when links aren't so hot
Axiomatic of good sales and marketing documentation is knowing how your audience prefers to read. Why do many sales staff fail to follow this and instead seem a little lazy in dumping material upon poor customers who have to do all the work to get the message? Some examples of poor practice include:
- proposals sent attached to emails only - forcing customers to print them out if they want to read offline
- proposal attachments in a variety of formats - assuming your customer can open them all
- hyperlinks contained in the material pointing to further information on the web
Imagine you have gone through the bother of printing out all the proposal material from the vendor who is talking to you and made time to read it at home - only to find that you can't make a decision because important evidence is hyperlinked and you are reading a hardcopy. Duh!
Tony
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It's easy to get sloppy like this when you treat customers like your colleages and assume they are at their PCS like us. Hotlinks are useful, though - can you not use them in documents then?
Thanks John - this is true. We simply need to put ourselves in our customer's shoes and remember we are trying to impress them with how thoughtful we are and how easy it is to do business with us.
You can certainly put hotlinks in documents. Just make sure any essential information supporting the decision you seek is actually included in the document and not somewhere else (i.e. it is self-contained) and make it clear the links are optional for additional information accessible when reading online.
Regards
Tony