Would you like to know the secret of writing fantastic sales letters?

This is a bit of a leading question because no salesperson in their right mind is going to say no and that is exactly the point of this message!

Writing great compelling sales copy is an essential skill for almost every sales role and yet often so little time is given over to teaching these skills.
Often salespeople are just expected to be able to do it with little or no help or guidelines.

So what is great sales writing and what is not?

Well unfortunately so much of what we see today is very defiantly not great, and often it is down right poor. Often it just concentrates on the sellers company, how great they are, how long they have been in business, how many features the product has etc.

An example of this sort of writing came through my door the other day, as you know I do a lot of work with salespeople who work in the food industry, and the industry magazine is called "The Grocer" which I get every week. Inside this weeks Grocer was an insert that had been put in by a company selling toothpaste. The headline and first paragraph on this insert was:

Putting their money where their mouth is:
"Company 'Name' is harnessing the power of 5 great brands in a major £3.65 million oral care promotion which engages consumers in a fun and interesting way and stresses the importance of the mouth."

Now I don't know about you, but I struggled to stay awake long enough to get to the end of this headline, let alone be inspired to take some action.

So the first rule of great sales writing is:
Capture the attention of your audience!

Imagine that your prospect is running away from a giant fireball and as they run they see your sales letter which is so compelling that they actually stop long enough to read it. Not as daft as it sounds because peoples lives today are so busy and hectic that they are quite literally flat out. So what is it that you have written that is so compelling that they will actually stop long enough to read it?

This is the job of your headline which has to be so interesting to your prospect that they are drawn almost magically towards it. How do we achieve this? Well to quote Perry Marshal, the guru of Internet marketing:
"You capture your clients' attention when you enter into the conversation that they are already having in their own head."

What are the conversations that are already going on in the head of your prospect? What are they worried about, what makes them stressed, what wakes them up in a cold sweat at 3am in the morning?

Identify that and you are guaranteed to get their attention!

So in our example from The Grocer, what could they have done instead? Well I would think that one of the major conversations going on in the heads of the independent retailers that this was aimed at is something like:

"How can I get people to shop in my store rather than the brand new Tesco's superstore that has just opened down the road?"

So our headline could be:
"Revealed - The secret of doubling the number of people shopping in your store!"

Now I think you will agree that that is far more compelling than the original.

The absolute masters at this sort of headline are the people that write copy for the front of women's magazines. This is because they operate in a highly competitive market and yet they know that if a woman picks the magazine up she is very likely to buy it. So the copy they write is highly compelling and gets straight into the conversation that women are having in their own heads.

Here are some examples from the front of just one magazine:

"Found! Your Secret Sex Weapons"
"50+ Super Sexy Bikinis from Just £6"
"Hair Miracles - The 30 Best Serums, Shampoos & Straighteners - As Voted by You"

So how do we use this to help us write great headlines?
Well it's called: "The Cosmopolitan Technique"

To do this, get a collection of women's magazines and write out the headlines from the front. Then taking each in turn, see if you can adapt it to fit your product or service.

So in our toothpaste example we could turn:
"Found! Your Secret Sex Weapons"
Into:
"Found! Your Secret Sales Weapons"
Or
"Hair Miracles - The 30 Best Serums, Shampoos & Straighteners - As Voted by You"
Into:
"Sales Miracles - The 5 best ways of getting more customers - As voted by you"

Get the idea?

Bill Robinson
Successful Sales Club