Where Is the Brand You're Pitching Currently Losing Money?

Sit with that question for a second.

Not where they could make more money. Not where they could get more eyes on their product. Where are they bleeding money right now?

Most creators never ask that. They pitch awareness. They pitch repurposing. They pitch conversions. And every brand on earth has heard all three of those pitches 10,000 times.

There's a different pitch almost nobody tries. And once you understand it, you're going to look at every brand you want to work with completely differently.

It's called churn.

The ARC Framework Has a Blind Spot

If you've read Sponsor Magnet, you know I teach that every brand has three main goals when they work with partners. It's my ARC framework — Awareness, Repurposing, Conversion.

But here's the nuance I don't think I've ever fully broken down for you.

Inside that conversion bucket, there are actually two distinct types. There's new customer acquisition — that's the one everybody thinks of when they hear "conversion." And then there's retention: keeping the customers the brand already has.

Same bucket. Completely different pitch. Completely different budget, most of the time.

Every day, brand partnership managers get pitched the same three ways. I can drive awareness for you. I can create UGC for you to repurpose. I can generate new sales for you. That's it. That's basically every email landing in their inbox.

Those aren't bad pitches. But when everybody's pitching the same three things, you're not standing out. You're just standing in line.

What would you do if you were the person on the other side of that inbox, reading those same three pitches 50 times a week? You'd probably stop reading carefully. You'd start skimming. You'd start deleting.

So if you want a brand to actually stop and read your pitch, you need to be talking about something they're not used to hearing from a creator. Not a fourth separate goal — the piece hiding inside a goal they already have.

That's where churn comes in.

What Churn Actually Costs a Brand

Let's make this dead simple. Churn is the percentage of customers a company loses over a given period, usually measured monthly or annually. Subscription business, software company, membership site — doesn't matter the category. They track this number obsessively because it's one of the scariest numbers in their entire business.

Say a brand has 10,000 paying customers. Sounds great, right? Big number.

Except every month, some percentage of those customers cancel. Even a "healthy" churn rate — something like 3%, which a lot of brands consider totally normal — means 300 people are walking out the door every single month.

There it is. 300 people gone, every month, on repeat.

So what does the brand do? They spend more on ads. They hire more salespeople. They throw more fuel on the acquisition fire just to replace the customers leaking out the back.

And here's the part that should make the hair on your arm stand up: a chunk of those existing customers might already follow you.

Your Audience Isn't Just a Pipeline — It's Already Their Customer Base

Here's the mindset shift I need you to make.

You've probably been thinking about your audience as a pipeline for new customers for the brand. Cool. That's the acquisition pitch. Everyone does that.

But what if your audience isn't just a source of new customers? What if your audience is also a chunk of the brand's existing customers — the ones they're terrified of losing?

If you have any audience overlap with an established brand, some percentage of the people watching or following you right now are already paying that brand money. And the brand has zero visibility into the fact that you — someone their customers already trust and listen to — could help them keep those people around longer.

A Word From Our Sponsor: Lulu

Real quick, here's a wild stat for you. Nearly 80% of the people who hop on a sales call with my team about joining Wizard's Guild found me through my book. Not a YouTube video, not a podcast episode — a book.

That's exactly why I'm pumped to be partnering with Lulu, because Lulu is literally how I published Sponsor Magnet and got it into the hands of the creators who eventually became my best clients.

Here's the thing about a book that no other piece of content can replicate: it builds trust at a completely different level. Someone who finishes your book doesn't just know you, they believe in you. And when they're ready to invest in themselves, you're the first person they think of.

Lulu makes it stupidly simple to publish your own print-on-demand book. No gatekeepers, no algorithms deciding your worth, no upfront inventory costs. You keep 100% of the profits. You retain your customer data. And you get free ISBNs with zero upload or revision fees.

Whether you want to sell through your own site with their Shopify, Wix, or WooCommerce plugins, or tap into their global print network to ship worldwide, Lulu handles the logistics while you focus on the creative stuff. Go to creatorwizard.com/lu. If you've been sitting on a book idea, stop waiting. Your book might just be the thing that changes everything.

What the Retention Pitch Actually Sounds Like

Okay, back to churn.

You could say something like: "Since some of your existing customers already follow me, I'd love to create a campaign that helps them use the product more effectively and gives them another reason to renew."

Here's why this lands so much harder than the standard pitch. Every brand knows deep in their bones that acquiring a new customer costs way more than keeping an existing one. That's not opinion — that's just how the math works in basically every industry. Ad costs keep climbing. Sales headcount is expensive. Every new customer they buy through advertising costs real dollars.

So when you show up and say, "I can help you keep the customers you already paid to acquire," you're speaking directly to the part of the business that keeps executives up at night. You're not asking them to spend more to get more. You're asking them to protect what they already have.

Here's the thing that makes this even more interesting: the person who owns acquisition and the person who owns retention inside a company are often two totally different people with two totally different budgets. If you've only ever pitched the awareness angle, you've only ever talked to one of those budgets. There's usually an entirely separate pool of money sitting with whoever owns retention or life cycle marketing or customer success — and that person almost never gets pitched by creators at all.

What would you do with access to a budget that nobody else is asking for?

Proof This Actually Works

I'm not just theorizing here. I had a live pitch call with Haley from Kit, my email marketing tool, and she said something that really stuck with me. She flat out told me that retention is one of the biggest reasons she can get budget approval for a sponsorship in the first place — if she knows a big percentage of Kit's existing customers are going to be in the room, watching, or listening, especially if she can get face time with them, that's a much easier case for her to make internally.

How to Find This For Any Brand

By now you're probably wondering how to find this for a specific brand you want to work with. Three places to dig:

Job descriptions. Search a brand's open roles for titles like retention marketing, life cycle marketing, or customer success. If they're hiring for that, retention is probably a priority with real budget behind it.

Earnings calls and press releases. If it's a public company, churn and retention numbers get talked about constantly in investor communications. That's a gold mine of exactly what they're worried about, in their own words.

Your own audience. Survey them. If you already know a meaningful chunk of your audience uses a certain product, that's your proof. That's the receipt you bring to the pitch.

Screw what's normal. Strive to be abnormal. While everyone else is fighting over the same three pitches in a crowded inbox, you could be the only creator talking about the number that actually keeps their marketing team up at night.

So — where is the brand you want to work with bleeding customers right now, and what's stopping you from bringing them the fix?

If this got your mind racing about how to actually pitch this to your existing sponsors, apply for a free sponsorship strategy session with my team at Wizard's Guild. We'll dig into how this applies to your specific creator business.

And if you want the full playbook on landing and growing sponsorships, grab a copy of Sponsor Magnet — it's everything I've learned from 550+ deals and $5M+ in sponsorship revenue.