Clicks 'n Conversions Blog

This article was first published  August 14, 2007 on the Tatum Marketing blog

I was on a tour of a new client’s office recently when Jacob, the company president, opened a door to a storage room piled nearly floor to ceiling with boxes and boxes of marketing collateral. There were presentation folders, product spec sheets, and a glossy corporate brochure.

“We spent thousands of dollars on this stuff, and here it sits,” Jacob said, his frustration apparent on his face. “And every one of our branch locations has their own stack of full boxes. What a waste. How do I stop it short of refusing to provide budgeting for sales materials?”

Fair question.

Money gets wasted on marketing collateral for two main reasons – one simple to fix and one not so simple. I’ll save the simple one for last.

The more complex and biggest cause of unnecessary, unused marketing collateral is a lack of understanding of the sales process and the buyer’s requirements on the part of marketing people.

When your sales people are face to face with a buyer, they’re talking about solutions to business problems not about product features and specs. And marketing departments, generally driven by product managers, are unfortunately prone to creating collateral that is nothing more than an extended list of features and maybe some product benefits.

At Jacob’s company we found 8 different, beautifully-produced single sheets each focusing on an individual product. Never did any of these printed pieces address who uses the product, how they use it, what problems they are solving with it. None of them contained value propositions that would be meaningful to the buyer. Nor did they tie the products together into an overall solution.

Now, I’m not saying that product features and functionality aren’t important to the buyers. At some point in the buying process, someone involved in the process does need that information. Usually though, in nearly every industry, they will go or send someone to your website to get it.

Here’s the thing.

If you create the wrong kind of collateral, your sales people won’t use it. Instead, they’ll spend valuable selling time recreating something they can use. And 9 times out of 10, it won’t be nearly as professional or clear or a persuasive as what could have come from the marketing team.

What’s more valuable?

Sales people need collateral materials that support their attempts to create value for the customer. They need solutions-based collateral. They need case studies, white papers, testimonials and articles that address real business issues and provide third-party validation. Sometimes they even need help figuring out what they need.

In my first meeting with Jacob’s marketing team, it quickly became obvious that the marketing people believed their responsibilities end with product development and lead generation. As the Director of Marketing told me “It’s up to the sales people to figure out how to sell it”.

Jacob and I think that’s wrong. Not that the sales team doesn’t have the ability to figure out these things. It’s more that we feel the sales team should be spending its time selling and not recreating collateral materials.

Boxes of unused collateral are a sure sign of a disconnect between marketing and sales. And it’s one that I can pretty much guarantee is costing you business.

If you’re the company leader, get your marketing and sales people together. If you’re a marketing person, go spend some time with sales. And if you’re a sales person, thank you for reading this, and go help marketing understand your needs.

Oh, and what is the easy way to reduce the amount of money getting wasted on collateral?

Don’t print so much. We’ve all been guilty of ordering more copies than we need just to get the unit cost down. But I’ve yet to run into a situation where ordering more copies actually costs less. If you only need 2500 pieces, that’s all you need. Ordering 5000 pieces, while it may seem efficient, isn’t going to make more people want your collateral.