The Blog · Sponsorship

How to get sponsors for your event: the performance based model, explained

By Richie Hosein, Founder of 1nfluenc3 Media · October 13, 2026 · 5 min read

Here is the truth most event owners learn the expensive way: sponsors are not found. They are sold. And what they buy is never your event. They buy access to your audience, proof it worked, and a team that treats their money like it matters.

What sponsors actually buy

Strip away the deck and every sponsorship decision comes down to four things:

• The room. Who attends, in real numbers, with real titles and real spending power. A small room of the right people beats a stadium of the wrong ones.
• The moments. Where the brand appears inside the experience: on stage, at the table, in the content, in the hands of guests.
• The content. Photos, reels and posts the sponsor can reuse long after the night ends.
• The report. Proof of delivery. What ran, who saw it, what it produced. Sponsors renew what they can measure.

Price the value, not your costs

The most common pricing mistake is building packages from the event budget. Sponsors do not care what your event costs. Price from the value of access: how hard is this audience to reach anywhere else, and what is one customer worth to the sponsor? Then build tiers, so a sponsor can enter, see proof, and upgrade into the bigger rooms.

The part nobody tells you: selling takes a sales team

Sponsorship is a pipeline business. Lists, outreach, calls, follow up, negotiation, contracts, deliverables, renewal. Most event teams are producers, not sellers, so sponsorship becomes the leftover task nobody owns. That is exactly the gap the performance based model exists to close.

How the performance based model works

Instead of paying an agency a retainer and hoping, the event owner partners with a sales team that works for a share of what it creates:

• No retainer. The partner earns only on revenue it generates.
• A fielded sales team. The partner builds and manages the outreach, using its own database and network.
• Tracked and transparent. Sales run through the partner's platform and tracking links, so every dollar is attributable.
• A clean split. At 1nfluenc3, revenue we generate is split 50 / 50 with the event. Your existing sponsors, buyers and business are never touched.
• Deliverables honored. The partner is on the hook for everything the sponsor was promised.

Why would a sales team accept that risk? Because the model selects for confidence. A team that only eats when it sells will only take events it believes in, promote them with its own money upfront, and work them like an owner. Since 2013, our own events have built a database of more than 150,000 contacts, which is the audience that makes the model work.

A real room, briefly

At Padel for a Purpose in Bridgehampton, an invitation only charity experience hosted by Josh Fox, our team programmed the talent, the culinary experience and the guest list, and the night raised more than $250,000 for the Brady Hunter Foundation and the Southampton Animal Shelter, with coverage in Page Six. Sponsors and partners show up when the room, the cause and the execution all say the same thing: this is worth being part of.

The short version

Define the room honestly. Package access, moments, content and reporting. Price the value. Then put a real sales team on it, ideally one that only gets paid when you do.