Collateral Impact: How to Design Successful Sell Sheets
Are you forgetting something? With so much time and effort going into a sales presentation, there’s a crucial piece of the sales funnel that’s easy to overlook: the sell sheet leave-behind. Without sales collateral, all of that preparation goes to waste when your prospect has nothing to remember you by. Before your next big opportunity, make the most of your sales strategy with sales collateral that makes an impact.
What Should You Consider When Creating a Sell Sheet?
Business collateral is by no means a one size fits all scenario. It is always helpful to have a general piece of collateral that gives a nice overview of the products and/or services you offer. However, having an arsenal of product/service-specific sell sheets is perfect for tailoring a meeting to the prospect. With both general overview and product/service-specific sales collateral, include the aspects that make your company unique.
With sells sheets and sales collateral, printing more isn’t always better. Ordering too many right off the bat can result in a whole lot of wasted materials because of how frequently sales collateral needs to be updated with new products, services, and current images. Starting off with a more conservative quantity also gives your business greater flexibility in testing and measuring what messaging/imagery/content is the most effective.
The visual design of the piece is also an important factor when creating successful sell sheets. As a general rule, cluttered, confusing, or boring pieces get thrown away. Concise, visually compelling sales collateral highlights the most compelling information, including what your business is about, what you have to offer, and how to contact you. While you want to provide the information your prospect needs, too many details can distract from what’s important and can confuse or overwhelm your prospect.
Your Sell Sheets Should Be Versatile
However, versatile doesn’t mean universal. Every business has its own unique target market, and what works for one business won’t necessarily work for yours. As marketers, we encourage businesses to create buyer personas to fully flesh out the kinds of messaging and design that will best connect with their ideal customer. This can help expedite the process of designing sales collateral, while also improving your chances of making a successful marketing investment.
Having a few different sell sheet options tailored to specific types of prospects also helps ensure that your business is able to connect with them in the most relevant way. Specific prospects will have their own preferences in how they communicate and receive information. Having varied sales collateral helps to accommodate those preferences. For example, some individuals will respond better to charts and infographics, while others will appreciate bullet point lists or fact sheets. Your sales collateral should reflect what each of your buyer personas wants to see.
In addition to crafting visuals that sync up with your buyer personas, sell sheets should also target different customer needs and steps in the sales funnel. By having a variety of pieces on-hand, you can meet your customers where they’re at with the exact information they’re looking for. Some sales collateral can provide a general outline of your business, while other pieces can address common concerns or objections. If your business has a wide range of products and services, having specific sell sheets that describe them in detail is also a major benefit.
For more tips on designing sell sheets and other sales collateral, connect with a 360 Direct Marketing team member here.
Marketing Importance: Holding A Business Together
Marketing is about helping you at the steps along the way. I believe in the value of marketing at the steps along the way, not the bottom line. Marketing helps with identifying and bringing in more qualified leads and increasing search rankings. Most businesses do struggle to create effective marketing campaigns because it can be difficult to know how to bring in more customers and how to increase sales, but that’s why SEO NZ companies are available to help enhance business marketing techniques. This should allow more companies to experience successful businesses with more leads and sales.
Marketing can also help to figure out how to increase sales conversion rates, helps guide customer service processes, creates perceptions in the marketplace, etc. Marketing is the connection between all departments of business, and the opportunity to get all areas of the business working as a cohesive whole. For instance, engineers need feedback on what consumers really need, finance needs feedback on which levers need adjustment for more profit, consumers need to understand that you’re delivering on a need, etc.
Many people don’t necessarily understand the full importance of marketing. Marketing is not only about helping you develop and promote a product or service, but it can also help bring all other aspects of the business together. The primary functions of Marketing are to help with identifying and bringing in more qualified leads, helping to figure out how to increase sales conversion rates, helping to guide customer service processes, creating perceptions in the marketplace, as well as much more. On top of this, however, marketing can also act as the glue that holds other functional areas of the business together. For example by providing the engineers with appropriate customer feedback the marketing team relay important information about what specifics need changing on the product. Using a customer feedback tool like Upvoty, (a Canny.io alternative) can help businesses know what their customers want and need, which can better help the development of their business. This increases both productivity and customer satisfaction. Another example of the marketing team affecting other areas of business is by giving demographic information to the sales team. The sales team is much more likely to be able to sell a product or service once the marketing team has presented research to them on the target market; age, gender, location, etc. Once this information has been presented the sales team can pinpoint certain targets that have a high probability of buying, this is another example of improved productivity. Customer feedback should be at the top of all business lists if they want to keep their company going. Businesses can always use VoC software (voice of customer) to help them pinpoint just what their customer wants and needs are.
Overall while marketing is already viewed as an important facet of any growing or established business its reach extends much further than just the apparent benefits. Without the other functioning areas of the business, there would be no need for a marketing company however without the marketing team, providing all the information they do, the other areas of business would find their work much more difficult. In conclusion; teamwork makes the dream work.