation. do a psychographic research study, a survey, send it to them and say, Hey, y 'all, I am planning out my content strategy for the next six months or for 2026 or whatever.

31:57Justin Moore:And I want to make sure that it serves you. And I want to learn more about you. Yeah, I can see the demographics in the platform and the ages, the genders, the geographies, whatever. But like, what's keeping you up at night? What are your challenges? What types of brands and products and services are you using and loving right now? These types of questions, there's more I go into in the book, but like, wow, such interesting feedback that you'll get. Let's say, for example, that you guys did an exercise like this. You have this agency. What if you came back with that survey and you found out that 40 % of those respondents actually had a brick and mortar location?

32:31Justin Moore:Here you were thinking that all the people that you served were internet entrepreneurs or something like that. Now you're thinking, wow, I didn't realize that so many people had these stores and the reason that they're doing, you know, when they get a client, if the next action is like come in for an in-person consultation or something like that. There's different types of challenges there. For example, maybe employee retention. That's a challenge that they're facing right now. Training, retention, recruiting, this type of thing. You probably would have never thought that that would be a good partner for you to like advertise on the podcast or something, but your audience is saying that's challenge for them.

33:09Justin Moore:So you should go out there and forge a deal with a recruiting agency or a staffing agency or a training agency or something like that. And I bet you guys could think of a pretty creative way to integrate a brand like that into the podcast. And so, and now, by the way, think about how much better of a pitch that is. When you go to that staffing agency, you could be like, instead of being like, you guys should advertise on our podcast, you say, hey, we surveyed our audience, 40 % of them are saying they're having this acute problem with the thing that your product solves. I would love to expose your, our full audience to this, you know, to your, to your solution.

33:39Justin Moore:And, and when you come out with the sponsorship, now it's like, Hey, I asked, you guys showed me, told me you were having this issue. I went out and sought this opportunity for you. And I got you an exclusive discount, you know, waived the first month's fee of the staffing agency or something like that. And so it's just, it's so much, it's such a better way to develop a shortlist of brands to pitch when you involve your audience in this conversation. I like that. That's really good. And then I'm going to start reaching out to them. I typically think if I'm going to do some sort of outreach, you've probably got the phone, you've got LinkedIn, you've got email, you've got direct mail.

34:16There's probably some more innovative ways of like, I'm going to post something on LinkedIn and tag the right people and whatever and creative ways. How do you think best to approach starting those conversations? And is there a message framework that you feel works 90 % of the time?

34:32Justin Moore:Yeah, so I have a framework in my book, Sponsor Magna, called the Rope Pitching Method, R-O-P-E. So R stands for your pitch has to be relevant to a campaign that the brand is either currently running or has run in the past. O stands for organic, meaning that you can tie your pitch back to organic work that you've already published that illustrates that your audience has existing affinity for their brand or their tool or their service. P stands for proof, so you can show how you've helped other brands achieve results. And E stands for easy to execute. So you're actually pitching them something specific, not, oh, we'd love to figure out a way to collaborate.

35:11Justin Moore:So let's make this a bit more tangible. So let's say – actually, let's do a tactical example. Is there a brand that you guys would love to pitch to have to sponsor your podcast? And we'll do a real-time tactical example. What do you think? I mean, there was a brand. There was like a water brand that I liked ages ago. so but zach i reckon you've got a better one now i was thinking we'd go for something like that that's like a bit a bit left field like a nice we me and zach like our kombuchas like kombucha drinks so let's let's go hip-hop the kombucha brand okay uh hip-hop well first of all does your audience like kombucha that's a great question and justin i'm gonna ask them right after this podcast yeah we don't know that we know we do so so that's this is the mistake guys this is a terrible example because like, you're just like, and you invent, I know, I know I told you like, yeah, we were just sitting here and inventing this idea and I put you on the spot, but like, this is why often sponsorships fail is because we think, oh, I love kombucha.

