Music Funding 101
How Much Time A Band Should Spend On Sponsorship Searching
Searching for funding of any type (for any business) can be very time consuming. Some new business owners talk about their early days and how they spent almost all their time looking for funding. Some even say they forgot what business they were originally in. The best stories come from the guys who tried to get large venture capital funding; they could not function until they got it, so they went all out and focused on it for years.
But with TalentFunding.com, bands should have a bit of an easier time since the contacts are already there to talk to. True, there are a lot of other things to take care of, but the process should still not be all-consuming. Here are some guidelines for bands to use when searching:
First and foremost, the band must keep doing their current shows. Potential sponsors just don't want to see a band sitting by their computers all day, trying to get funding. Any band doing this will probably never get a sponsor. So a balance must be struck.
The second thing that bands should not do is become attached to one particular potential sponsor. This is a common occurrence with all new commission salespeople; they just don't know how to work with several (much less hundreds) of prospects, so they get serious with the first sponsor that talks with them on the phone. And predictably, the band stops contacting other sponsors because the band thinks that if they can get this one sponsor, then they won't have to waste time on others guys. But bands should always search, even when they already have a sponsor who has paid. That's how sales works, and that's how sponsor searching must work. The current sponsor must always think that the band is talking with other sponsors.
I'd recommend that the band do two shows a week while searching for funding; this will give them time to do everything else: day jobs, relationships, sleeping and searching for sponsors. Initially, all the searching will be on the computer, but that will eventually be partially replaced by some phone calls, and then hopefully by a few in-person meetings. Eventually, after several months, the band will figure out how many computer contacts they must make before they get one in-person meeting. That's all it is: If you want twice as many meetings, do twice as much computer work and phone work.
The time for computer contacting will be the same for most bands; probably a few hours a week. Phones too, after a while, will take about this much time. But the in-person meetings are going to vary depending on the commission sales experience of the band members, the size of the city they live in, and how much "long distance" prospecting the band does. Bands without commission sales experience should be wary of too many personal meetings; it won't be obvious to these band members which meetings are good ones and which ones are not. Nevertheless, after several months of contacting sponsors, one or two personal meetings per week should suffice.
It will be at this point that most bands get discouraged (just as new salespeople do), because they are spending so much time talking to so many people who sound interested, but none of them ever come through. This, my friends, is what commission sales is all about. An experienced commission salesperson becomes trained at knowing that these "deals" never had any chance at all, so he would not have spent any time on them. Instead he would be talking to other people. Nevertheless, all bands should give the process a full year before deciding that it's not for them. Or, they could always try to get a funding rep.
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