Anatomy of a successful sales letter.

Anatomy of a successful sales letter.

Nov 28, 2018 | Communication

My inbox is stuffed with sales letters, an outcome of 20 years of researching and engaging in a wide range of areas of interest to me, and those I work with, in an effort to distil the lessons to be passed on.

Some are very good, they move the hand towards the credit card, almost involuntarily, and some are just plain awful. Most are somewhere in the middle, OK, but generally no cigar.

A sales letter has only two  functions: to state why somebody should give you their business, and then to lead them to the next stage in the process, which is not always a transaction. Most often with a letter, it is simply to move you to the next point in the sales ‘funnel’

It should always be in the language of the receiver, and as personalised as possible, without  any spelling, grammatical, or any other type of error.

In other words, accuracy and clarity.

The flow of a sales letter is critical to success, and is a fairly well understood series of steps:

Headline.

The headline is the most important part of a sales letter. It is what someone sees first, and unless it engages in some way, they will move on. David Ogilvy, the original Madman stated that the headline was 80% of any ad, and a sales letter  is nothing but a form of advertising, a cheaper form of a sales person.

After the headline, which distils the reason why a reader should continue to read, there is a logical process which normally looks like the following:

Pain points.

Describe the problem in words that the potential customer will relate to and understand, personalising the pain, and demonstrating that you understand it. Do this well  and they will start to empathise.

Amplification and Aspiration.

Amplify the consequences of not solving the problem,  and offer a vision of what the feeling will be like when it has been solved.

Story.

Sales letters are really a story, and you have to tell the story of your solution, and how their problem can be solved, the means by which your solution will deliver them the outcomes to which they now aspire. People are not buying your product, they are buying the  outcome from buying your product. It is the old ‘drill and hole’ story. When you go to the hardware to buy a drill, it is not the drill you want, but the hole it will deliver you. Testimonials are powerful ways to demonstrate the outcome from purchase.

Offer.

A sales letter has to make an offer, it has to offer a conclusion to the story told, the problem solved. You have to be absolutely clear about what it is you want them to do, how and by when. Many sales letters I see shy away from being direct, but if you have not lost them at the beginning,  and they are still reading, there is a fair chance they are interested, so enable the interest by telling them what to do next.

You do not have to be a professional copywriter to produce a good sales letter, but you have to be very clear, concise, and empathetic. Not an easy task, but one which generally comes at the end of a process of understanding the value of your offer to a specific group of potential customers, or better still, a specific person.

 

 

 

 

What is the single source of competitive advantage in the 21st century?

What is the single source of competitive advantage in the 21st century?

Nov 26, 2018 | Governance, Strategy

Competitive advantage used to be about the sum of scale and the efficiencies that could be applied. Businesses like GM, GE, Exon Mobil, Wal-Mart all built scale and efficiency as the core of their success.

Our economies and institutions ran on the basis of scale and efficiency. Our political systems were fuelled by  the notion that those in charge accepted a moral obligation to be honest, tell us the truth, and act in our collective best interests for the long term.

Now things have changed.

Competitive advantage is now more about connections that deliver the scale. The planets biggest businesses, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Facebook and Alibaba, now have connections as the common element of their competitive advantage.

Over the weekend I heard Donald Trump in an interview propose that he had a ‘Platform’ in his followers on Twitter, Instagram and social platforms generally, that removed the need to rely on the institutions that had built the US. His platform was the people, he argued, with whom he now had a direct connection, independent of the institutions.

Love him or hate him, it is hard to disagree.

Equally, the Liberal wipeout in Saturdays Victorian elections will I suspect be sheeted back to the absolute lack of trust in the Liberal party generally, fuelled by the shambles in Canberra over the last decade. The Labor party should also be very careful, rather than crowing their success, as we trust them no more than the Libs.

It seems the foundation of the 21st century will be trust.

Hard won trust is easily lost, and very hard to win back.

As businesses and institutions build scale based on connections, those connections will be fuelled by trust. The absence of Trust will come to mean that your ability to build competitive advantage will be compromised. The strategic and marketing task of both public and private institutions, can be boiled down to the simple proposition that they need to be trusted, and that we, the great unwashed who vote with our feet, money and loyalty, require that they earn that trust, it will no longer be just given.

To reach that point, they need to build up the real evidence that they can be trusted, that they will act in our common interests before theirs, as distinct from the fluff and bullshit currently churned out by their publicity lackies.

As I look forward, I can see no driver of success more important than outlining a goal, articulating the route toward the achievement, then being held accountable for the actions that take us towards the goal.

In a word, trust.

Header photo: Christmas 1914 on the Western Front.

Which 5 capabilities enable a leader to successfully scale

Which 5 capabilities enable a leader to successfully scale

Nov 23, 2018 | Change, Leadership

Virtually every business I come across wants to grow.

