A sales person needs to climb a series of consecutive steps in closing a corporate sale. Sufficient resources at his or her disposal are crucial to the sale. 



Sales collateral should not necessarily be produced by sales staff. The collateral material to be utilised by the sales person requires the input of writers and designers. It must be professional, impressive and most importantly relevant to the prospective client as well as to the product or service being sold.

In corporate sales, especially B2B sales, it would be inappropriate to leave a tacky pamphlet with your prospective client at the end of a presentation or even a casual meeting. The appropriate material to present in a situation like this is editorial content instead of advertising content. The sales person needs a business card, informative catalogues, demonstrational videos, impressive presentations; and this content is only meant for the presentation phase of the sale. You need a whole set of different collateral to get the sales person into the boardroom in the first place.

Here are a few great ideas for generating quantities of quality sales collateral.

Emails, eBooks, eNewsletters and Document Management

Produce pre-planned templates. Your templates can consist of electronic newsletters, eBooks and blog articles providing valuable information concerning the products and services on offer. You could also have response email templates presenting quotations and answers to frequently asked questions. If these pre-planned generic templates exist and are filed in an orderly manner (such as in an electronic document managing system - making them easily retrievable), then all that the sales person needs to do is pull the template, take a few minutes to personalise or customise the content and hit the send button. This will take the same amount of time that a lousy cold call would take, but different in the sense that a specific request or need is tended to timeously, efficiently and professionally.

Working with a pre-produced template system as “ammunition” for the sales person brings order and elegance to the sale.

Catalogues, Presentations, Videos & the Editorial Approach

Email templates, eBooks, electronic catalogues etc. is only one part of the necessary content. Once the sales person has made a large enough impression he or she will be invited to present a proposal or a presentation. This is the time to pull out the next level of sales collateral content. 

Editorial content beats advertising content in this phase. The prospects want coherent information from you. Proposals and presentations should also be previously produced, well-written and designed. They should showcase case studies, statistics, recorded customer testimonials, project portfolios, and product or service demonstrations.

Customise According to the Client & the Job

Important to note is that the pre-produced collateral content is not there to search, pull and send at random. Every template must first be customised according to the needs of the prospective client and the product or service of interest. 

For example, a firm of architects wishes to approach a client interested in building a series of 5 star hotels. There would be no point in, firstly, sending the client an eBook on paint techniques and secondly, sending a portfolio of the building of the local bus station that the architect firm was involved in. Both of these materials would have been useful if the client and the job had been different, but in this situation, to use these would be unprofessional. 

In Closing

Planning and implementing a collateral sales template strategy makes the sales process an elegant and orderly one. The process is painless for both parties and guarantees to be effective due to the planning that went into it and the pace at which content will be sent out.



Sound Idea Digital is a full service digital marketing agency. For more information contact 012 664 4227or email to info@soundidea.co.za

Carla van Straten is a Writer for Sound Idea Digital | Carla@soundidea.co.za | @SoundIdeaLMS | Sound Idea Digital l www.soundidea.co.za