What I Wish Boutique IT Consultancies Knew About Bad Sales Copy On Their Collaterals?

Ask a Chinese chef what he means by baking, boiling, broiling, frying and grilling, and he tells you they are cooking processes used in traditional Chinese cuisine.

Now ask a Chinese military general or military historian the same question, and he tells you that they are ancient Chinese torture and execution methods.

Quite a difference.

As a result of boiling, broiling or frying, you can be either well fed or well dead.

I mention this humble little factoid because this is the exact problem when two people look at sales copy.

For most IT consulting firm leaders, copy is just an imbecilic dump of over-hackneyed rhetoric and vending-machine clichés based on an almost random dump of haphazardly patched together words and phrases that no one reads and gives a hoot about. 

So, they think if copy is just some filler of some eyesore white spaces, it must be produced as cheaply as humanly possible.

So, they go and find someone in India, Bangladesh or Albania who can write copy for as little as $5 per hour or less. 

But a few IT consulting firm leaders regard copy as the foundation of their good marketing that creates their brand and "premium" perception in the marketplace.

So, they see valuable, engaging, action-oriented so-called "authority" copy that buyers can notice, read and act on, and happily pay north of $1,000 for a blog post, $5,0000 for sales landing page or $25,000 or more for sales funnel development. Funnel and copy go together. In multi-step B2B sales, one can't exist without the other.

They know what good copy or copy-enriched content (content pieces that lead to sales) can do for their businesses, so they naturally want to hire the best copywriter whom they can afford and who are willing to accept them as new clients.

But just as marketing is the engine room of your business, copy is the engine room of your marketing.

Symptoms Of Poor Sales Copy

So, just look at your whole sales process and see if your firm experiences one or more of these symptoms...

• Low proposal acceptance rate. Buyers ask for your proposals but they've already decided to hire someone else or do the work in-house, but want to use your proposal to steal some good ideas from it.
• Your salespeople are treated as fungible vendors. They don't talk about "big picture" business issues, but hand you a list if IT tasks and you're expected to perform them at the lowest prices.
• You get beaten up on price. When your salespeople meet buyers, and the first question is "how much", "what's your hourly rate" or similar nonsense, then you know it's over. Those buyers care about one thing: The lowest price, and you'd better run very fast and very far.
• Your firm struggles to attract quality talents. IT is a talent-dense industry. Technology changes pretty quickly, so it takes serious dedication to stay-up to-date on those changes. And that dedication comes at a price tag. But the same applies to any professional in your firm, not only technical people. 
• Your salespeople meet and negotiate with procurement agents. When you negotiate with people without profit/loss responsibility, you're likely to be beaten up on price. If the company folds, those disinterested employees can go to the competition for similar work, but people with P/L responsibilities are on the hook for the consequences. So, they do their best to succeed.
• Your clients micromanage your people. When you are forced into a superior-subordinate (master-slave) relationship with clients, you can look forward to some serious mistreatment. You can receive random phone calls in the middle of the night or demands for work that are excluded from your agreements.
• High level of buyer flake-out. Your salespeople have "great" meetings with buyers, submit proposals and buyers disappear with a trace. You try to raise them from the dead, but to no avail. In most cases, disappearing buyers plan to disappear on you right from the start. They just milk you for information.
• Meeting too many non-ideal and problematic buyers. Your written collaterals fail to properly sift, sort, screen and select real buyers and too many pretender buyers, tyre-kickers and self-important and self-glorified intermediaries waste your time and money.

And now let's see the... 

