7 excellent sales collateral tips that can help your startup grow

When you have a growing startup, sales collateral is something you can’t neglect when you’re trying to close more business.

In today’s competitive market, you need to take various approaches to ensure that you have the edge over your competitors.

Hence, sales collateral enables you to create content and resources that connect your prospects with your brand and help speed up the sales process.

What is sales collateral?

Sales collateral is basically any material that speeds up the sales process. Anything that provides additional information to your prospect about your product or service is sales collateral.

Sales collateral comes in various forms, and below I have listed down types that businesses can use to inform their customers:

• Brochures
• White papers
• Blogs and landing pages
• Infographics
• Product sheets
• Educational & explainer videos

As we learn how sales collateral can help your prospects through the sales pipeline and convert them into customers, we also need to know how to utilize it to its optimal level.

So, let’s first take a glance at the benefits of sales collateral and how it can help you take your startup to the next level.

Benefits of sales collateral

78% of executive buyers have mentioned that salespeople don’t have relevant information to share with them.

This creates a distance between a company and its potential customers.

Fortunately, sales collateral has more benefits than just closing deals faster, and the mentioned points are reasons why sales collateral is a must for every business.

• Increase brand visibility: Let’s face it, there’s no business without competition. You can only stay ahead in the game when your brand reaches more and more people. Powerful content is sufficient to build a brand image that makes you stand out from others.
• Educate your customers: You will only gain a customer when they’re well acquainted with your company and what it offers. Sales collateral enables you to educate your customers and provide useful information to help them make informed decisions.
• Increase productivity of salespeople: A salesperson has a lot on their plate. With sales collateral, they can simply forward the resources to the prospects to save time and increase their productivity. This helps them focus more on prospecting and closing deals faster. Ready to drive sales excellence? Explore our guide on sales productivity tools for actionable tips and tricks.
• Making informed decisions: A business can only retain customers when they’re well-informed about every aspect of the company. With informational content and regular updates, you can keep your customers aware of the upcoming offers and events to encourage participation.
• Stay connected at every touchpoint: Most customers need more than one touchpoint to make a purchase. This approach lets you stay connected with them at every touchpoint to ensure the sales process runs smoothly.

Well, sales collateral doesn’t seem negligible now, does it?

Now that you know why it’s imperative to leverage sales collateral, we’ve compiled a list of best sales collateral tips that can help your startup grow.

Essential sales collateral tips for growing your startup business

Find out what the customer wants and then make it better.

Ain’t that the truth!

Every company’s efforts go into enhancing the customer journey and gaining clients for life.

This also includes delivering a little extra from what the customer expects from you. Hence, when you’re using sales collateral, you also need to optimize it for better outreach.

To deliver the best customer experience, follow these excellent sales collateral tips and never worry about growth!

1. Create brand awareness

When you’re implementing sales collateral in your business, you must first put effort into creating brand visibility with unique content and constant engagement.

Sales collateral is useful in every step of your sales cycle. You can create engaging content to share on your website and various other social media platforms to capture more prospects.

Have an event lined up? Then create images and banners to attract more audience and eventually convert them into customers. Likewise, you can also create videos using a video editing app that provides information and captures the prospects’ interest.

Just take an example of FreshBooks - one of the most used accounting software in the startup world.

The brand published an explainer video showing what FreshBooks is to its prospects:

The video excellently shows what the tool can do for them, features they can use, and the value it can provide in just under 2 minutes.

400K views is nothing to sneeze at.

2. Utilize sales collateral templates

Not every customer is the same. Therefore, your strategy should also be different for each customer segment.

You can segment the customers based on their behavior and preferences to create sales collateral that resonates with them.

Moreover, to save time, you can create various sales collateral templates to personalize every interaction.

When you have multiple templates, you’re more likely to cater to your prospects’ needs by delivering personalized content.

Not just textual content, you can create multiple set of videos for different audiences. The best way is to create a separate video for every industry you serve.

I understand you may have to invest a lot of time and money in video creation. But video is the easiest way to consume content these days, and brands are not missing out on this opportunity. Besides, there are many affordable video editing options available in the market.

When you do jump in the whole video game, pay extra attention to the quality of the video. Never compromise on the casting, script, audio dubbing, time limit, and overall messaging of the video.

I would advise jumping into the video segment when you are fully ready because when you compromise on any technical factor, it would damage, rather than helping your brand.

3. Create contextual sales collateral

Does it get irritating when you receive an email or message out of the blue without any context? Well, that’s the reason why you need to create a sales collateral that’s contextual and provides value.

Therefore, you need to make your prospect aware of the content you’re sharing with them and how it can benefit them.

Having contextual sales collateral improves engagement and helps in building long-term relationships with your customers.

4. Stay true to your brand

Whichever approach you take, always ensure that your sales collateral is connected with your brand to reflect its true value.

Is your company’s demographic young people and millennials? Your focus should be to create infographics, images, and videos that relate to them using social media platforms.

Are you targeting B2B? Then you can create an informational guide, ebook, or case studies to add value to your proposition.

Your company’s value should reflect in the sales collateral, so ensure you create resources that are closely connected with the brand.

5. Help in decision-making

Your website also plays a vital role in making or breaking a deal.

An easy-to-access website with relevant information is more likely to be preferred by visitors than a complex website.

Landing pages are one of the examples of effective sales collateral; they bifurcate the product/service categories and deliver exactly what a customer wants.

For instance, take a look at what Close has done.

They have created separate landing pages for SaaS, Financial Services, Insurance, Real Estate, and other segments, so every prospect can relate to it.

6. Make sales with CTAs

When you approach a prospect with any content, your motive for selling should be clear.

In marketing, precision and straightforwardness go a long way. So, ensure you add visible CTAs in your blog, email, or any landing page.

Your goal is to convert the prospects into customers eventually, right? With CTA buttons, you can direct them towards purchasing the product/service directly from the content.

7. Use it for promotion

Even when you’re not selling new products, you can use sales collateral to promote your upcoming offers and discounts to your existing clients to upsell or cross-sell.

If you have an upcoming product launch, you can create brochures, social media graphics around it to spread the word and capture the attention of your customers and prospects.

Final thoughts

A small business tackles a lot of challenges, including client and deal management along with marketing.

Sales collateral helps you overcome these challenges in a simplified way that enables you to build a solid brand image and make lasting connections with every prospect.

So, implement these simple tips when using sales collateral and witness how useful these resources can be.