Be Ready: Stand Out with Better Collateral

The biggest gift any salesperson could ever ask for is a prospect asking for more information. That’s your perfect opportunity to give a tailored pitch to an interested audience. But one of the most common mistakes across all sales organizations is not having quality materials prepared.

A prospect asking for more information is your opportunity to lose. Being unprepared is just letting deals fall through your fingertips. This may seem basic, but go back and look through your own sales collateral: do you have quality, materials prepared for every key persona and industry?

Next, are those materials eye-catching? Do they stand out from what your competitors are handing out? Are they in multiple forms of media, or are they all the same one-pagers with infographics?

Until you have confident answers to each one of those questions, you’re leaving money on the table. These are the fundamental requirements of any effective go-to-market engine, any success you’ve had without them has been a struggle against a significant handicap.

Be Specific

You need specific sales materials for every persona you sell to. From C-level executives to procurement directors, you need collateral that appeals to the specific needs of each person’s role. You also need industry-specific pitches, especially if what you offer has distinct applications or specializations.

First, you need a strong pitch to CXOs. These senior executives care about the broad vision of how your offer will affect their bottom line and grow the business in the long term. That’s different than what your pitch to the people heading the departments that will use your product, the head of procurement, and any individual contributor-level people should be.

You also need individualized pitches for different industries. Whether you offer a particular product or a suite of services, your pitch is going to vary depending on the industry your prospect is in. The metrics you hope to impact, industry-specific jargon, and even the format of materials should change depending on the norms of the industry you’re pitching to.

Multimedia Collateral

When a CEO is clicking between your collateral and your competitors, what’s going to make yours stand out? Are you handing potential buyers forgettable one-pagers with with the same art style as everyone else, or are you shaking things up with multimedia collateral?
The best way to stand out is to offer a variety of high-quality sales materials to prospects asking for more information. That way, they can choose the format-video, audio, text, or visual–that appeals best to them.

By appealing to different learning styles, you increase the chances that someone will actually retain the information you’re trying to communicate. You’re also more likely to keep your audience’s attention by giving them a variety of content to consume. Videos, one-pagers, graphs and charts, and podcasts are all great mediums for capitalizing appealing to different learning styles.

Your multimedia collateral should also be up-to-date, both in medium and in content. Of course you should have materials that discuss new products and features as they’re released, but it’s also important to keep up with popular trends. For example, as podcasts grew more popular, it became more common for companies to put sales and marketing materials in an audio format.

What are you doing to make sure your sales collateral helps you stand head and shoulders above the competition? Reach out with some of your own success stories of sales collateral that worked.