How to utilize Sponsors to pay for your next Dental Referral Marketing event using these proven steps.

Are you tired of paying out of pocket for your practice events? In this episode, we share how to secure local dental vendors and businesses to cover your costs. Learn how to build partnerships that help both businesses grow.

What You Will Learn

By the end of this episode, you will walk away with the proven roadmap for success.

Episode Breakdown:

Point #1: Find Your Ideal Match

Point #2: Create a Win-Win Deal

Sponsors want to know what they get in return. Do not just ask for money. Offer them real value like putting their logo on your bags, giving out their flyers, or letting them speak. 

Point #3: Finalize # of Sponsors to Invite to Participate

Summary & Action Plan

Stop waiting for the perfect marketing budget to drop into your lap. You can start planning your funded event today! 

Next Steps

If you want to dive deeper into this topic, book a call with me (link below). We will spend an hour looking at how this applies to your dental specialty practice.

🎙️ Book a Call with Me: https://stan.store/dentalreferralmarketingpodcast

Attend Free Monthly Level-Up Training (Reserve your Spot): https://stan.store/dentalreferralmarketingpodcast

Ready to Scale Your Specialty Practice Footprint?
Ramping up new doctors and protecting your referral pipeline requires systematic execution. Let’s collaborate to take your business to the next level. Reach out today for dedicated, expert support in:

• Referral Network Growth: Auditing and scaling your active referral marketing systems.
• Associate Onboarding: Building rapid, high-density ramp-up strategies for new specialists.
• High-Impact Events: Planning and executing educational or local clinical networking events.
• SEO & AI Visibility: Optimizing your digital footprint so your practice is the top recommendation on modern search platforms.

[Click here to schedule a strategy session with Michelle and the Referral Conduit team.]

Thanks for Listening! 

See you in the next weekly episode, posted Monday mornings at 8am est. time. "Referral Marketing made simple for Dental teams who want to grow!"

