Hot Topic: Spotcheck - does your gun fire blanks?

Before you have a chance to deliver your sales pitch, your prospective customer is likely to have looked at your company website -will he find that the sales and marketing collateral scheme you designed several years ago is still relevant? This is one of the key weapons in your sales and marketing arsenal and is often the most neglected. It's not surprising that this should be the case. Once the production mechanism has been established, it's left pretty much alone for years. Here are four good reasons for dusting it off and taking a fresh look at it:

1. there's a new person in the job
2. the business has devised a new strategy (or sometimes one has been imposed)
3. the company that produces your collateral has become careless (perhaps because the process is not scrutinised)
4. marketing communications is centralised and the local budget needs to be trimmed

I'm sure you all know the "in-tray exercise" where you divide all your tasks into piles that are either urgent or important. Collateral is one of those tasks that always make it to the important pile but seldom rises to the top of the urgent pile. By the way, the usual outcome of the exercise is to realise that you spend most of your time doing work that is urgent but not important! OK, so we all accept that collateral is important, since there is absolutely no point in putting the sales team into the field, properly armed, but with the wrong kind of ammunition.

At Cambashi, we believe that more than 3 years between strategic reviews of a key marketing process is far too long. We know that the markets and our customers' value indicators change much more frequently. The sales team, and the climate they sell in, should be the drivers. Many experts have written on the subject of collateral and most sales and marketing managers and practitioners can point to their preferred pundit. The problem is that, once established, the collateral production process is seldom critically reviewed.

There are various categories of collateral, e.g.product data sheets; company profiles, position statements, thought leadership white papers, etc. The advent of the web has changed the relative importance of these different categories. Some may no longer be relevant. However, customer success stories remain one of the most valuable collateral types. They can be handed around by our friends in the prospect company to members of the decision making group that we can't even get to visit our website, let alone us.

Although some companies do this extremely well, and consistently, for others it remains a continuing challenge. Our research for the last 20 years confirms that what people value most is the insight that is provided by reading and learning about the experiences of other people who have faced the same challenge.

We've put together a simple self-assessment checklist with a scorecard and explanatory notes which you can print off our website.

There are a number of ways that you can use this. Of course, if you would really like to do some benchmarking against your peers, then please contact me. However, you can also print it off and do the exercise off line. If you have strong nerves, you could wait for the next sales meeting, ask your sales team to complete it, and then invite your marketing manager along to hear their views!

Bob Brown

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Also in this issue . . . .

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