Twice in two days, I’ve had the same conversation with marketers suffering from the same confusion. Both are organizations that rely on lead generation as the first step in their sales processes. That is to say, they expose prospects to their marketing message in an effort to move them to contact the company, learn more, and finalize a sale.

The problem both companies had (and I see this all the time) is they were falling into the trap of over-communicating in their marketing materials… telling their whole stories… every detail… forgetting that the goal of their marketing is not to close the sale on the spot. Rather, the goal is to motivate a prospect to call and engage in the sales process.

I find this happens most often when companies write their own marketing copy. They are so close to what they’re doing, they lose their ability to trim down their story. They can no longer write copy that engages prospects quickly, established the firm’s credibility, yet leaves enough to talk about that it makes sense for the prospect to call.

This problem is VERY easy to stumble into. I struggle with it myself when I’m writing about products or services that I’ve been part of creating.

Here’s what seems to happen…
You understand so well the rationale behind each element of what you do. And you’re such an informed critic of your own product/service offering that anything less than a full explanation of everything you provide (and why) starts to feel incomplete to you.

The result – you wind up trying to wet the whistle of your prospects with a fire hose. WAY too much information… and way more than they need in order to reach the decision to give you a call.

The information overload either dissuades prospects from investing the time to process your message - or you answer so many of their questions that they no longer need to call you to learn more and begin the sales process.

The next time you find yourself reviewing a lead generation program, ask yourself the following questions:

• Does our marketing earn the scarce attention of our audience?
• Does our marketing (design and copy) establish our firm’s credibility?
• Does our message differentiate us from our competitors?
• Does our copy help prospects qualify themselves?
• Are we providing a compelling reason for prospects to engage in our sales process?
• Is our copy concise and scannable enough to engage a busy prospect?

These can be tough questions to answer for yourself. This is one time when it can really pay to get some objective feedback.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 4:32 pm and is filed under Direct Marketing, Powerful Presentations, Sales & Business Development, Web Marketing, Marketing Principles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.