Sales Specialist - Sponsorships

The Sponsorship Sales Specialist is responsible for driving sponsorship revenue by identifying, developing, and closing new and existing partnership opportunities across events and programs. This role builds strong relationships with prospective and current sponsors, understands their business and marketing objectives, and recommends sponsorship opportunities that deliver measurable value.

What You'll Do:

• Prospect and develop new sponsorship opportunities through outbound outreach, referrals, networking, and industry research.
• Manage the full sponsorship sales cycle, from initial outreach and discovery through proposal, negotiation, contracting, and close.
• Build relationships with existing sponsors to drive renewals, upsells, and expanded participation.
• Conduct discovery conversations to understand sponsor goals around lead generation, brand awareness, thought leadership, customer engagement, and business development.
• Recommend sponsorship packages, exhibit opportunities, speaking engagements, workshops, hospitality experiences, and event add-ons based on sponsor objectives.
• Maintain an accurate sponsorship pipeline, opportunities, activities, and forecasts within the company's CRM.
• Partner with event, marketing, operations, and customer-facing teams to ensure sponsor commitments are properly communicated and executed.
• Clearly communicate sponsorship benefits, deadlines, deliverables, registration requirements, and event policies.
• Track progress against individual and team revenue and pipeline goals.
• Research new industries and organizations that could expand the sponsorship ecosystem beyond traditional partners.
• Support sponsor retention by helping partners understand how to maximize their event participation and ROI.

Qualifications:

• 2+ years of experience in sales, sponsorships, partnerships, events, business development, or a related client-facing role.
• Demonstrated ability to prospect, build relationships, and move opportunities through a sales pipeline.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Comfortable conducting discovery calls, presenting solutions, negotiating, and asking for the business.
• Highly organized with the ability to manage multiple sponsors, opportunities, deadlines, and events simultaneously.
• Experience working with CRM and sales pipeline tools.
• Ability to collaborate across sales, marketing, event operations, and leadership teams.
• Event, technology, channel, SaaS, or B2B industry experience is a plus.

What Success Looks Like:

• Growing net-new sponsorship revenue and pipeline.
• Meeting or exceeding sponsorship sales targets.
• Increasing sponsor renewal and expansion opportunities.
• Bringing new organizations and industries into the sponsorship portfolio.
• Maintaining strong sponsor relationships from initial conversation through the event.
• Consistently identifying the right sponsorship solution based on a partner's objectives rather than simply selling a package.

Working Conditions:

• Remote or Hybrid, depending on location
• EST or CST preferred