One of the first realities you are going to discover, no matter how good a racer (boxer, sprinter, jockey, etc.) you are, there is someone out there with your picture on their wall and a plan to beat you. You are NOT just selling your track record. If you have a great performance record, that’s great. If not, that is also not an insurmountable objection to selling sponsorship.

Also, you are NOT just selling advertising and exposure or advertising impressions. Racing is not just an alternate advertising medium. There are a lot better and more cost effective traditional advertising channels. Not only are they better, but more scientifically measured and a whole lot less controversial than motorsports.

You are selling a complex set of marketing tools and the ability to deliver a very specific audience that the racing series you have chosen to compete in, attracts. A target audience has the ability to buy things, and sales are very measurable. Who do you know who wants access to these markets? Your racing program offers a unique platform and a package of business and marketing benefits that most businesses can use to build their sales…if they only understood how to use it. This book is designed to help you to understand what you have to offer, what a prospect may need, how to articulate this in the context of a prospects business and how to put it together. Then deliver on the expectation you have created.

I have also developed this book as much as a reminder to myself of how to go through the fundamental steps of a typical complex product sales cycle methodology to sell a sponsor. This book looks at applying this method to motor racing. It applies almost equally to any other sporting or charitable sponsorship sale. Just the language and benefits vary somewhat.

My sales background began selling complicated computer systems to business. To do this successfully, a seller of the computer system typically has to work out what the prospective buyer needs and then applies the system they are representing as a solution. Selling racing as an image making business building method and multimedia alternative to billboards, print, radio, TV advertising, trade shows, corporate entertainment and merchandising, is a complex task. But not impossible. And certainly something you can learn how to do.

Learning how is necessary as business has changed. We have woken up and discovered it’s the Nineties. Business expects a healthy return on their marketing investments. They have re-engineered, downsized and right-sized. Buying into racing, a corporation must be sure they have defensible business logic for doing this. It is up to us to find this and articulate it so a board of directors believes this too. To go racing with corporate sponsorship you need to recognize that marketing investments require measurable returns and work to provide these. Ignore this at your jeopardy.

This book also documents my disbelief at the business state of most motor racing series. It seems when grown men get around racing fuel there is a tendency for it to make many petty and greedy, while losing their better judgment and plainly dishonoring the sporting trust they have been given by spectator and sponsor alike. Many of these businessmen have achieved great things in their professional lives, strictly adhering to the tenets of good business practices, yet they totally lose it around racing! Look at the time, fan and equity wasted in the battle over Indy car and sports car racing, versus the growth and health of stock car racing.

Why then, when they are entrusted with husbanding this sport, do they forget everything they have learned at the expense of the sport. Undeniably, the most successful series in the world is NASCAR because of focused and single minded management. Yet it seems every other series and sanctioning body is fiddling with rules to make them more competitive, safer, cheaper and more attractive to competitors and spectators. Read this as attempting to make the sport more marketable. Wake up ladies and gentlemen and realize it takes a team consisting of owners, promoters, sponsors, spectators and participants to make this thing work. Once a series has a sound and stable business basis, competitors, sponsors and spectators will come.

It is just fine to complain, but no one cares! Improving any given series we choose to compete in begins with ourselves. This book is offered as help to improve our respective sales skills. Beginning here, is the only way this can change and motorsports become healthy again.

First, I am frequently asked why I am so free with my ideas, opinions and strategies. I never found that being secretive with ideas gains anybody anything. Someone who offers help and positions themselves as having some special skill they won’t disclose, is typically hiding nothing except mediocrity. Ideas are free. It is the effort and grind necessary to make them work, that is worth something. That’s the magic.

Secondly, many of these ideas I have come across working with drivers and teams. Remember, taking an ideas form one person without attribution is theft, borrowing an ideas from tow; plagiarism, but taking many ideas from many sources is research. You will learn to research!

Ideas are free. Implementation is a bitch! You have to want it badly enough and then go out and do it. On the track and off. Go through the whole grind. I hope this book helps you build a better budget, a better plan, more marketing partners and better your racing program. All levels of the sport desperately need well funded, businesslike racing programs. I welcome ideas, corrections, contradictions, and even controversy.