Team Penske has been holding annual summits for more than a decade with its sponsors, updating them on the team and discussing marketing and business-to-business opportunities.
Last week, the racing organization held the first of a new kind of summit, bringing together executives who don’t typically interact with their company’s motorsports program.
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Buyers and sellers sit down for speed networking at Team Penske’s event.
Photo by: NIGEL KINRADE PHOTOGRAPHY
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The event, held in and around Team Penske’s headquarters in Mooresville, N.C., was part of a new strategy to work across sponsors’ corporate structures so that executives in verticals such as purchasing/supply chain, IT, human resources and legal get involved with the sponsorship, too. Team Penske plans to make the summit an annual part of its schedule.
About 100 people attended this year’s event, representing 30 team sponsors and five prospective partners. Roughly half of the people in attendance hadn’t interacted with Team Penske before.
“One of the things we really want to do is broaden the relationships we have across companies and look at, ‘How can we add value to their HR divisions, benefits, sourcing, purchasing, IT, technology?’” said Jonathan Gibson, vice president of marketing and communications for Team Penske, which has been planning the event for a year and a half. “When you think about how sports sponsorships are evaluated, the marketing decision-maker is just one component of it, so we want to make sure that as they’re looking at our relationship, they’re thinking about the total value we add to their company.”
Last week’s inaugural event, organized by sourcing-executive network company Sig, brought together purchasing, sourcing and supply-chain executives, mindful that it is these executives and not marketers who decide the products that a company buys and sells.
Activities during the two-day event included motivational speeches and, on the first night, go-karting. But the highlight was a speed networking session that saw sell-side executives move from table to table to meet with purchasing executives. If the two sides agreed to a further meeting, a bell was rung to signify the new connection — and the sides received prizes like gift cards from Shell and AAA, both of whom are Team Penske partners.
“It was nice to see the next step in B2B,” said Heidi Massey-Bong, senior business adviser of NASCAR sponsorship for Shell, who noted the company found multiple potential future business relationships during the speed networking session. “To be able to bring our procurement people to the table, now you’re putting the buyers right next to each other. Now you have expedited this process.”
Gibson said the idea was a natural next step for Team Penske, which he added typically brokers nine figures’ worth of business-to-business deals annually and whose founder, Roger Penske, is regarded as a — if not the — pioneer in the motorsports/B2B space.
Gibson said Penske will look in the coming years to switch up the vertical it features for this symposium, with the next likely candidates being IT and HR. He declined to disclose the cost to produce this year’s event.
Bud Denker, executive vice president of Penske Corp., attended the event and said he encountered hesitance from some executives who typically aren’t involved in marketing and wondered why they would need to touch their company’s motorsports program. But as numerous bells rang before him, signifying additional meetings that were being set up, he smiled.
“I think you saw some apprehension with people coming here, saying, ‘How do I add value to this equation?’” Denker said. “And now you see it in action and say, ‘I get it now. I understand what the marketing guy has been telling me.’”
