I have given advice over the years to various sales organizations, NGOs, Not-for-Profits, Charities, what have you. They all intuitively seem to know that if your organization is not growing, it’s dying.
But it always amazes me how some of the most basic steps they can take to increase their sales, their sponsorship dollars, their donations, etc. are ignored.
When I worked at the Ottawa Senators, we had about 300 signs and rink boards that we needed to sell every year. If you attend a game at Scotiabank Place today, you will notice that all rink boards and most signs are sold in pairs– this is so that everyone in the arena can see each sponsor but also because it cuts down on the number of sales they need to make.
Think about it. If you have to sell 300 signs and you sell them in pairs and for a minimum of three years, you will only need to make 50 sales a year instead of 300. This makes your organization much more efficient.
The same philosophy is applied to the Ottawa Senators (Charitable) Foundation and I brought that concept to other charities that I support like Christie Lake Camp for Kids. The latter’s sponsorship has grown hugely in the last two years because they are not starting over every year. So you are not like a baseball player having to start over every season with 000 home runs…
It is the same for a business. If all your deals are for one year, you have a growth curve that is essentially flat, year over year. You need heroic efforts to grow your business and outputs are pretty much in a linear relationship with inputs (this is a fancy way of saying that you are basically an hourly wage slave).
If you do three year deals (or, at a minimum, two year deals), you start to get a positive slope to your revenue curve and maybe even some non-linearity; i.e., exponential growth.
More money, less effort, sounds right to me.
Dr. Bruce