36:13Justin Moore:Like, of course my, like, this is great. It'd be great to get a deal. Um, but like you could come out and 90 % of your audience is like, kombucha is evil. You know, like how dare you, you know, the type of thing. If you don't know, if you don't know that information, uh, it's tricky, but let's just for, for conversation. Well, should I tell you, should I tell you that there's three things, right? That we get asked the most, cause this might be a good thing that you'd be like, okay, there we go. There we go. Right. Okay. So we get, we get asked either like sales advice. So like, how would you tackle this problem I've got?

36:42Then we get what data do you use? And then we get what dialer do you use to have so many conversations with people? Those are probably the three things that always pop up regardless of who it is. It's always a different person asking some form of that.

36:58Justin Moore:okay uh the most obvious one that jumped out to me was the dialer so do you guys have any sort of deal with the dialer that you use no no you don't but by the time this comes out we might though we do have a data sponsor and if we do have that sponsorship this we're going to go to the ad right now oh god i'm so tired i've just been talking to qualified prospects all day without any wait time how have you been doing it because i've been cold calling people on my mobile and i reckon i've spoke to one person no no no stop that right now and use nooks.ai why what what what does nooks do it finds me the right people to call and it calls them and it connects with them over and over and over again so you're saying it's nooks.ai and i can just be speaking to qualified decision makers all the time no with a better connection right wow nooks.ai are you guys are you guys able to Are you guys able to say which dialer it is so we could talk about it real time, or do you not want to?

37:55Yeah, let's talk about it because it either comes up or –

37:58Justin Moore:Yeah, let's do that. So it's an American dialer called Nux. It's like a power dialer. Okay. How do you spell it? N-O-O-K-S? N-O-O-K-S, yeah. Okay. All right. So I'm going to share my screen here. Wow. This is interactive podcast. This is how the sausage is made stuff. We like this. I don't think we've ever done this on a podcast. Guys, I'm calling an audible here. I hope that's cool. Okay, so I'm going to walk you through just in real time my thought process as I'm looking at this page. Okay, so they've got a bunch of social proof here. They're working with a bunch of amazing companies. Okay, so they got case studies.

38:41Justin Moore:Case studies is something that seems clearly valuable for them here. This is the very first thing after the scroll is case studies, right? I already have a pitch idea for you, by the way. Okay, we're going to keep going down here. Okay, so there's just a bunch of features, features, features, features, AI coach, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, a bunch of badges. Okay, so they've got a LinkedIn here. So let's pull up their LinkedIn. Okay, and what are they posting on? Okay, so they had, okay, all right. Okay, so they did an event in last March on LinkedIn. So they had how to grow and train your SDR team in the world of AI.

39:27Justin Moore:This was a year ago. Okay, so let's just stop here. Okay, I'll give you two pitches. Ready? Okay, going back to the rope method, right? Let's do this pitch first. Hey, you know, we'll find the person or whatever. But, hey, I saw that you guys had some amazing case studies or success stories on your website, you know, with HubSpot and Greenhouse and all that. I was curious if you had ever considered doing some success stories with a smaller medium-sized agency because we've had some amazing results using your tool. Then the next – so that's sentence number one. That's the relevant angle, right, which is that they care about case studies.

40:11Justin Moore:studies because we see it on their website, right? And we're piquing their interest because we're saying, hey, I don't see any case studies from like, medium sized companies, because if I'm a medium sized company, I'm going to come on here and be like, Oh, this looks like it's only for enterprise, like only for massive companies using this tool. But you know, I don't know if it's for me, right? But you guys know you're seeing success with it, right? Second sentence is the organic piece, right? You know, happy to share you link a podcast episode where you talk about how the success that you're seeing with this Tyler.

