Beyond the Brochure
Don't underestimate the importance of effective messages
The brochure has always been a mainstay in the salesperson’s collateral arsenal. Heavily used in the awareness phase of the buying cycle, brochures give prospects an introductory look at the company and its solutions. They contain all the appropriate buzz words and phrases customers are looking for when evaluating a solution. In short, they ensure the buyer that you are a viable company, you “get it,” and the product or solution meets their needs.
If brochures are the tools that help ensure you get in the game, what do you need to win it? In other words, what are some of the other tools salespeople can use to in the consideration and preference phases of the sales cycle to help close the deal? For answers, marketing and sales professionals need to look beyond the brochure—toward tools that offer more precise information and address specific needs/concerns.
In the consideration and preference phases, prospects are looking for differentiators—capabilities that set you apart from the competition. What does your company and solution offer that are both key requirements and unique? How do you communicate this functionality in a way that is mapped to the prospect's business goals?
Along with the more common white papers, ROI tools, and technical and solution briefs, we’ve seen a need for a more strategic document that speaks directly to your prospect’s business challenges and discusses a solution’s capabilities in that context. Whether they are called Buyers’ Guides or Solution Blueprints they are, in essence, customer-facing sales guides.
The customer-facing sales guide
These unique deliverables pick up where the brochure leaves off. While the language can be benefit-oriented, these pieces focus more closely on the solution’s functionality—and how that meets a prospect’s needs. Unlike a datasheet, the customer-facing sales guide boils down the key features a company should be looking for in a solution—based on industry analyst recommendations and other market indicators—and clearly states how this solution meets and exceeds those requirements.
They are ideal in competitive situations because they plainly state your solution's capabilities as it applies to your prospect's specific needs. For example, if an organization is investigating security solutions, it will be faced with several basic architectural options—including embedding security logic into application code, placing security agents on each Web server and leveraging a proxy server. Clearly, there are pros and cons to each scenario. The customer-facing sales guide enables you to discuss each option and ultimately demonstrate how—if a company fits a particular profile with specific goals—your approach is the right one.
In today’s highly competitive environment, your sales force needs more tools than ever to close a deal. The customer-facing sales guide picks up where brochures and datasheets leave off, giving your sales team a strategic, compelling piece that can help them move their customer through the sales cycle.
To learn more about how we can help you develop sales tools for all phases of the sales cycle, contact us at info@launchintl.com or call 215-230-4340.
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