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Using Follow-up Sales Letters

To Continue Your Sales Calls

Reprinted by permission from Direct Marketing Magazine.

Follow-up sales letters can continue the sales call in another form. They can focus your sales promotion on your best prospects and multiply the power of your sales force. Four types of letters discussed are benefit, transmittal, list cleaning, and cordial contact.

By Sig Rosenblum

Creative Consultant

It doesn't matter how impressive your salespeople are in person. The prospect's memory is short. And your sales message fades. What can you do about it? You can give your sales story a powerful second chance. You can send a series of letters to prospects after the sales call. Follow-up sales letters can:

Keep the welcome mat out. Most sales require several calls.

Stress what was missed or slighted during the sales call, itself.

Stimulate the prospect's thinking and move the sale along.

Show your people to be problem-solvers, not order-takers.

Help the prospect.

In short, follow-up sales letters can continue the sales call in another form.

They can focus your sales promotion on your best prospects, multiply the power of your sales force and cut the cost of selling.

If you'd like to add follow-up letters to your sales arsenal, here are a few key points:

Have a written follow-up plan. Don't ad lib. Base your program on the facts "out there," not on your own preconceptions. Talk to salespeople, customers and prospects in person, by phone or questionnaire. Identify the sales situations you want covered.

Develop a sales letter manual. It might be indexed by product or prospect objections—or both. Manuals can be simple or ambitious—a few basic letters or hundreds of selling paragraphs to cover every conceivable kink. There are no rules. Your manual should fit your way of working and the situations you face.

One feeble thank-you letter is better than nothing, of course. But a series of letters is best. They can be brief, to the point. Generally, six letters, a week or two apart, work fine.

Don't worry about "bothering" people. If your letters are well-written and packed with benefits, readers will devour every word. Will some people ignore—even resent—your letters? Sure. But some people won't open the door when you call. The cold shoulder is a sales rep's lot.

When personalized letters are considered, cost is the usual criterion. Instead, measure results. You may do better with personalized letters, in spite of their higher cost. You may not. Some marketing managements use a personalized letter right after the sales call, then switch to the non-personalized form.

Use your judgment about reply cards. If you are selling a yacht to a CEO and your letter is on engraved, hand-made paper from the office of the president, it may not be strengthened by a reply card. Yet, one of the world's leading manufacturers of business jets has a powerful, personalized letter program to CEOs and includes a reply card in every mailing. So it depends. When in doubt, send the card. Offer literature, prices, helpful publications, a sales call.

Varieties of Letters

And your letters should sell. Make them sledge-hammer hard or subtly soft. Whatever is appropriate to product and prospect. It may help to look at four classes of letters. Their varieties are infinite.

Benefit letters weave a story of obvious advantage for the prospect: Money and time saved. Greater efficiency, beauty, speed. Prospect benefits—and lots of them. Here's a typical—though fictional—situation.

You are selling an expensive piece of capital equipment to printers: a modern, computer-controlled paper cutter. The highest priced cutter on the market. You know that price objections are raised most often. But you also know that price objections are no problem when met creatively. For they are an invitation to show the features that underlie that "high" price. So you marshal your sales letter soldiers for the attack.

Follow-up letter #1 might discuss reduced down-time. That translates to more production, more profit. Your next letter might focus on speed and versatility. Your cutter produces ten times more on one shift. Safety? Your exclusive electronic eye protects hands and fingers. No accidents, no time lost. No lawsuits. Lower insurance costs. And better morale. Price? Far less important now.

You might end your series with details of your liberal financing plan. Savings earned by the machine pay for the machine. Do the arithmetic for the prospect. No vague claims of "big savings," but specific figures: You actually save more than $8,600 a year. In five years, you own the machine free and clear and bank the savings.

Cordial contact letters are ideal where the proposition is simple and there are few facts and figures to convey. Your goal? To leave a friendly feeling with the prospect. So these letters underscore prompt service, quality, delivery and other intangibles. Sell the skill and knowledge of your craftsmen, designers, sales force, distributors. Paint a picture of an organization that's on its toes and eager to please. Project cordiality and warmth.

Transmittal letters send something helpful to the prospect: product samples, catalogues, case histories, feature stories, testimonials, price lists, annual reports. An opportunity is lost if your people just clip a business card to these materials and drop them into the mail. Every contact with prospect and customer should sell.

List cleaning letters are vital. People get hired, promoted, fired. There are new secretaries, assistants, and department heads. Your mailing list is not static, but very much alive—an ever-changing kaleidoscope of names and faces. So you'll want to use periodic list cleaning letters to keep your mailing list or database current. Where the list is large and the sales force small, this is an excellent way to alert sales people to new buying influences or changed responsibilities. Some mailers have list change requests on every reply card: Are we addressing you properly? If not, please make the change—in name, title, department or address—below.

So continue your sales calls with follow-up sales letters. Have a written plan. Develop a sales letter manual. Use a series of letters. Personalize your letters or not, based on results. Enclose reply cards. Make your letters sell. Use benefit letters, cordial contact letters, transmittal letters—or all three. And keep your list clean.

What do you say after you say good-bye? Hello—all over again.

Sig Rosenblum is a creative consultant in direct marketing. As president of a New York agency for fourteen years, he planned and wrote programs for major industrial and consumer accounts such as Olin, American Standard, GAF and Kodak. He holds several Best of Industry Awards from the Direct Marketing Association and has been a speaker at Direct Mail Day. Sig is at 45 Breese Lane, Southampton, New York 11968. Phone: 631-283-2284. Fax: 631-283-2608. E-mail: sigrosenblum@peconic.net Web site: sigrosenblum.com