40:40Justin Moore:And by the way, if you don't have a podcast episode about that yet, you make one before you pitch them. Very good. Very good. You make the episode still going to serve your audience, right? Clearly. But you know, strategically that you're going to use that episode when you pitch nooks. Okay. Then we get down to the next part of this pitch, which is we're pitching them something very specific, right? The easy to execute part, right you're saying we would love to sit and do a case study uh you know with your team we could air part of that you know interview on the podcast or maybe we could talk with you know the ceo of nooks or something on the podcast as well um you know we could turn this around in the next two months uh and then the last sentence is the proof element happy to share how we've worked with this other data provider um you know and achieve some amazing results are you free on thursday at 10 am to talk about this beautiful what do you guys think about pitch i know it's really good and actually i think people should be paying you for that type of thing well well they i mean i'm not gonna say no you can come and pay me if you want second second second second pitch angle uh hey i saw you guys did this this webinar or this this thing in denver are you going to be running any uh i'm assuming you guys are in europe are you running any of these types of events in europe we would love to host one of these events for you that's the pitch basically right and they haven't done this since last march um so yeah from my perspective do you see do you see how different this is than reaching out to nooks and being like hey guys we love you we use your tool it's so great we're getting such great results from it would you like to sponsor our podcast right it's it's so different right

42:25i love it i love it it's i think it's been brilliant um justin if there are any creators that are thinking i i i always think about like with sales people i always think about the mindset bit of like how to overcome the rejection and creators are obviously putting themselves out there they're creating art like what mindset hacks have you got people to deal with i guess the sponsorships that don't come off or the sponsorships that don't go anywhere

42:56Justin Moore:i have an adage that it's not no it's not yet very rarely is a brand ever going to say to you like i never want to work with you ever in life like don't ever talk to me again it's it's more likely that it's just like it's not the right time for us like we're not working with partners right now in that way or we're not running a campaign that you'd be a good fit for or whatever some sort of combination of reasons why it's not right, the right timing. It's much more likely that it's just, you know, great, you're now on their radar, you reached out to them, they know who you are, you set a great first impression.

43:31Justin Moore:Now the job is to nurture that relationship. You guys know this, you know, in sales, it's like, it's probably going to be the fifth touch point where they're like, Oh, God, great, great timing. Thank you so much, like for reminding me about you. We've got this great campaign ready for you. In fact, one of my coaching clients, her name is Emma. She runs one of the largest cruising YouTube channels. And she shared an anecdote recently in our coaching program that it was the fourth follow-up with a brand without hearing back from them. The fourth follow-up where she was kind of shouting into the void basically, right?

44:04Justin Moore:For the contact to be like, oh my gosh, thank you so much. I'm so sorry. I've been busy. I've been sick. I've been out. It's been whatever, but great timing. We've got this campaign and then they move forward with the deal. so it's like could you have could you set that as your goal to have the tenacity to follow up with the brand four times without hearing back from them sometimes that's what it takes to just kind of like this is a really at the end of the day what it comes down to is like most creators don't understand the concept of a sales pipeline that like you're you're not going to get a deal in the first outreach like the the riches are in the in the follow-up you know it's that little meme of the guy that's digging and the diamonds chiseling with the with the tunnel with the diamonds and he's almost there and then he gives up right exactly exactly i i i literally use that that image sometimes in some of my uh my my presentations justin thank you so so much we always end the podcast with the same question if people have listened to this all the way through what's one question that they should ask themselves uh why are you not serving your audience with sponsorships right now most people i imagine are serving uh their customers with the products that they directly sell, their coaching, their agency, their courses, masterminds, whatever.

45:17Justin Moore:And I actually think that's super myopic and narcissistic to think that the only way in which you could serve your audience is with the things you directly sell. Brands have solutions and you're never going to create a sass for that problem that your audience has. No, go out there and forge a deal. It's in service of your audience. So stop being selfish. I like it. It's the perspective twist on that. Amazing. Justin, thank you so, so much for joining us. If people want to find you, get your book, work with you, how can they go about it? Yeah. So my book is called Sponsor Magnet, about to hit 7 ,500 copies sold.

45:49Justin Moore:I self-published this thing. So I'm very happy about that. I have a goal to get this. Thank you. Yeah. I have a goal to get this book in the hands of a hundred thousand creators and entrepreneurs in the next 10 years. So if any part of this conversation excited you, simulated your brain, go to sponsormagnet.com to check it out. I got an audio book now too. And yeah, I would super appreciate if you have any friends, tell them about the book as well, because word of mouth is how it'll spread. Amazing. Thanks so, so much, Justin. Thanks, Justin. Thanks, guys.