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Bad sales skills die slowly don’t they? One of my poor sales skills when I was younger was to shotgun my prospects and customers with sales and marketing brochures by snail-mail and E-mail. Want to know something I always knew but never admitted to myself? All of that activity never helped my sales one bit.

“…reminds me of the guy I know who hasn’t exercised in thirty years but wears the best looking and most expensive pair of Nikes on the planet.”

Why don’t brochures work?
They don’t work because we have two primary considerations when it comes to the most effective ways of selling: relationship and information. We need to create a partnership with our customers and accumulate as much data as possible about them in the process. How does a printed piece of marketing collateral or a beautifully crafted PDF file E-mailed to a decision maker help us in either of those two areas? We’ll get plenty of people doling out sales tips and sales advice in our careers about why we should launch an avalanche of marketing materials. They’re not providing good sales help.

Marketing Brochure Cleanliness is Next to Godliness
Snail-mailed collateral is thrown away and buyers delete E-mailed marketing propaganda if it isn’t caught by the company’s spam filter first. Consider for a moment how little marketing material actually hits the eyes of a decision maker. Virtually zero percent. Our customers treat this stuff like Anthrax. Besides, if customers want information guess where they look first? Your web site.

Why do we keep doing it?
We keep sending out a tsunami of sales brochures because it’s something we’re supposed to do and it makes us feel good. At least we’re doing something. It reminds me of the guy I know who hasn’t exercised in thirty years but wears the best looking and most expensive pair of Nikes on the planet. It somehow makes him feel like he’s doing a positive thing regarding his health.

So doctor, what is your sales advice?
Stop wasting time on ineffective sales materials and focus on what makes a difference. The difference is all the activities involved with relationship building and being a student of our prospects and customers. That’s the best sales tip I can give you when it comes to collateral material.

Related information: Collateral Materials, Sales Brochures, What a waste!, A #1 Proposal Tip

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Tags: collateral

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