NASCAR sponsors wheel and deal

By Mark Hansel

Friday, March 6, 2009 | 2 a.m.

As soon as he crossed the finish line, Las Vegas native Kyle Busch knew he had scored a victory in the Shelby 427 NASCAR Sprint Cup race at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

It may take a little longer for one of his major sponsors, M&M, to find out if it got any other big wins last week.

Of course it is a huge plus when millions of NASCAR fans see the M&M logo on the car in victory lane on Sundays, but some of the sponsors’ biggest NASCAR wins take place off the track before the race even starts.

On the Friday before the race, Busch’s sponsor and several others were trying to get to their own winner’s circle in a conference room far removed from the track.

The NASCAR B2B Council Meeting that took place at the Hard Rock Hotel last week is one of only four held each year. A select group of NASCAR sponsors gets together for an afternoon that includes sales presentations, social interaction and speed meetings, which are like a series of speed dating sessions for sales representatives.

The B2B (which stands for business to business) council started in 2004 with four participants and now includes 37 companies.

The goal is for the sponsors to explore ways that their products and services can benefit one another or that they can use the NASCAR affiliation to increase sales.

“We have partners who have been able to attribute millions of dollars of either selling or buying of their products and services to one another on the council,” said Norris Scott, NASCAR’s managing director of partnership marketing. “In today’s economy with all of the scrutiny of marketing dollars, B2B has proven to work.”

One of the reasons it works, says Kari Taylor, director of global accounts for Office Depot, is because businesses create partnerships but people make deals.

“This is my third year of doing B2B, and these people become your friends, too,” Taylor said. “Business is still about people, and there is still an art to selling. NASCAR doesn’t guarantee that you are going to do more business, you still have to be all the things your brand states and promises and be committed to doing good business.”

The B2B group is like a club, and, as with most clubs, membership is a privilege and exclusivity is paramount. It’s one thing to be an office supplier at a business-to-business council, it’s quite another to be the only office supplier in the room.

“There are a lot of sponsors in the sport and every single one has a need for office supplies,” Taylor said. “This environment really provides us a forum to emphasize what we do.”

There are several levels of sponsorship in NASCAR and the B2B Council Meetings are limited to the top tier. And with the exception of auto manufacturers, there are no direct competitors.

“We’ve got official partners, track partners and team partners,” Scott said. “The only people here are the first group.”

NASCAR coordinates the events because it knows that without sponsors there would probably be no racing. By encouraging the companies to support each other and NASCAR, the association helps ensure its future.

“Sponsors are the lifeblood of NASCAR,” Scott said.

The value of sponsorship is ingrained into the minds of drivers early, and in tough economic times it’s especially important to make sure sponsors continue to support the sport. It’s why after a race, drivers are handed a hat with the logo of one sponsor and the drink of another as soon as they step out of a car, adorned with decals of all of the other sponsors.

Carl Edwards, who won nine races last year and is one of the most popular and successful Sprint Cup drivers, knows sponsors such as Aflac, his primary sponsor, keep him on the track.

“From day one I could see that it was the racing sponsors that make this work,” Edwards said. “We’re just like any other sport, we’ve got to weather these tough times and do the best we can. I’m just fortunate to have some really good sponsors that are solidly behind us.”

Keith Farley, corporate sponsorship manager for Aflac, said the popularity of the familiar Aflac duck has greatly increased the company’s name recognition, but the NASCAR sponsorship and the B2B Council affiliation have helped the company go beyond that to more fully explain the services it provides.

“A lot of people know the name Aflac, but are not familiar with what we do,” Farley said.

Aflac offers supplemental, dental, vision, cancer, disability and other insurance policies for individuals and businesses. It recently completed a deal generated through a B2B meeting in which Aflac has been included as part of Office Depot’s human resources benefits program and Office Depot has become Aflac’s office products supplier.

The B2B meeting format includes a meet-and-greet session followed by an introduction and presentations from select sponsors that focus on ways the products or services offered by a company can benefit the other sponsors in the room.

The speed meetings involve small groups of sponsors getting together in a timed session to exchange information about their respective companies. When the clock stops, the sponsors move to different tables and repeat the process.

The sponsors are given a tally sheet that allows them to gauge the level of interest from the other participants, which can be used during follow-ups.

NASCAR encourages the companies to track the successful deals that come out of the sessions, called wins, so they can gauge the effectiveness of the meetings.

Some recent “wins” generated from B2B meetings include a deal between Ford and Office Depot that has resulted in the auto manufacturer purchasing $1.5 million in office supplies from Office Depot and employees of the office supplier buying more than 100 Ford vehicles. M&M has saved 18 percent annually on office supplies since switching to Office Depot from another supplier.

Las Vegas was chosen as one of the sites for the B2B session in part because of feedback from the participants.

“We asked the sponsors and a lot of them wanted to come here,” Scott said.