Day after day, business owners tell ad writers, “We just need more sales opportunities. It’s a numbers game. If you double our traffic, we’ll double our sales. Now show me what you can do.”These business owners don’t understand that today’s close rate dictates tomorrow’s sales opportunities.Some businesses will run customers off faster than a good ad writer can bring them in. But still they will tell that ad writer, “We just need more sales opportunities. Double our traffic and we’ll double our sales.”What that company really needs, of course, is to increase their close rate. And the secret to increasing your close rate is to align the personality of your sales process with the personality of your advertising.But that will never happen as long as your sales manager remains untethered from your ad writer.It’s easier to grow a company that closes 6 out of 10 sales opportunities than it is to grow a company that closes only 2 out of 10. Straightforward math would tell you that it should be only 3 times easier, but then you’d be forgetting about the exponential impact of customer referrals.There are exceptions, of course. A company with a truly extraordinary product can utterly botch their sales training and customer service and still do just fine. This is particularly true in technology and in restaurants.But let’s talk about that disconnect between your sales manager and your ad writer.This is a blind spot shared by the majority of American companies.Think of those people in your company who respond to customer inquiries as your first responders. These first responders include the people who answer telephones and who respond to emails and to live chat inquiries on your website. And then, of course, there are your service people and your salespeople.Your first responders are continuing a conversation that began with your advertising. And your customer has clear expectations about who they expect your people to be and how they expect your people to act.When your first responders speak and act differently than your customer expected, that customer feels ambushed and betrayed. Remove this disconnection by being the company your customer believes you to be, and you’ll see your close rate climb faster than a happy squirrel harvesting acorns in an oak tree.Strong ad campaigns communicate a distinctly memorable corporate “personality” that distinguishes a company from its competitors. Rippling that attractive personality through your advertising is especially important when the public perceives your products and services to be essentially the same as those of your competitors.Win the heart and the mind will follow. The mind will always create logic to justify what the heart has already decided.A good ad writer will cause the public to like you.Now all you have to do is be the company the public liked.And now you know the most important truth of advertising.Your ads don’t communicate a distinctly memorable personality?Then you don’t have a strong ad campaign.You don’t have a high close rate?Then you don’t have alignment between the expectation of your customers and the performance of your first responders.Are your first responders using the signature phrases that made your ads famous? Do they embody the corporate personality communicated in those ads?Or is your sales process independent from your advertising?If you want to talk more about it, Indy Beagle has a lot to share with you in the rabbit hole.Roy H. Williams