17 Copy Problems Leading To The Above Symptoms

1. Your target market is far too wide, so you have to water down your copy to cater for a wide audience. Compare: "Backup and disaster recovery for multi-office law firms" vs. "IT consulting". A broad target market can blur your marketing just as badly as Bill Clinton blurred the meaning of the word "is" during his 1998 impeachment. 
2. You think your copy is "good enough". Your copy is your firm's first impression to it target market, and your brand (which the market hangs on you) is based on that first impression. How good is that first impression?
3. You regard copy as some filler between images. After your list (60%) and offer (30%), your copy (10%) is the #3 top contributor to your overall marketing success. Images are not even on the list. Remember the Gettysburg speech and the Declaration of Independence were NOT PowerPoint presentations.
4. Your copy reads like newspaper articles or some college textbooks. That is, as dry as camel shit and as boring as an unknown relative's funeral. As a former gravedigger, I can vouch for the latter. And if you keep your copy dry and boring, the competition may soon dance on your firm's grave.
5. Your visitors bounce off your website in less than two minutes.
6. You try to sell your firm's complex and expensive services using "commodity" copy. The type of copy that is used to sell cheap, mass-produced commodities to the unwashed masses.
7. Your copy fails to polarise your market. Good polarisation means people in your target market either love or hate what you do, but there is almost no one in between. See US President Trump.
8. Your copy is far too tactical and not strategic enough. That is, your copy uses too much subject matter jargon and not enough business jargon. Its style is journalistic - objective, passive, and detached. As a result, senior executives can't get the business benefits of your services and perceive your firm as a fungible vendor, NOT as a respected industrial authority.
9. Your copy fails to articulate your target market's biggest and most expensive problems. The better you can describe your target market's problems, the more your buyers perceive you as a sought-after expert. But you have to limit your expertise. Don't be like so many gender studies professors who've become economics and politics experts right after Trump's election.
10. Your copy is written by people who've never sold your services. Copywriting is selling in print. You may hate the S word, but just as fat-bottomed girls made the rocking world go 'round in the 1978 Queen song, in business, sales makes the rocking world go 'round. So, het used to it.
11. Your copy is the representation of poor market knowledge. Market knowledge is when your target market is doctors and instead of patients, you use clients or customers in your copy. Or, instead of myocardial infarction, you use heart attack in your copy. Incorrect terminology can bury your credibility faster than Bill Clinton's falling trousers in the Oval Office.
12. Wishy-washy language. Copy is there to sell. But not hard-sell but gently nudge readers towards the buying decision. One secret of good copy is that it can lead readers to their buying decisions so gently that they don't notice they're being sold. They actually enjoy reading the copy. Now think of many IT consulting firm's online data dumps. Their copy ill-positions them in the marketplace. 
13. Your copy lacks industry-specific jargon. There is a phrase, I believe, in the Bible: "Ye shall know them by their fruits". In our marketing context, it means, you use the kind of jargon that helps readers to recognise you as an industrial expert, not just any Gypsum Jacob handicapped barbed wire hurdler. Many years ago, my ex-badminton partner, commercial a 747 pilot, told me: "You can recognise a real pilot by the way he enters the cockpit and settles into his seat." Your copy reveals much more than you think.
14. Your copy is more of written college lecture than a story book. Your buyers can read general technical data on any website. You have to try to be different.
15. Your copy reeks lack of technical expertise. Web host: "We offer 100% uptime." No one can offer 100% uptime. There are moving parts that hosting companies can't control. Or... Custom software dev shop: "We offer 100% bug-free code for the first time." No! No one can do that. Well, maybe on a $5 IPhone app, but not on some $500,000 industrial control software.
16. Your copy fails to talk about the cost of living with the expensive problems that your services solve. If you offer backup and disaster recovery, talk about how many businesses go bust or land in million-dollar lawsuits due to mishandled, corrupted or lost data. No, this is not fearmongering. This is reality.
17. Your copy is written out of synch with how the brain processes information. Syntax matters. Just because a word consists of letters A, T and R, the words tar, art and rat have drastically different meanings. The word "headshot" has different meaning to a portrait photographer and a sniper. So does the word "handshake" to a salesperson and an computer engineer.

Summary

I agree, good copy is not cheap. And you too may be reluctant to pay the price to get it.

But when you realise that your copy sets the tone of how your target market perceives your business, the quality of clients your business is able to attract and the price those clients are willing to pay you, you may change your mind.

The sad reality is that if you don't have great copy, you don't have a business, because can't engage your target market.

In the first 57-73% of the buying cycles buyers don't even talk to salespeople. But they study their written materials. And the written materials position sellers.

And the tone of the first meeting and the treatment how buyers treat sellers tell the story of how good your copy really is.

Copy can cut both ways. It can either elevate your firm to the respected authority status or sink it to the level of fungible vendors.

Every piece of copy that you create – from web pages to through white papers to emails – can open doors for your salespeople to begin meaningful conversations with ideal prospects who can become ideal clients. Prospects that have the kind of problems that your firm can solve.

Or the same doors can slam shut in your face, rearranging the structure of your conk and locking you out forever.

Your marketing is driven by copy.

With bad copy in place, you can look forward a painful slog and there is a horribly low ceiling on your growth potential.

But with good copy, the sky's the limit!

Good copy gently nudges, guides and escorts readers forward inside your sales funnel to the point of sales. 

Bad copy either nudges them backwards or right out of your funnel never to return.

And then game's over. And that's a bit of a disaster whatever the Association of Lincoln Presenters, the attendees of the Vent Haven Convention or even the World Clown Association says.