Another Top Ten CV No-Nos & Your Sales Docs

This particular Horror Ten comes from London broadsheet The Telegraph.

There’s the surface level job hunt point to make here.

Audit your own resumé and remove any of these offenders if they exist.

You could go long on what ought be displayed instead.

Career ambition, career summary, your numbers, typical prospect space, process outlines?

Better still if in part on show graphically too.

But all this thinking does also apply to your sales docs.

Pretty much each sales outfit I encounter has a pre-templated standard Prop.

Yet this doesn’t often filter down into other types of sales correspondence. Specifically, the types of documents that many moons ago were sent in the physical post. And since have been faxed, emailed and messaged across to our salivating prospects.

Even if they are largely once-off pieces tailored to each individual prospect, they could still be part of a wider process staple.

First off, you could surely list a top ten items you should exclude from these.

• quotes from your senior execs
• anything written by your marketing dept
• your logo
• any sentence without a point
• any paragraph more than two sentences long
• unjustified numbers
• overt mention of competition
• meaningless (or too few) headings
• outline pricing that looks like an invoice
• and the ubiquitous ‘jargon or acronyms’

This is a fairly generic quickfire rogues gallery. You likely have your own. Time to do a spot of gardening and weed out the unwelcome?