Sales Collateral
Turn your sales collateral into powerful tools to drive growth.
Sales collateral, in any format: digital downloads, PowerPoints, video, or print, is valuable content specifically designed to support your sales team and process, by offering your prospects the right information at the right time.
Effective Sales Collateral
Effective sales collateral tells your brand’s story and reinforces the value your business provides. It supports your team throughout the buyer’s journey, providing answers to your audience’s questions and paints a picture of expectations.
The format of your sales collateral: whether print, digital, video is entirely dependent upon where and how your buyer will ‘consume’ the content. The length or depth and breadth of content on your solutions will vary as well, depending on the topic, but well designed collateral will always take into account where the prospective buyer is in their journey from awareness to decision.
Right Information + Right Time
The buyer’s journey is now almost entirely self-guided. Gartner research tells us a potential buyer will likely spend less than 17% of their time actually meeting with a potential supplier, and it’s much less, only about 5-6%, when a buyer is comparing multiple supplier options.
So how do you get the RIGHT INFORMATION into the hands of your prospective buyer at the RIGHT TIME in order to even be considered and make it to the final consideration?
Case Studies
Case studies allow your audience to see how their problems and needs might be solved by your company’s products or services. More importantly, they allow your buyer to see that others have made the successful decision to choose your solutions. No one wants to make a bad decision - and understanding how others in your buyer’s industry met their challenges - can go a long way toward reaffirming their decision to choose your solution.
Long form case studies, like this one for ACE METAL CRAFTS, are great at telling detailed stories of how your firm was able to identify and solve a problem.
Done well, highly technical data can be transformed into an easy to understand showcase of your firm’s products and services, including a quick case study on how a client’s Clutch-Brake retrofit solution turned an obsolete piece of machinery into an asset ready to produce for the next 50 years (see example).
Case studies can be repurposed as different content within the buyer’s journey, with particular emphasis on visuals that will tell the story, such as this one for a manufacturer of plastics product and molding.
Brief BEFORE and AFTER snippets of a project’s success can support your overall message of competence and expertise in your line of work, such as this example of Effective Sales Collateral produced for a manufacturing firm.
Example:
Modular Sell Sheets with facts and supporting data
Very often, the process of creating sales collateral can help the sales and marketing teams align their thinking. Phoenix Modular Elevators sells a seemingly simple-to-understand product, elevators, until you realize their product is a revolutionary method of construction.
The Phoenix team knew their technology and methods were superior to traditional ‘stick built’ elevators. But being ‘revolutionary’ isn’t always a good thing, as most people shy away from being ‘pioneers’ who may fail with the product.
Working to identify the specific influencers and markets to address - our team created a combined modular brochure, which speaks to the unique needs and concerns of Architects, Elevator Contractors and General Contractors and can be used in a variety of channels.
Examples:
Presentations designed to speak to a specific audience
Taking the time to create sales collateral - sell sheets and presentations - with images and messaging that allows the prospective buyer to envision themselves using your product is key.
A distributor of high end testing equipment had created a virtual ‘lock’ in the oil, gas and petroleum industries. Their machines and consumables were used around the world. Their website and sales collateral all reflected this to good effect.
The same equipment could be used in the lucrative and fast-growing markets of Flavors for Food and Fragrances. Flavor and Fragrance marketing requires a decidedly different look and message than big oil. Working with the Ayalytical sales team, we researched the industries and created targeted collateral.
Example:
Blog Posts
Demonstrating your expertise in your field is a crucial part of developing strong relationships with your clients. It’s important for your audience to know that you are well-versed in your line of work, and a great way to prove this is by regularly writing and publishing blogs for your website. Not only can blogs showcase your industry expertise, but they also indicate that you care about being an asset to your clients – not just closing a sale.
Traditional Sales Collateral
Concrete, tangible sales material is just as valuable as your virtual resources. There is something about being able to physically flip through a sell sheet, read a pitch deck, or comb through a brochure that does, and always will, appeal to consumers. Manufacturing and industrial businesses often have long lists of products, machinery, and services that can be difficult to digest without the help of sales collateral, and oftentimes, following through with a purchase can be a big commitment. Our team caters to your specific needs to provide you with the kind of marketing tools that are right for your business and your business only. We provide custom brochures, sell sheets, tour maps, problem-solving Powerpoints, and even “15-Minute-Pitch” talking points to help you better serve your clients.