The seeds that would grow into OpenSponsorship were planted during a golf event in India. While speaking to a marquee player (a golfer paid to attend a major tournament), Ishveen Jolly discovered a problem no one was addressing at that time. Although the golf pro was a big name in England, he lacked a sponsorship deal in India – and he didn’t have the network to secure one. “Why is there not an Airbnb for our industry?” Jolly said during our interview. “That’s kind of what we set up with OpenSponsorship.”
The seeds that would grow into OpenSponsorship were planted during a golf event in India. While speaking to a marquee player (a golfer paid to attend a major tournament), Ishveen Jolly discovered a problem no one was addressing at that time. Although the golf pro was a big name in England, he lacked a sponsorship deal in India – and he didn’t have the network to secure one. “Why is there not an Airbnb for our industry?” Jolly said during our interview. “That’s kind of what we set up with OpenSponsorship.”
Fast forward to the present, and Jolly has built OpenSponsorship, an authentic solution that empowers brands to partner with athletes for digital marketing campaigns. Seeing over $3M worth in deals during the last year, the company has been a game-changer for athlete relationships with sponsors. Its explosion in popularity is attracting sports superstars like Serena Williams as investors. High-profile clients like Anheuser-Busch are finding Jolly’s concept of a two-way marketplace between brands and athletes to be enticing as it helps ensure positive returns on their investments.
The Premise and The Promise
Jolly has become an Inc Top 100 Female Founder and had her name is included on the Forbes 30 Under 30: Sports list for her innovative contributions to marketing. “Sports at the top level is my passion,” she says. As for working in sponsorship, she admits that she just happened onto the field. “I thought sponsorship was . . . addictive. It’s so much more than just traditional marketing spend. So I love that for the brand. And then on the other side, every major team, event, and league relies on sponsorship as a major source of funding, athletes included.”
As a sports agent, she brokered endorsement deals with premier leagues, teams, and athletes. She gained an insider perspective on how fragmented and unanalytical the sports sponsorship market was. Realizing the industry lacked transparency, access, and tech innovation meant a vast untapped potential in a marketplace with an annual $60B revenue. The idea behind Jolly’s company was to modernize the old way of marketing oneself to potential sponsors. “Connections are still made in conference halls,” she says. “Someone knows someone, which just felt really bizarre to me.”
Adding more discontent was the notion that only the most famous athletes deserved sponsorship deals. “The agency model is very geared towards the top 1%, right? And so the other 99%, maybe they’ll get that shoe deal and an auto deal. Are they really getting the DTC, the vitamin . . . like all the other categories?” Jolly wants to focus on what she calls the “non-top 1%.” OpenSponsorship increases the endorsement opportunities for every level of athlete across the globe.
How Open Sponsorship Works
Serviceability and simplicity are two key ingredients that OpenSponsorship strives to offer its clients. “How do you know who to work with?” Jolly says when detailing what the platform captures. “That functionality is very similar to recruitment.” Brand managers can use OpenSponsorship’s comprehensive search tool to find the best athlete, team, or event to deliver on their marketing goals. The database presents profiles from over 40 countries and 50 different sports.
From this point, managers advertise their brand to the party they choose. They can ask questions to determine if the relationship would be a good fit. The interested party will then apply to submitted campaigns. Both sides will have the chance to go over the terms. Once deals are finalized, OpenSponsorship holds payments in escrow until deliverables have been completed. Brand managers can then measure campaign performance via the platform. “The holy grail is to be able to show ROI,” Jolly says. “I’m putting this in. What am I getting in return?”
Taking what works in other marketplaces and adapting those features into OpenSponsorship has proved instrumental in creating mutually-beneficial business relationships. “We don’t want to be dealing with cancellations,” Jolly states. “So how do we make sure that the whole deal is done? What’s the workflow there?” Adjusting the campaign functions to reflect real-life situations has added depth to the platform. For instance, brand managers can solicit for charity initiatives or affiliate programs with royalty options. Athletes can accept campaigns based on their needs at any particular time, including those that give back to communities. Jolly is excited about this because it could open up charitable possibilities, something she’s quite fond of. According to her, “The beauty of tech is that you can actually drive behavior.”
Transparency and Scalability
OpenSponsorship’s transparency policy extends to disclosing their prices, and feedback so far has been highly favorable. One client told Jolly that her company is his number one provider of deals. The main reason? Because OpenSponsorship is so open, he knows exactly where all the money is going.
“You might as well earn that transparency,” Jolly says. “But then the scalability side of it . . . If you didn’t have a pricing page, that means that every single call has to go to a sales rep. And as a startup, you can’t have someone sitting on every single phone call. That’s never going to be scalable. In a way, the transparency mission is about creating something good out there that betters the industry. That’s actually what’s led to scalability. There’s just no way we would be where we are without transparency.”
Scaling a company can challenge the savviest business owner. Jolly seems to have the upper hand as she and her team work towards navigating OpenSponsorship onward and up. She has the following advice for SaaS leaders: “When you find something that works, double down.” She adds that founders need to commit to doing things that drive the business forward instead of staying the course.
Jolly also suggests focusing on retention. “You need to decide what retention means for you and what you can afford. Retention allows you to figure out where the product gaps are. The hardest thing with a SaaS product is if there’s any gap in the product where people choose to go offline, someone may come and replace you.” This can explain why Jolly’s platform is exhaustive in functionality. She doesn’t want clients to go anywhere else.
Data and reporting can’t be overlooked. One of Jolly’s favorite methods to track and understand clients’ actions is cohort analysis. Not every customer has to be held, but a subsection must grow. When they do, companies can focus on determining what went wrong and take measures to prevent it from happening again.
SaaS Trends and Challenges
The world is moving to a place where there is a lot of employee turnover. Jolly thinks that taking a close look at what defines loyalty can reduce staff movements. She asks, “How can we hire better, but then make those people always be improving products, so we don’t need . . . three more people to go below them?”
There’s also the trend of improving account management via technology. However, Jolly wonders if the right questions are being considered. “How do you service these guys at scale? I feel like there are many people who were thinking about this idea of a white-glove service for account management. But you’ve got a SaaS platform, or you’ve got a platform, so what does that look like?”
With all of the problems she’s tackled and those yet to come, Jolly finds the endeavor to be both challenging and rewarding. “Maybe some people are lucky that they can build a massive company, and then it gets stagnant, and they could just sell it. For me, there’s still a lot to solve.” Any person can acknowledge a problem. It takes an industry leader with passion and drive to recognize and eliminate them.
Learn more about OpenSponsorship.
