Communication for business development purposes is a very specialized area. When I was a bank consultant establishing private banks around the nation, one of the first things I did after signing a contract with a bank was to sit down and review all of the written communications pieces sent to clients, prospects, and to strangers.

The purpose of a business development letter is to create prospects. The purpose of a sales letter is to sell your company and its products to prospects. Most marketers confuse the two. They are two separate letters. Marketers think a business development letter sells products. It does not... at least, the effective ones do not. Instead, business development letters sell credibility and reputation. Business development letters make people want to hear about your products (sales are then achieved via sales letters).

Most bank marketers I worked with did not understand that simple fact. I have come to realize that most marketers do not understand the purpose of sales versus business development letters. Even the most sophisticated bank marketers in New York, San Francisco, Dallas and Chicago did not understand. They thought business development and sales letters to be the same thing. They are not.

The first and most basic rule of business development communication is this: The recipient of a letter is not a prospect to whom something can be sold. He or she is a stranger. To become a prospect, a response to a business development effort -- letter or sales call -- must be received. If you are mass marketing, you can make sales to strangers rather than prospects (developed via business development calls and/or correspondence)... but it is a very expensive effort.

The second rule is that business development letters talk about the recipient and that person’s needs. You establish your credibility and get a positive reaction from them by proving you know about their needs.

A sales letter talks about your company and your products and how they fill client needs. Sales letters are sent to prospects, not strangers. The biggest mistake marketers make is to try and turn business development letters into sales letters.

The best private banks in the country specialize by client occupation. Physicians, accountants, lawyers, corporate executives, small business owners, entrepreneurs were all targeted for business development. We narrowed our definition of segments served. We had one private banker who served the needs of surgeons only. Another served non-surgeons. The same was true of CPAs and lawyers… small, independent firms were handled by one banker.

Those employed by larger firms were handled by another private banker. Each group’s problems are different. Our message to them was designed to deal with their needs, not our products. Thus, the more specialized we could be, the more specific we could get about their needs. That means we could more effectively sell people on becoming clients.

A lot of marketers write business development letters from the perspective of high quality service clients can expect from their company. Big shock... people, especially affluent people, expect quality service. It is not a sales or business development point. And, it is very easy for a competitor to write a letter that makes yours look pretty bad by referring to client needs (which hints at expertise... for which people are willing to pay). If you write a business development letter that speaks in general about your high quality of service and I write a business development letter that accurately points out some of the problems you deal with in your every day business life, which do you think has the best chance of getting read? Such are the advantages of market segmentation.

Viewing market segmentation, business development and sales as three distinctly different parts of a process is as effective for companies selling office furniture or computer equipment as it is for private banks. Know your market segments. Find out what motivates them. With most successful business people, “time is money” is almost always a motivator because most successful people are very busy.

It is an art to write an effective business development letter. It is difficult to explain the business advantages you have to offer while talking about the letter’s recipient… someone you’ve never met. The temptation is to talk about you and your products -- a guaranteed way to get the letter thrown away. Talk about them and what they need and your letter gets read.

Business development letters need to drip with credibility. For example, you do not on the one hand say “Your time is money,” and on the other hand say, “…and I’d like to stop by your office during business hours to waste some of your time.” Instead, you tell a time is money person you will be glad to meet them early in the morning, before the business day starts.

Back in the 1980s, one of the major New York banks -- one whose name you would easily recognize -- did a huge advertising campaign for private banking. The lead line was, “Now that you’ve made it, maybe you’re ready for (Bank Name) private banking.”

What better way to say, “We, the big, important bank think little old you may be important enough to bank with us.” Not exactly a theme designed to stroke the ego of the customer (and successful people have strong egos). I’m sure it made the bank feel important.

The final rule of a good business development letter: Be sure it strokes the recipient’s ego, not your own. How can you do that? Count the number of times “you” rather than “I” is the subject of all sentences. The ratio should be 60-40 or 70-30 -- in favor of the recipient.