What is a sales sheet and why do you need one?
A sales sheet can help your sales team increase sales and stay up-to-date on product knowledge, but it can also help customers gain valuable information about your product. What is a sales sheet? Is it just for internal use or for external use? And how can you make your sales sheet work?
What is a sales sheet?
A sales sheet is a simple sheet — usually a single page or two pages (printed front to back) — that provides information about a specific product or product line.
You may be wondering what a sales sheet is and how it differs from a brochure.
A sales sheet differs from a brochure in its format and the amount of information it contains. While sales sheets are common in many B2B (Business to Business) industries, they are less common in other areas. A sales sheet is one of the cheapest ways to provide valuable product information to your sales team and customers.
What is in a sales sheet?
A sales sheet generally contains company information, information about where to purchase the product, technical specifications, and a picture or graphic about the product. The information on a sales sheet is designed to be scanned, so there should be plenty of whitespace, clear formatting, legible font, and visual data whenever possible.
What is a sales sheet used for?
A sales sheet may be used internally by the sales and marketing department. The marketing department can use the sales sheet to create web copy, catalog copy, email marketing, social media posts, magazine ads, and dozens of other products. The customer service department may have sales sheets that they can refer to when a customer has questions about a product’s specifications.
The sales team will often use sales sheets extensively. When they’re formatted consistently, it’s very easy for a salesperson to find and compare information between different product models or product lines. Because the salesperson needs to meet a prospect’s need quickly, they can scan various product sheets to find the two products that will fit with a customer’s existing infrastructure or the three options that carry the desired feature.
Sales sheets can also be used externally. Eighty-one percent of buyers do online research before making a buying decision and 67% of the buyer’s journey is online, usually before they talk to one of your salespeople. For this reason, sales sheets can help to interest a prospect before the sales team even knows that they exist.
For B2B buyers — especially in highly technical industries — a purchase decision requires detailed specifications. When your buyer can determine at a glance whether your product meets their needs, you’re able to help influence the buying decision more at an earlier stage and snag more of those prospects.
I have all this other stuff. Why do I need a sales sheet?
The first reason you need a sales sheet is to help support your internal staff. With multiple products and various features, your sales, marketing, and customer service departments have a tremendous amount of data to keep track of. Having sales sheets available to support them means fewer calls to research & development, fewer lost sales, and fewer unhappy customers.
Internal sales sheets empower your team members at every level to take initiative, answer questions, and provide outstanding sales and support. By giving them an easy way to access product data, your team will be able to handle more issues at a lower level without needing to elevate them to a supervisor.
The second reason you need a sales sheet is to provide data for your prospective customers. A B2B customer looks for a new product to fill a specific need, and a sales sheet tells them at a glance whether your product will meet their need or not. Providing this information online or by request (or both) helps you connect with prospects who are looking for products in your specific niche.
Originally published at blog.tdsmaker.com.
