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Conveying trust in your sales material is key to building long-lasting relationships. Therefore, I would say it is essential to be authentic and communicate your values. Many of the sales proposals I have seen conventionally focus heavily on the ‘features and benefits’, but I believe that building trust is now more critical than ever.

Directly address the main pain points and challenges your target customers face and demonstrate empathy and understanding. Follow this with how your product / service can relieve those pain points and include real life examples of how you have done it for others. Customers want a sales narrative they can relate to, where they can recognise their own situation and see an obvious solution.

For a technology company creating sales material, it is very easy to fall into a trap of getting very technical on the audience explaining lots of features. In our experience sales material should contain information of business benefits, improvements and any added value that your products / solution provide. Customers are interested in reducing risk and cost, but improving service level agreements and offerings. Material should include examples of a companies design, deployment and support methodology with examples of cost saving
and improvements made by other similar customers. The material needs to be concise, showing example analytics . One certainty is change will happen, embracing change and becoming agile to lead we give competitive advantage. Demonstrating how this can achieved is more important than a technical features white paper.

Authenticity. Without question. When you engage with a customer or a potential customer, all of your marketing efforts, interactions (In person, online, products, recommendations, reviews etc) all say something about your organisation and set an expectation. Customers buy when their expectations are met. And they stop buying or decide not to buy if their expectations are not met.

Authenticity is the matching of expectations with reality. Authentic experiences build trust. Trust builds empathy and engagement. And these things generate referrals and repeat business. Some organisations spend $m’s on trying to overdo the “customer experience” yet it is totally wasted because all they are trying to do is make up for expectations not being met and lack of authenticity.

Keep it simple. Be authentic.

All too often we shape our customers around our own business processes rather than the customers. How many times have you stayed at a hotel, where you have to interact with many different systems. At each stage, you are forced to reenter the same information, and all because internally the hotel has systems that aren’t integrated. If I have one piece of wisdom, it would be to start treating your customers as respected individuals and modify your processes and software to support this.
As Ray Kroc once famously said, Look after your customers and the business will look after itself (Ray Kroc, McDonalds).

Be the business you want to be from day one. Not the business you are at day one. Even if it is only you. Have structure, minute your management team meetings, have a colour scheme, agreed font, standard templates for quotes, naming conventions, ppt templates, board meetings, etc. If you want to compete in the open market with the best, you need every advantage. Stay nimble, flexible, fast moving, all USP s you can have, but where you can look and feel the same, both externally and internally, do so.

How is your content going to help the customer? Put yourself in your customers shoes and when you read the story that your sales material describes does it answer the question “what’s in it for me?” Does it explain how your product or service is going to help, benefit, or solve the needs of your customers? Can they save money by buying today? Will they look healthier because of your workout? When there is a clear answer to Whats in it for me? you’re good to go.

Sales material that makes an impact always includes 3rd party endorsements. Having other people saying your the best has a much bigger impact than simply saying it about yourself.

Everything you do must inspire action in the people who matter most, and when it comes to sales material the only people that matter are your customers and prospects.

Your sales collateral should communicate who you are, what you do, and how you can help. But more importantly “WHY” the prospect or customer should get in touch. What’s in it for them? How will it be of benefit? And what will they gain?

If you can make the “WHY” clear, you’ll stand out from the crowd and consequently get more enquiries. There are lots of brands out there telling WHAT they do, but very few tell you “WHY” they do it.

There are many important messages to communicate in sales material, but if I were to pin point a single one it would be to communicate the why/how your products or services will add to value to the purchaser.