In business, sooner or later, you are going to face the task of writing sales documents - letters, proposals, brochures, advertisements, presentations, speeches. Unless you are prepared for it, you'll find any of these tasks difficult and time-consuming. It's also worrying, if you care about the outcome, because It's not easy to know if your piece is going to work.

Instead of staring at a blank sheet of paper or computer screen feeling frustrated as time ticks away, this manual will show you a straightforward way to write sales pieces which are highly effective.

And although it doesn't promise to make you a creative genius, there are many sources of inspiration included to help you come up with good ideas.

You'll also discover some fascinating tricks of the trade - layouts which get much higher readership, how to reduce your printing costs, ways to increase your response rate etc.

In my company, we've critiqued dozens of sales letters and brochures and worked with many clients on their documents. From all that exposure, it is evident that sales writing in UK technology companies is generally poor. We've looked hard for examples of good technical sales literature to use in the courses, but found that most of it is full of basic faults.

A large part of the cause is that there is little formal education in the subject. And because there are so many examples of bad practice around, it has become self-perpetuating.

This manual is my attempt to tackle the problem. The ideas you'll find are based on practical experience and testing. I've tried to make the approach as close to a scientific process as possible - meaning, whoever you are, whatever your product or service, for any type of sales document, just apply the method correctly and you can be confident that the resulting piece will achieve good results.

Within the conservative environment of technology, you'll be giving yourself a huge competitive advantage.