241: Bringing More Marketing Into Sales Calls

<p>Salespeople have sales tools which often are not thoroughly thought through enough.  These can be flyers, catalogues, slide decks, etc.  They can also be proposals, quotations and invoices.  Usually the salespeople are given the tools as they are and either don’t ask for improvements or don’t believe the marketing department has much interest in their ideas about the dark art of marketing.  Consequently, there are some areas for improvement which go begging.</p> <p> </p> <p>Flyers, catalogues and slide decks tend to be very evenly arranged.  Every page is basically presented in the same way.  Yet, as salespeople we know that there are going to be certain products which are more popular than others.  These items and corresponding pages should be up the front.  It might mean breaking away from the sectional approach, of all the bits and bobs being collected together in their respective places, separate and cordoned off. </p> <p> </p> <p>Also, on important pages of these most important products or services, there are bound to be key words or key paragraphs that, over time, we have learnt are of the most relevancy to our clients.  There will also be key data tables, diagrams or photos which should be drawn to the buyer’s attention.  Why don’t we have marketing do something with this information.  Maybe make the font larger, or add bold or highlight using colour.  This is only a matter of adjusting the layout of the page and getting the next round of printing or soft copy to reflect these updates.</p> <p> </p> <p>Generally speaking, we don’t want to be handing our materials over to the client, in the first instance.  We want to spin the item around, so that they can easily read it. With our nice pen we draw their attention to the areas we want them to see.  Not everything on that page has equal value.  Some sections will be more important than others.  They can read the whole thing later at their leisure, but while we are there with them, we want to go through the content  and determine what they need to focus on.