In Will’s Head: One-Pagers—Or, Covering Your Assets

In this installment of “In Will’s Head,” we talk to Maestro founder, Will Fuentes, about how he approaches what sales collateral he or his clients need. In our previous foray into Will’s brain, he mentioned that his number-one strength is strategy, which is evident as he discusses the written material he uses throughout a sale.

I know what you’re thinking. It’s sales collateral. We’re talking about one-pagers and case studies—how much strategy could there possibly be? As it turns out, quite a lot.

ONE-PAGERS FOR SLEUTHING

I started by asking Will how he thinks through what sales materials he needs. “I ask myself, what is the information that I want to control exactly how it’s relayed,” he replies.

I nod. I’m one of the people at Maestro who writes the sales collateral, and that’s pretty much the answer I expected.

“What’s information,” he continues, “that, when shared, can give me insights into who’s involved and how they’re involved?”

Huh, that was not an answer I was expecting.

“What’s information that, when shared, can give me insights into how well the individual I’m dealing with knows their company and how their decisions are handled?”

As I said, I write these pieces, and even I had no idea they had this kind of power. I’m still nodding as though I know exactly what Will’s talking about. “With a one-pager,” he says, “you can get a really good line of sight into what’s going on.” He gives the example of a sale in which the prospect’s IT team is always asking the same questions. “I’m going to create some collateral because these are things that come up often,” Will explains, “but also because I can now litmus test the deal.”

If he provides his contact with the IT fact sheet and later asks if IT had questions, an answer of “no” likely indicates the information was never shared, and his deal isn’t where he thought it was. If his contact sends the fact sheet to the IT team ahead of Will meeting with them, no questions from the team means they likely didn’t bother looking at it. “That can tell me quite a bit about the relationship between them and the person on their team championing the deal,” Will explains. “It could also tell me about the priority they see in this thing.” Alternatively, if they say they don’t have questions about the fact sheet but have more in-depth questions that haven’t yet been covered, it’s a sign that the deal’s in a good spot.

ONE-PAGERS FOR ACCELERATION

“No one closes a deal from a one-pager,” Will says. “But you can speed up the sales cycle with them.” He recalled working with a client on a huge deal, where they were competing with a behemoth. Will and his client’s salesperson would anticipate who was coming to each meeting, provide the right asset, and ask their champion to distribute it as pre-meeting reading. It served the role of answering some of the meeting attendees’ questions (before they even had to ask them) and ensured the meeting itself was as valuable and efficient as possible.

“Your prospects have a million other things to worry about besides your sale,” says Will, “so if there’s information that’s important for them to understand as part of the sale, you should create a one-pager. Plus, if you want to accelerate your sales cycle, one of the best ways is to get people information in an anticipatory manner—get it in their hands before they actually need it.”

Sometimes clients tell Will that they already have a whitepaper or some other in-depth document. That’s great, but they still need a one-pager. “Your seven-page document about your product early in the sales funnel, when they’re just hearing about it, isn’t going to be something people are ready to read, especially busy executives. A one-pager is a great way to move the message up to the executive buyers in a way that’s concise, and a well-done one gets people interested in understanding more.”

ALL HAIL THE ONE-PAGER—SHE IS YOUR QUEEN

“I think of one-pagers like a queen on a chessboard,” Will says. “It can be moved and used in so many directions if you’re strategic about it. When I talk to people about creating your KOP [key opportunity plan], part of what I’m looking to see is when they are going to send this one-sheeter. Or what’s the follow-up question they’re asking? Because that’s how you use these things. It’s not like they exist for you to just throw into the ether and be like, ‘Okay, I sent it.’”

Will goes on to say that the best assets are those that can be used pre-funnel, in-funnel, and post-funnel. “A really well-written one-pager can work in all three facets—to gain interest, move a deal along, and then maybe educate the end user.” Your one- and two-page assets can take so many forms. Legal fact sheets, implementation information, FAQs, and other new uses that may emerge for your organization.

Will mentions enterprise AI as an example. “More and more companies are creating AI ethics committees about the use of AI in their organizations,” he says. He recommends that anybody selling in this space have an asset on their position on AI ethics. “It doesn’t have to be a deep white paper,” he explains. “It can just be a one-sheeter, a position statement, or a letter from your data scientist.”

Remember the huge deal against the behemoth competitor? Will helped his client win that deal. The buyer said that what stood out was how much care had been taken with every asset, deck, and email sent throughout the sales process. The buyer knew that the founders of the company were engineers, so if they took that much care with the sales information being sent, they couldn’t imagine how much care must have been put into the technology itself.

Besides helping you sleuth and accelerate your deal, one-pagers can simply make you look better. “If you’re a small business, it’s super important for building trust and reliability,” says Will. “One-pagers can be a big distinguisher.”

So, let a one-pager be your queen—so long as her court is full of strategists.

Are you looking for help with your sales strategy? Or with your one-pagers? Or with your strategy for using your one-pagers? We’re available at mastery@maestrogroup.co.