Michelle Hougland

Host - Dental Referral Marketing Podcast

CEO/Founder - Referral Conduit Software

michelle@referralconduit.com

https://stan.store/dentalreferralmarketingpodcast

Transcript

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So, you want to host a dental referral event using sponsors to offset the cost by paying for some or all of your expenses, but you're just not sure where to start. Well, this episode is for you. Hi, my name is Michelle Hoagland, and after securing hundreds of thousands of dollars for dental specialty practices that I've worked with over the years, I'm going to share with you my proven roadmap to guide you on your journey to successfully securing your own sponsors to help pay for your dental referral marketing event. In today's episode, we will discuss who should be your sponsors, when should you reach out to them to begin the pitch and planning process, how many sponsors should you consider inviting to participate, and what amount should they sponsor and what will they need if they do want to participate in your referral event. We'll review how this can be a win-win-win strategy so your sponsors win by aligning with you in your practice, your attendees win by being served by the sponsor or sponsors, and you win by keeping marketing dollars so you can allocate that elsewhere while still hosting your referral sources that will continue to genuinely build your referral relationships. Point number one, who should be your sponsors? To answer this question, we must first decide who are you planning to invite to attend this event? Is it going to be doctors only, hygienists only, assistants only, maybe the front team, the non-clinical, or are you going to focus just on the clinical team together with the doctors, hygiene, and assistants? To answer this, you would need to determine the objective of your event. Please do not have an event just to have one. What is your objective? What are you identifying? Is it a drop in referrals? Are you wanting to build up your hygiene department? Maybe announce a new device such as a laser that you don't have available? Or is it just for goodwill by supporting the dentist, their teams, and aligning with that maybe a dental holiday or supporting an awesome speaker or topic that you'd like to share with your referral network? Once you decided who's going to be attending your event, then you can identify the best sponsors that align with your event. For example, maybe you're a periodontist and you're wanting to grow your hygiene department. You also may have just purchased a new laser to be able to offer for your patient's care. And you want to highlight that to your referral network or potentially your new referral sources. So in this event, you could be considering, well, let's answer the question that we get asked from general dentist, their hygienist, on when do you refer to a periodontist? You would then consider dental reps that promote products and services that their ideal customers, their hygienists, are looking to gather at this event. This could be a huge win for the sponsor because they don't need to go through what we like to call the gatekeepers or our amazing front teams who have people that walk in and solicit on a day-to-day basis, but they're not getting directly to the hygienist. So these sponsors or dental reps that are going from office to office, hoping to be able to speak to a hygienist or two, trying to catch them between patients, maybe drop off some materials or flyers at the front desk. They would love to be able to come to your event, possibly be a sponsor, and be able to speak to a whole room of hygienists that are there, attentive, not dealing with patients at the moment, maybe enjoying a nice dinner that you've provided and engaged and wanting to learn more. This could be possibly your local Colgate or your Crest reps. Could be maybe your Henry Shine rep, for example, who has connections with local reps that would love to sponsor and be able to get in front of their ideal audience. Maybe you consider reaching out to companies that offer things such as dental loops for dental hygienists, maybe even out-of-the-box ideas such as massage therapists and day spas. Going back to dental, it could be Hugh Friday instruments, cavatrons, piezo scalers, maybe even now voice-activated period charting systems, and so on. This just gives you some ideas to consider who could possibly be a sponsor for your event. This is just one example. Point number two, when you should reach out to them to begin the pitch and the planning process, to begin these conversations, to see if your local dinner reps are interested, if they have a marketing budget remaining to sponsor your event. In my experience, I recommend at least six months prior. Also, on a side note, the beginning of the year in January is best to approach them before their allocated budget has been fully spoken for by other events and other offices and such. But honestly, you should be fine unless you're wanting to try to squeak in an event before the end of the year. Point number three: how many sponsors should you consider inviting to participate? Well, this depends. It depends on the amount of estimated attendees for your event. My rule of thumb is one sponsor per 20, 25 attendees. Just as an idea, if you're considering having multiple sponsors, you should be careful. You don't want competing vendor relations in the same event unless it's a very large event. Recently, where it was almost 400 in attendance. And for that size of an event, there was enough, I guess, meat on the bone for both competitors to be able to display their products and talk to the guests and the attendees, offer raffles, you know, have their literature on each attendee's uh play setting and that type of thing where there was enough to go around. But if it's a small event, you don't want to have competitors in the same area. It's just not good. You gotta think of it from the sponsor's point of view. They get a certain amount of money each year and they choose their events very carefully. They want to see a return on their investment as well. But for your normal 30, 50, maybe even 75 in attendance, try to keep them free of competition. You want it, like I said, to be it's kind of like a fertile atmosphere for your sponsors so they can garner new business. Uh, you want them to also return for your future events. You don't want this to be a one-time and done type of thing to continue for years to come to support your practice and your referral marketing endeavors. Not only are you building relationships with your referral sources at these events, but you're also building it with your dental reps and your vendors. Think of this word travels, uh, your dental reps and vendors, they're in all of your competitors' offices. They're in and out of offices continually. They network, they talk to teams. So you want to be the one that creates the buzz for man, they're awesome. Oh my gosh, let me know if you guys have another event. I love getting that from our sponsors where they're already wanting to lock down their place to give my practice that I'm working with money for their next event because it's such a great experience for them. They get a great return on investment, and it's a great experience for your referral sources and team, depending on the focus of the event, just a win-win-win all around. You are not only supporting their trust when they're sponsoring an event, but you also want to be respectful. You want to ensure that their investment in your practice event is just a no-brainer. It'll reap dividends for you in the future as well. Point number four, what amount should they sponsor? And what will they need if they do participate in your referral event? So, for what amount to sponsor? It depends on your estimated events expense. What I recommend for you to do first of all, before you even start talking to potential sponsors, start gathering quotes for your venue for the food and catering. If you're gonna have A V or sound equipment, usually your venue will also offer the A V sound equipment, just depends. Your estimated marketing outreach that you're gonna allocate. The best events I have found, or when you have an outreach or PRC practice relationship coordinator who is carrying those invitations to your referral network or your potential new referral sources in person and inviting them to attend your event. That's bar none the best attended events, or when we have someone allocated just for doing that. You'll want them to go out and promote at least 60, 90 days prior minimum for your event. And with that, of course, when they go market, they bring goodies. So just think about what's the estimate of what that will cost for those expenses. Also, are you gonna have a speaker or are you gonna present or one of your team members? Be real careful with this. You want to make sure you give them the best experience possible. You don't want to go cheap on this. A lot of the times your sponsors may have like Colgate. I've had a speaker from their company before and did a great job. They will provide the speaker for that and they'll also provide CE credits as well. But if you're looking at having to pay for a speaker to come an honorarium, consider what that could be. Raffle prizes, is this something that you're going to want to offer? It adds a little fun for the attendees. You can listen to my previous episode where I go into that in more detail as well. I'll put a link in the show notes for you. The other thing you'll want to consider is any expense for your marketing collateral, meaning at the day of the event, having notebooks and pens with your logo on them, maybe having cups that have your logo, having grab bags, that type of thing. Estimate how much that would be. Once you've gathered all of these estimates together, just a rough idea, then you can reverse engineer and determine, okay, from this expense and this amount that we're looking at, how many attendees do we anticipate, how many sponsors are we anticipating, and then from there you can determine how much do you want to ask sponsors to be a part of your event. Once you've determined those estimated expenses and you determine the number of sponsors you hope to obtain, you can consider offering a tier level, like a three-step sponsor option. This is something like a gold level sponsor, a silver level sponsor, and a bronze, you know, that type of thing. Or you can just make it a flat rate amount for every sponsor. They all get the same thing if you're doing multiple sponsors. And if you have any questions on this, if you'd like to schedule a call with me, a coaching call, I'll be happy to go over this. I planned over a hundred events with sponsors and different venues. There's a lot of moving parts. I'll be happy to walk you through what this could look like for your practice. Once you've identified sponsors to invite to participate, they will typically request at least a drafted version of your event marketing flyer so they can submit for their leadership approval and for their accounts payable department to refer to when they're rendering your sponsor payment. Depending on the size of your vendor, the company, you may also be asked to sign a sponsor agreement. If you need guidance on this, go ahead. Like I said, book a call. I'll be happy to give you some advice on that. Now, I'm not an attorney and I'm not providing legal advice, but I can provide recommendations for you to consider based on my experience. If your team wants any assistance in designing that marketing flyer, have them join my free level up monthly training. Of course, you at the doctors or the dental leadership, you're welcome to attend. In this free level up monthly training, I'll be teaching how to use Canva and for designing your flyers, but also going over the key items you need on your flyers for maximum attendance to make all the work for planning your marketing event and your sponsors coming out make that a success. Check out the link in the show notes below. Now you have a proven roadmap to guide you on your journey to successfully securing your own sponsors to help pay for your dental referral marketing events. Should you have any questions or you want to take a deeper dive into this topic, book a call with me and we'll spend an hour discussing how this applies to your dental specialty practice. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of the Dental Referral Marketing Podcast. This is your host, Michelle Hoagland, CEO of Referral Conduit Software. I post podcast episodes every Monday morning at 8 a.m. Eastern Time, where we make referral marketing simple for dental teams who want to grow. I'll see you in the next episode. Have a great day, everyone. Bye bye.