Marketing Manager + Sales Manager = Increased Profits - By Bob Etherington Sales Trainer

As a marketing manager, you may wonder, why the stationery cupboards are full of unused brochures, there is something you need to know. The potential customers out there are not interested in much of what they contain. For that reason sales teams do not want to use them.

Here are two key reasons why:

1. Marketing Material Doesn’t Sell

The only reason anybody wants to buy your product is to solve a problem. Unless your brochure and website talks about the problem and how your product provides a solution to the problem it is practically useless as a sales aid.

What your product or service ‘is’ (described in terms of its raw facts and features) is of little or no interest to anyone outside your company. Never assume your customers will make the link between your product’s features and their problems, they never do.

We all know that the MD, Technical Director and other senior managers all admire the look and feel of all the glossy stuff – their own mugshots included – plus all the self preening about your company, but your customers could not care less. So stop looking inwards and start selling outwards

2. People Like To Be Personally Addressed

Stop writing copy about somebody else and start addressing the reader directly. If the sentences and paragraphs in your marketing material contain phrases such as “customers will discover” or “many people find that”, or “we are delighted to announce” you will never engage the reader.

People (your potential customers) are not interested in ‘those people over there’ that you appear to be referring to and they are certainly not interested in your corporate ‘delight’ in your new announcements.

Simply put, the words, ‘I’ ‘we’ ‘our’ ‘they’ ‘their’ are the least persuasive words in the world. Put them in your copy and hear the sound of glossy brochures hitting trash can.
 

The most persuasive intriguing and engaging words in the world are ‘you’ and ‘your’.

Rewrite the brochures and marketing materials in the two steps above and I promise you your sales force will start to love you for the very first time.

Bob Etherington
http://www.bobetheringtongroup.com