The economy, commerce, business, the stock market and free trade: all of these were built on our ability to sell things to each other.

This is why the job of the ad writer is incredibly important.

Television and radio, newspapers and magazines, direct mail and email, word-of-mouth and live chat, social media and outdoor, telephone calls and sales calls are just different channels of communication.

Every point-of-contact with your customer is a channel of communication.

Your website is where questions are answered and additional information is gathered. But this doesn’t happen until the customer first hears about you and is intrigued enough to seek you out.

External messaging – advertising, social media, news stories, and word-of-mouth – is where the conversation begins.

External messaging usually triggers a visit to your website.

This is the first hand-off in the relay race.

If your website is built for ecommerce, the sale might be closed there, and the conversation ended. But if you have a phone room, or face-to-face salespeople, their job is to continue the conversation begun by external messaging and accelerated by your website.

When a customer leaves your website to contact a salesperson, this is the second hand-off in the relay race. The baton is now in the hand of the third runner, a live human being.

Have you ever seen a three-legged race where the right leg of one team member is tied to the left leg of another team member, requiring them to run in a synchronized manner?

The first runner is your ad writer. The second runner is your salesperson. The bond that ties them together is your website. When these are synchronized, coordinated, and singing the same song, you have channel alignment and a high close rate.

When they are managed separately, each of them going their own way, you have salespeople complaining that they aren’t getting “good leads” and that your ads are “reaching the wrong people.”

I’ve never seen a company fail due to reaching the wrong people. But I’ve seen countless companies struggle due to a lack of channel alignment.

I’m done talking now.

Roy H. Williams