Sales sheets

What a sales sheet is

A sales sheet is one page about one product or service, carrying the price or the price band, that a salesperson leaves behind after a meeting or attaches to an email. It is read in the hand at arm's length or on a screen. Assume thirty seconds of scanning, and two minutes of reading if the scan earns it.

That is a specific reader in a specific moment: somebody who has just met you, or who has been forwarded something by a colleague, deciding whether this is worth another conversation. The sheet has to survive being read without you in the room, because that is when it is read.

It is not a brochure, which is several pages, covers the whole business and is meant to last a year. It is not a flyer, which is read standing up in six seconds. And it is not a one-pager in the sense of an internal case document, which argues for a decision and is written for somebody who holds a budget rather than somebody who has just met a supplier.

When you need one

You need one when somebody sells in person, at trade shows, on site visits or across a counter, and currently leaves behind either nothing or a printed page from the website. You need one when the same specifications and prices are being retyped into emails several times a week.

You need a set of them when you sell more than one thing and each buyer cares about only one: one sheet per product, so nobody hands over a document where most of it is irrelevant.

You do not need one if the thing being sold cannot fit on a page honestly. A complex installation quoted per site is a proposal, not a sheet, and pretending otherwise produces a page of vague claims. You also do not need one before the substance is settled: if what is included and what it costs are still being argued about internally, that is offer copy first, and it is the cheaper job.

What goes on the page

A sheet has room for about three hundred and fifty words once the design has taken its share. Everything below competes for that space, in roughly this order.

• What it is, in one line. Named plainly at the top, in the words a buyer would use. The product name alone is not enough; somebody who was handed this at a stand will not remember what it does.
• Who it is for. One sentence that lets the wrong reader put it down. This is a feature, not a loss.
• What it does and what it includes. Four or five points, each a benefit tied to a fact: the specification, the coverage, the response time, the warranty length.
• The price or the band. In CAD, with what it depends on. A sheet without a number gets an email asking for the number, which is a day lost, or no email at all.
• One piece of proof and one next step. A named customer type and a specific outcome, then the one thing to do: call this number, book this visit, request this sample.

The back of the sheet, if you are printing two sides, takes the detail: the full specification table, the sizes, the questions a technical buyer asks. The front is for the decision and the back is for the justification.

What you get

The sheet copy, marked up for layout. Every block in order, labelled by where it sits: headline, subhead, the points, the price block, the proof, the contact line. Word counts noted, so the designer is not guessing at the room each block needs.

A version for email. The same sheet with the wording adjusted for a reader who was sent it rather than handed it, plus the three-line email that goes with it. Most sheets are now attached far more often than they are printed.

A note on what dates. The lines that need changing when a price or a specification moves, listed so a revision takes ten minutes. If the price moves often, I will suggest a band or a “from” figure and say why.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A commercial flooring contractor in Saskatoon sells four things: vinyl for clinics, epoxy for workshops, carpet tile for offices, and a maintenance contract. Site visits are its main sales method, and the estimator leaves behind a folded brochure that covers all four and mentions no prices.

The work replaces it with four sheets, one per product, printed two sides. The front of the clinic sheet names the product, says it is for medical and dental fit-outs, gives five points including cure time and the disruption window, gives a square-foot price band in CAD with the two things that change it, and asks for a site measure. The back carries the specification table. The decision that came out of the work was to drop the brochure entirely and put the money into reprinting the four sheets each spring, when prices change anyway.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What is being sold, who hands the sheet over and in what situation, and what the reader already knows by the time they get it. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. How many sheets, one side or two, and the revision rounds, agreed before anything starts.
3. Inputs from you. Specifications, current prices, warranty terms, and half an hour with whoever actually sells the thing, which is the most useful half hour in the job.
4. The draft. Four to six working days after the inputs arrive. A single sheet is quicker; a set of four is not four times the work, because the structure is shared.
5. Final copy, then layout. One round of revisions included. If you have no designer, I can brief and manage one through design coordination, quoted separately.

One to two weeks from first call to final copy is typical for a set of three or four.

What it costs

Sales sheets are quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, based on how many sheets there are and how technical the material is. A set costs less per sheet than a single one, because the structure and the research are done once. Layout and printing stay with your designer and printer. The pricing page explains how quoting works for services without a published band.

What happens next

Three things usually follow. The sheets get a matching set of pages online, since buyers look you up after the meeting, which is product page work. The follow-up document that goes out once someone is interested gets written properly as a reusable proposal. Or the sheets reveal that the sales conversation keeps stalling on the same objection, and that gets answered in an objection-handling document. This job is finished when the sheets are in the estimator's bag, and nothing further is assumed.