Aside from ecommerce marketing, marketing can show its greatest value when it directly supports your sales efforts. The key to supporting sales efforts is outrageous sales collateral.
Here are two tips for giving your sales collateral that special, memorable something.
1.) Make Your Sales Brochure Enormous
Picture yourself arriving at the office of your ideal buyer attempting to secure a few minutes of the decision-maker’s time to hear your proposal. It can be as daunting as it is pride-swallowing. Even if your marketing activities have identified them as an interested and highly qualified buyer, you must still get past the gatekeepers.
The challenge here for marketing is to support your sales efforts without even being there. The idea is for a giant, over-sized sales brochure. This 13"x19" to 24"x36" front and back brochure will be printed in brilliant color and mounted on equal-sized foam board.
I realize it's a little hard to picture yourself walking into that same office with an over-sized brochure under your arm, but consider the advantages:
- It’s attention grabbing.
- The whole office will wonder, "what is that?" and "Where did it come from?"
- Who wouldn’t want to read what someone printed on a giant board?
- Intrigue is a powerful sales tactic
- It’s impossible to crumple up and throw away.
- It’s sized intentionally not to fit in a trash bin
- It's memorable.
- Who can forget the salesperson who showed up with that giant brochure?
Let your marketing use a little creativity to set your sales collateral apart from the ordinary and you will invariably set your company apart from the ordinary as well.
2.) Crumpled-up Your Sales Pamphlet (so the prospect won't do it for you)
In our last tip, we discussed setting your sales collateral apart from the ordinary by developing enormously over-sized sales brochures. Here's another, slightly more portable, way to make your sales collateral outrageous that's sure to leave a lasting impression with sales prospects.
After you hand your prospective buyer your sales pamphlets and have left the room, most people just crumple it up and throw it away.
Fact is, no one likes to be sold, but what can marketing do to support your sales efforts without making people feel like they are being sold. What if I told you that you should crumple up your sales pamphlets for them?
Your sales pamphlets should be printed, crumpled by hand, and have a special business card printed and rubber banded to the crumpled up mess. The special business card will quickly and clearly explain that your company wanted to save them time and effort by taking the liberty to crumple up the sales pamphlet for them. It will also provide them an incentive to un-crumple the pamphlet with a cleaver sub-headline like: "If you would prefer not to through away any more money, flatten me out and receive $50 off your first purchase."
The crumpled-up sales brochure has a few advantages over the traditional folding sales pamphlet.
- It's creative, different and memorable.
- It's interactive.
- It's more portable than the "Over-Sized Brochure"
- It's easy and cheap to produce with little more than a desktop printer and a helping hand.
The Crumpled-up Pamphlet and the Over-Sized Brochure are both just creative ways to let your marketing set your sales collateral apart from the ordinary and you will invariably set your company apart from the ordinary as well.
Both of these tips are ways to create attention-getting and memorable sales collatoral. The design, production and effective use of these tactics can be a little tricky, but that's where Justin Downey Marketing comes in.