A few I come across want to, and are able to scale.

Scaling is different from just growing, it requires much more than being better at what you currently do. It requires significant change, invites risk, and for many is very unsettling personally.

The few that have scaled successfully all have in place a leadership that seems to have a few common characteristics, always in an individual, who is able to shape the organisation in ways that reflect the hunger to be different in ways that adds serious value to customers, and to scale as a result.

They create a vision that excites and engages those around them.

They are able to translate that vision into a clear strategy that provides a transparent framework for decision making, ensuring what not to do is as important as what to do.

They build the capabilities of those around them to enable the execution of the strategy.

They focus relentlessly on one thing at a time, and measure results that connect the outcomes to the strategy, daily, weekly, quarterly, bi-annually, and longer term.

They are good people. This seems counter to the public persona of the driving successful business person who scales a business successfully, but most I have seen who are the genuine leaders of a successful scaling, are also successful people in other ways.

When you want to see if your business has what it takes, give me a call.

Photo credit: Roberto Robitz via Flikr

 

 

 

Is AI going to take our jobs?

Is AI going to take our jobs?

Nov 21, 2018 | Change, Management

Some of them yes.

Those repetitive jobs where we do the same thing over and over, will be gone.

Let’s be clear about AI. It is artificial, it is not intelligent.

AI is very good at some things  we humans are bad at, but it is no good at what made we humans so successful.  The imagination, and emotion, the capacity to empathise,  and understand complexity we are born with is not artificial, and cannot be replicated by machines, at least not in the foreseeable future.

Machines can do things  faster and more reliably than us, and they do not go on smoko, no holidays, hangovers or emotional attachments to fellow workers.

Machines are fast and reliable, and fast and reliable is a huge benefit.

Machines are also very accurate, tell them what to do, they do it. Again, something we humans are not so good at, we tend to vary things around, sometimes just to relieve the boredom.

Machines do the routine, mind numbing tasks that we put aside, or do poorly. They do not have a mind, so they do not mind being bored.

Al is maths, not magic. All AI is statistics and maths that can be broken down into algorithms so they are repeatable. Machine learning is the next step on the ladder, where the algorithms learn to recognise patterns. This takes trial and error, so that eventually, the machine can isolate common characteristics in a pile of data.

This is becoming more common every day, as we see uses for pattern recognition.

Both Google and Amazon have products you can download and use that deliver astonishing accuracy in pattern recognition. An occasional client has introduced this feature on his remote cameras, so they can now distinguish between a kangaroo and a truck, triggering a response from alarm connected to the camera, so the truck, potentially an intruder sets the alarm, the kangaroo which is more likely just hungry, is ignored.

The next step is usually called ‘Deep learning,’ and we are just at the beginning of this. It is in effect layers of machine learning interacting to identify from a broader and deeper pool of input data the item of interest. We will progress down this track, and at the end, in another 50 years, perhaps machines may be able to ‘sort of’, think.

This stuff all has the potential to make us seem smarter, but we are not, we are just using machines to do what they are good at, while we still do the stuff we are good at, empathy, judgement, relationships.

Over history, technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed. While it will be painful for some, there is no reason to believe the pattern will not continue. Irrespective of the size and type of organisation you belong to, AI is knocking on the door. Open it, realise the productivity benefits, and figure out how to best use it to serve others, and make a buck along the way.

Addendum April 2023. This post was over 4 years old when ChatGPT burst onto the scene, taking the world on a wild ride. In a post in December 2022 I asked essentially the same question, ‘Will HAL’ take our jobs? https://wp.me/p5fjXq-31n and arrived at the same answer. However, the gap of only 4 years has seen the development of the technology referred to above evolve at warp speed, culminating in ChatGPT3.

 

 

The most common cause of the failure of medium sized businesses.

The most common cause of the failure of medium sized businesses.

Nov 19, 2018 | Customers, Strategy

  Businesses fail for a lot of reasons, lack of cash, their product becomes redundant, competitors emerge at a cheaper price, distribution is not as anticipated, inadequate sales skills, and many others. However, all these failures have a common root. They were not important enough to the few who might have really cared enough to give them their business. They try to be all things to all people, and even the most successful company of the last 25 years, Apple, cannot pull that off. What on earth makes you think you can? The key to success is to do less. Relentlessly prune everything you do until there is nothing left but the stuff that is really, really important to the few, that you do better than anyone else. That combination stops those key target customers going anywhere else. Saying ‘No’ is the hardest thing any medium business has to do. However, it is also amongst the most important things. Stand for something genuinely meaningful to the few, and deliver relentlessly to them. Forget the rest. Header credit. My thanks once again to Hugh McLeod at Gapingvoid.com