Developing a corporate partnerships programme for Royal College of Physicians
Who are RCP?
The Royal College of Physicians (RCP) is a global community, representing 37,000 doctors worldwide, committed to raising standards and supporting healthcare professionals throughout their careers.
The challenges
We were invited to work on a corporate sponsorship programme for RCP alongside our strategic partners, Create4 who were responsible for the programme strategically. This was a broad commercial endeavour with far-reaching potential but the initial focus was to have corporate partners support the RCP’s 500-year anniversary in 2018 and their landmark conference Innovation in Medicine 2018.
The college was seeking five headline sponsors plus other partnerships at varying support levels from organisations within the pharmaceutical, medical device, technology and digital health sectors. However, they had no contact information available and no internal resource to reach out to these markets.
Our solution
We were commissioned to research and build a database of qualified companies and to then identify the relevant budget holders and stakeholders.
We reached out by telephone and individual email to them to provide the prospectus which Create4 had developed. We followed up to schedule meetings and conference calls which the Create4 team attended to ‘sell’ partnership packages.
To give both our strategic partners and clients real-time information on the project, we designed a bespoke application in our QuickBase relationship management system. The application was used to manage the entire sales process end-to-end, so that the Create4 team were able to enter their follow-up meetings, calls and deals and to forecast revenues. We created bespoke reporting for Create4 so that they could provide the RCP stakeholders with real-time updates and forecasting. They were also able to append reports, proposals and contracts within the app so that the entire pipeline was managed in one place, providing a single customer view.
The results
Our database consisted of 3,600 contacts within approximately 1000 companies. Each company was tagged with data regarding their market sector, membership of their industry body, participation in other key medical conferences and other relevant market intelligence we were able to amass.
Over a period of six months we booked more than 100 meetings, which generated 81 deals and helped exceed the campaign revenue target by 1000%. The Royal College of Physicians was able to secure the sponsorships needed to support their 500-year anniversary and landmark conference in 2018, and established key partnerships for future endeavours.