Writing An Effective Sales Letter

Salespeople often take numerous courses on how to deal effectively with people and how to improve their sales techniques. Companies spend significant time and money on these aspects to increase the knowledge and skills of their salespeople. Consequently, their top salespeople are able to sell snow to an Eskimo when they talk to their customers.

The problem is that one important area is often overlooked - written communication!

Effective sales people also need to learn how to write properly and convincingly. Imagine how much business is lost when salespeople have poor writing skills. Trust me, you don’t want to know.

Now is the time to teach your employees all about effective sales writing. If you are a salesperson, you should register for some sales writing courses.

Analyze your audience. Know their desires and their motivations.

Before writing any sales letter, you need to analyze your audience. Obviously, you are going to include different information when you’re writing to the head of a company than you would if you are writing to a potential customer. Well, at least we certainly hope you would!

Once you know the age group, profession and educational background of your target audience, you can gear your written content towards them. Using an appropriate level in your letters and emails will go a long way to increasing your sales.

Explain the benefits of a product or service to your customers.

The bottom line is a customer wants to know “what’s in it for them” when they purchase a product or service. Most of them don’t care how the company is doing or how high sales have reached unless they’ve invested in the company.

Effective sales letter gets right to the point and explains how a product or service will benefit the customer. Instead of explaining the features of a product, explain how it will save the customer time or money or improve their safety.

Present any bad news first, followed by positive news.

Inevitably you will have to break bad news to a customer or client at some point in your sales career.

One way to make this much easier is to present the bad news first. Get this out of the way in the beginning, and then follow it with a positive comment. This will soften the blow and allow the reader to end on a positive, rather than negative note.

If you have to inform a client that their sales have fallen to a record low, try using the following:

“We regret to inform you that your sales have reached an all-time record low. On the positive side, they’ve dropped so low that they can’t possibly sink any further!”

Just think of how much happier your client will be when they read the good news.

Maintain an informal tone with customers.

You want to remain professional in all your written letter. However, you should maintain an informal tone when dealing with customers. Effective sales letter will convince your customers you are a friend and ally, not a shady conman!

This doesn’t mean you need to invite your clients over for dinner. It just means you should make them feel comfortable. Don’t include complicated technical terms and unnecessary jargon they won’t understand.

They’ll be more likely to purchase from a salesperson they feel comfortable with than one who intimidates them.

The bottom line is that sales letter is meant to do one thing—sell! So you need to learn how to write proper documents in order to increase your sales.

This article is about writing an effective sales letter. Click here to return to 'Written Communication'.