Two weeks. That is how long it typically takes a commercial team to turn a fresh signal into a proposal in front of the buyer. The signal might be a new CMO at a target brand, a brand entering a category, or a rival’s partner deal running down. We have had that figure confirmed in conversations with major clubs and teams on both sides of the Atlantic.
The initial reaction is that sellers are slow. That’s typically not the case. The people in a modern partnerships department are as capable as they have ever been. The two weeks are in the relay between them, and the relay has barely changed in a decade.
By the time the proposal is sent, every rival rights holder has seen the same signal.
We’ve been here for over a decade
The study most often quoted on sales response time is now fifteen years old. In 2011, Harvard Business Review published research by James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington. Drawing on 1.25 million sales leads across 42 US companies, it found that firms trying to reach a prospect within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to have a meaningful conversation with a decision maker as firms that waited one hour longer. Against firms that waited a day or more, the gap was more than sixty times.
That study looked at inbound leads, not sponsorship, so the multipliers are directional rather than transferable. The causes the authors identified are relevant, though. They pointed to teams pulling leads from the CRM once a day rather than continuously, and to routing rules that shared leads out by territory and fairness rather than by fit.
Read that list again with a partnerships department in mind. Swap the daily CRM check for the weekly insights digest. Swap territory routing for the question of which seller owns which category. The tools have changed a lot since 2011 whilst the sequence has not.
Having worked inside a club commercial team, I recognise the process clubs describe to us now. We would get the tip-off from our researchers, or an agency pal, and it was all hands on deck. The thrill of the chase. Then somewhere between the initial excitement and the finished proposal, momentum, focus, and clarity had been lost. Someone’s on annual leave, another is travelling to a partner review, the design team has a shell scheme to finish before the conference deadline. V.final is delivered at 6pm on a Friday. The software is better now, but the number of handovers is the same.
The signal is not the advantage when everyone has it
Sponsorship intelligence is one of the success stories of the last decade. Platforms such as SponsorUnited now track more than 403,000 brands and 2.2 million deals. KORE and others give rights holders a view of partner performance and market movement that would once have taken an analyst team a season to assemble. Club business intelligence teams have become far more sophisticated at turning that data into something a seller can use.
That success has a consequence. When the market is visible to everyone, the signal stops being an edge. A new CMO appointment at a target brand reaches every subscribing rights holder on the same morning. So does a category entry, a funding round or a sponsor’s exit from a rival property.
Sponsorship then adds a rule most B2B markets do not have. Category exclusivity means one partner per category, per property, per cycle. A club does not need to be the best proposal in the market. It needs to be the first credible one in front of the buyer, in a category it can still sell.
If every rival takes a fortnight, the one that takes three days does not need a better proposal. It needs to arrive while the brand is still deciding.
The fortnight evaporates
The relay looks broadly the same at every elite club we have spoken to. A signal arrives through an intelligence platform or an alert. The insights or business intelligence team picks it up and adds context. A seller then validates it: is the brand a real prospect, do we have a relationship, which inventory fits, and does it conflict with an existing partner. Once validated, the opportunity goes to design for collateral. The draft comes back to insights to check the audience numbers and the market claims. Only then does it return to the seller, who sends it.
That is five handovers. Each one is a queue, because every team in the chain is also working on renewals, activation reports and the next board paper. Each one is also a translation. The seller knows the new CMO came from a brand that built its name on grassroots football. That nuance gets compressed into a two-line brief. The designer interprets the brief. The insights check is designed to verify the numbers, not to test whether the story survived the trip.
Days are lost to waiting, and meaning is lost at each handover.
The wider sales data points the same way. Salesforce’s State of Sales research found that sales reps spend just 28% of their week actually selling, with the rest absorbed by deal management, data entry and internal coordination. In a sponsorship department, much of that remaining 72% is the relay itself.
None of this is a criticism of the people in it. Business intelligence teams are doing exactly what they are asked to do, with rigour. Designers are protecting the brand, and sellers are right to validate before they pitch. The issue is the sequence they are working in.
The first credible proposal sets the frame
Sponsorship sales cycles are long. In my experience, nine to eighteen months from first conversation to signature is typical for a mid-sized deal, and longer for naming rights or front of shirt. That length is misleading. The cycle is long, but the window to frame it is short.
6sense’s 2025 Buyer Experience Report, a survey of around 4,000 B2B buyers, found that the winning vendor was already on the buyer’s first shortlist 95% of the time. The vendor the buyer favoured before speaking to anyone went on to win roughly four deals in five.
Earlier research from Gartner into complex B2B purchases found that buyers spend only around 17% of their buying time meeting potential suppliers. With three suppliers in contention, each gets roughly 5% of the buyer’s attention. The rest goes on independent research and internal alignment, conducted without the seller in the room.
For a brand CMO weighing three rights holders in a category, the first proposal that arrives with a credible view of the brand’s own problem becomes the reference point. Later proposals are measured against it.
Why faster tools at each step have not shortened the relay
The market has not stood still. Proposal builders have cut the time it takes to produce good-looking collateral. Intelligence platforms have cut the time it takes to spot an opportunity. Both are real gains, and clubs using them well are better for it.
But speeding up a step does not remove a handover. If design takes one day instead of three, the brief still waits for the seller to validate it. The draft still waits in the insights queue for its check. The joins between steps, where most of the two weeks sits, are untouched.
The industry has recognised the problem for some time. A 2021 doctoral study by Dan Kaufmann at the University of South Florida surveyed 212 senior sponsorship sellers and managers across the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB and MLS on what helps close deals faster. Shortening the cycle is a stated priority across the business. The attention has mostly gone to individual stages rather than the sequence that connects them.
What compressing the relay looks like
The people stay where they are. What has to change is how the work moves between them.
In the model we build with clubs and teams, the signal arrives already worked. An agentic workflow, with a human in the loop at every decision point, matches the signal against the rights holder’s own inventory. It checks existing partner categories and exclusivities, sets the opportunity against the rights holder’s own deal history, and drafts collateral inside its brand system. The insights team reviews the output rather than rebuilding it. Design sets the templates and standards once, rather than producing every deck from a brief. The seller owns the relationship and the decision to send.
The handovers do not disappear. They become reviews of finished work, run in parallel, rather than a queue of half-finished work run in series. Nothing in the chain loses context, because the context travels with the opportunity rather than being retold at each stage.
Speed only counts if the proposal is specific to the brand. A fast, generic deck is worse than a late one, because it spends the first impression on something the CMO could have received from anyone. Because the workflow starts from the brand’s own signal and the rights holder’s own data, the first draft is already specific.
Two further points matter to a commercial director. First, the system sits on the rights holder’s own infrastructure, so the deal history and partner data that make it accurate remain its own asset. As we argued in anyone can build now, the scarce asset now is ownership of the commercial logic behind the software.
Second, speed is only half of the commercial case. A proposal that arrives first also needs to stand up when the partner asks what it will deliver. That is the same measurement problem that sits under front-of-shirt deals, and the same connected data answers both.
Where to start
Most rights holders do not know exactly where their two weeks goes. They know the total but have never seen it broken down by stage. Earl’s four-to-six-week diagnostic maps the relay inside a club’s or team’s own partnerships function. It times each handover, identifies where context is lost, and sets out which stages can run in parallel with a human reviewing rather than rebuilding.
When financial rules cap what a club can spend on the pitch, the competition moves into the commercial department. In that department, the rights holder that answers the signal first sets the terms for everyone else.
