Sales Collateral

3 min readOct 15, 2017

Think about the last time you purchased something that you weren’t positive about. Maybe the price felt too high for what you were getting. Or maybe the price felt fair, but you weren’t sure you should be spending your hard earned money on it.

Retail buyers feel this exact way when they roll the dice on a new product. They feel anxious, nervous, even fearful about betting on the wrong horse. It’s called fear of buyer’s remorse.

Retail is risky business with high overheads, not for the faint of heart.

Of course, buyers want to buy. It’s their job. They need to stock their shelves with products that will sell, so that they can make money and keep their doors open.

But no one wants to feel like they were suckered by a salesperson.

Buyers need some persuasion to get over that fear of buyer’s remorse. They need to believe that your product will sell quickly at a price that covers the margin that they need to keep their doors open. When they take your product on, not only are they tying up cash that they could be spending on other products, they’re also giving you shelf space that they could be giving to more tried and true products.

This is where sales materials come in.

To successfully sell your product into stores — both new and existing — you need all your pistons firing in harmony. Your product must be consistently perfect, your packaging must appeal directly to your target customer, your pricing must be in line with the market, your social media must be building buzz around your brand, and you, the sales rep, must have a polished set sales materials at the ready for kicking down doors and closing deals.

Your sales materials should be created with the same care and attention to detail that you put into all aspects of your business. If they’re shoddy and unprofessional, the buyer will think that you are shoddy and unprofessional and that your product must be lacking in some significant way.

Put your best foot forward at every turn, and keep all of your materials on brand. “On brand” means that there is a consistent quality and aesthetic between all of your sales materials, and that aesthetic should match that of your product and packaging. Every time you hand someone something, it should convey a unified brand vision, reinforce the positive associations that they have with your brand, and assure them that they are in good hands.

Having all of these pieces in place and on brand is a lot of work (and a costly investment if you hire professionals). You may be tempted to cobble something together as needed, but you will in fact be making your life more difficult in ways that will be imperceptible to you. Prospective and existing buyers alike will form judgments of you and your brand based on your sales materials, and if you give them the impression that you don’t have it together as a brand, or that you’re amateur in any way, they’re not going to tell you that. They’re just going to stop responding to your emails and calls.

Over the next handful of posts, we’re going to cruise through many of the materials you’ll want to have sharpened and at the ready. Here’s what we’re going to cover:

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Remember: #1 among your sales materials is the product itself. You’re going to be sampling out a lot of your product, so it needs to look and feel like it will fly off the shelf. You may be the greatest salesperson on the planet, but buyers know that you’re not going to be present in the store to sell your product to the end consumer, so it’s up to your product to do the real heavy lifting.

Sales Collateral

Written by Matt Robertson