Keep these 10 essential tips in mind when designing your direct sales piece, and your results will go through roof:

1. Bullet Points - The human eye is drawn to text that is preceded by a bullet point. Bullet points shout to reader, "Pay special attention to me! I am important!"

Write up a laundry list of benefits. Make them easy to read so prospects can skim through them quickly and get gist of what you can do for them. And always keep your laundry list of benefits bulleted so reader can't miss it.

2. Cliff-hangers - Continue last sentence of your paragraph on next page of your direct sales piece. Try to ask a question or give a solution. This technique is called a cliff- hanger. If your reader wants to find out what will happen, he/she will have to turn page. Because so many people fail to make it to second page of a direct sales piece, it is essential to use cliff-hangers to hook your readers.

3. Simple Layout - Don't confuse your reader with tricky layout. Keep your indents, underlining, centering and subheadings consistent. And don't justify your right margins.

Copyright 2002 by Dave Kahle

Are things changing rapidly in your business?

Silly question, isn't it? Of course they are changing. Rapid change is distinguishing characteristic of new millennium.

Take that rapid change and add to it growing competition, increasing complexity, consolidations at every level, and increasing demands from customers and you have recipe for a business climate that will turn anyone’s hair gray.

This rapid change whirling around every company puts great pressure on organizations to change themselves. Not only must organization as a whole change, but individuals within each organization must themselves change, learn and grow more rapidly than at any time in past.

This ability for an organization and its people to change in response to changing world around them may be ultimate success skill for Information Age.

A few years ago, it was good enough to allow learning and change to happen in a hit or miss fashion. Not so today. If your organization and your employees are going to change as rapidly as environment, they are going to have to get serious, dedicated and systematic about those changes.

That means you must organize and manage an effort to stimulate and support positive personal change. In other words, organizations, including yours, need to develop a new capability - capability to change rapidly.

Every organization has a unique set of capabilities. While some of these capabilities are necessary for any successful business, others are unique to that individual concern. For example, every business must be capable of accounting for its money; every business must be capable of generating sales; and every business must be capable of providing goods or services its customers want. Those are universal and basic capabilities. If your organization cannot do these, you won't be in business very long.

However, real strength of business comes from those capabilities that are unique to it, that differentiate that business from its competitors.

Some businesses have created great research and development capabilities, others are outstanding at customer service, while others emphasize quality throughout. Some are outstanding in sales, other marketing, still others in management.

One way to prepare your organization for rapidly changing 21st Century is to develop a unique and new capability. That capability is what I call "active learning."

So what is active learning? And why is it important? Let's start with a definition: Active learning is process of acquiring new information and/or gaining new insights, and then changing behavior as a result. You've experienced it. It's what happens when you go to a seminar or a conference, gain several new ideas, and then come back and implement them in your organization.

Active learning takes place at a number of different levels within an organization. But they are all dependent on an individual employee changing how he/she behaves. The employee who is adept at active learning regularly absorbs new information and acts in different ways as result. It's same process you engage in when you attend a seminar, except that it's required of every one of your employees, not just you.

Here’s an every day example. Let's say you upgraded your software to next round of upgrades. Now, every employee who works with that software must take in new information, (the changes in software) and then change his/her behavior to correspond with new information (they must use software). This learning process requires that they do something differently then they did before.

There is a fundamental and powerful concept underneath surface of this simple example: Learning to use this software upgrade is not a one-time event. There will be other upgrades soon. And your employees will have to learn (take in new information and change their behavior) again and again and again.

While computer upgrade is an easily-identified culprit, reality is that kind of regular change epitomized by software will likely occur in every aspect of employee's job. Software will change, customers will change, products will change, bosses will change, co-workers will change, strategy will change, policies will change, procedures will change. If it doesn't, your organization is in danger of becoming a dinosaur, wonderfully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

One of my clients summarizes it accurately when he tells every new hire: "The only thing I can guarantee you is that you won't be doing job you're hired to do a year from now. Either job will have changed in such a way as to be significantly different, or you will have grown to take on new responsibilities."

In this kind of environment, it's easy to see that companies who will be most successful are those who have filled their offices and cubicles with individuals who are willing, able, and skilled in learning.

Now that's a good thing to keep in mind whenever your are hiring. Hire well, and eventually you'll evolve into a learning organization. In mean time, you must work with employees you have.

Unfortunately, not all of them are "change-friendly." Many were educated in slower times, and view change as a threat to their positions and status. Many resent every attempt to get them to do something differently.

Clearly, some organizations, some groups, and some individuals are better at active learning than are others. While it's true that everyone can learn, it is just as true that not everyone can learn equally quickly and effectively. This ability to learn quickly, effectively, and continuously will be one of most powerful capabilities of organizations that hope to succeed in information age.