Trust the Process

One of my clients, a self-described perfectionist (he has 11% body fat), hates that he pushes off his writing work—waiting for when he fully understands what he wants to say.

That moment never comes.

This is very common. I’ve done it. I did it for years.

Becoming clear is not a light-switch, it’s a process. It usually takes drafts—even, if you care enough about them, in 200 word LinkedIn posts or thought-leadership articles, blog posts.

Most of us can’t curate, or even acknowledge, everything we want to say about a certain topic in an hour, or even two.

I suggest: write bullet points in fifteen minutes.

Let it brew, come back

Add forgotten details. Maybe repeat.

Then pull it all together.

It gets easier when we become more confident writing, but only in that we trust the process will work, and practice shortens the cycle to the deepest point.

It’s still a process.

There is no light switch—where we suddenly understand either a. everything we know on a topic; or b. how to structure it concisely.

At any given moment we are ignorant even of our own knowledge.

Accepting this gives us the structure we need, often, to publish our deepest understandings. 

Language exists to make thinking transparent

Failing to understand this has had massive effects on culture, business effort ($300-400 billion of extra effort according to some studies), business credibility, and decision making.

We have taken the human being's greatest asset-- our ability to team together via communication, and, culturally, turned that into "self expression" and "copywriting" both of which, largely, serve speaker, not audience, goals.

Therefore, we really sell approaches to problems, not solutions to problems.

Nobody has a guaranteed solution to anything-- but some solutions are more thought-through than others.

That, not the fonts, not the tool (funnels, webinars, one-pagers) is what really sells an idea.

Two things will improve every situation anyone needs to sell anything:

• Admit the perspective. (The idea comes from a perspective, and it will be judged. Let people question it.)
• Show the depth of the thinking behind the solution.

Transparency is Credibility

Credibility, I’m learning more and more, relies on transparency. Even when people agree with us, they get a twinge in the gut when we haven’t delivered information well—and it rubs at the credibility of our assessments.

Recently, at an NPR-sponsored debate at Hunter College—full of likely-liberal-leaning students and NPR listeners, that audience voted overwhelmingly for a conservative position.

The debate: single-payer healthcare vs. privatized.

The universal side took the position that privatized health care was obviously immoral, intoning: agree with me—or you’re obviously immoral.

It didn’t play well, even in a room of people who may have agreed with them. The other side won by simply showing the long division of their argument.

I've found most businesses forget this in their marketing and reporting. Advocating a conclusion or value proposition doesn't make it credible, even to people inclined to agree.

Transparency is credibility.

We Buy the Process and the Approach, Not the Result

If we approach our marketing materials kicking pain points, people respond to us as if we are trying to manipulate them-rightfully -- you hate those emails as much as I do.

Most businesses don't give any information about their business at all -- they use abstract language "consultants" and put well designed photos of projects they've worked on with awkward verbiage on a one-pager, communicating nothing.

Credibility, from the buyer's point of view, comes from the transparency of approach, which we rarely discuss in our public-facing materials.

We buy people's processes and approach, not result.

Two issues, then:

1. The marketing team cannot just be graphic designers, then, they need to fully understand the product.
2. The approach needs to read clearly, and work.

Language will portray us, or betray us, every time.

There are fundamentally two types of business people in the world: those who see business as a game of manipulation, and those who see business as a partnership.

The vast majority of insights about writing, particularly in the content marketing space, is based on manipulation. With my clients, I call it "seeking false leverage."

There's a major difference between "Your business is failing because..." and "in my experience, most businesses fail..."

One is copywriting. The other is credibility and leadership.

If we want clients to hire us, it's simple:

1. Maintain credibility
2. When it comes to money, make it clear we're not looking for sales, we're looking to solve problems, and there are costs.

Language will portray us, or betray us, every time.

If we think it's a battle of egos- it is.
If we think it's about solving problems- it is.

Our approach is the end result.
 

"You cannot tell tone in an email"

When a manager complains to me that a person on their team doesn't write professionally, it's usually because some unnecessary war was started by an email-- and then someone justified the writing with "you cannot tell tone in email."

This is simply not true. It is true, however, that you cannot control tone when you don't pay attention to tone in an email.

Email tips:

1. Use salutations. "The product is in terrible shape" and "Hi Joe, unfortunately the product is in terrible shape" are vastly different messages.

2. Know the takeaway of the email, and give concrete information to ensure its credibility. i.e. Not just "we're going in another direction" but "after meeting with... due to X and Y we've decided to go in another..."

3. Use emotional intelligence. Re-read it. Do you need to add professional, but personal, tone? "I understand that..."

4. Emails curate vast amount of information, including relationship information. Note what you are not saying as much as saying.

5. Always sign off, and offer to explain questions or comments.

When We Write, We Make Naked Our Assumptions

Recently I received an email from a massive retailer, one most Americans have, likely, purchased something from, with the visible part of the email saying: "dear highly valued customer... you have specifically..." And I'm thinking-- if I was really highly valued you would have gone through the extra 30 seconds to loop my first name into your email template-- and therefore, I'm almost certainly not "specifically" chosen for anything!

I find this interesting from the business point of view. Because the marketing team at this retailer will probably notice that I, and many others, did not open this email-- and then conclude that "email marketing doesn't work." Or "no one is interested in this offer."

When the actual takeaway is: no one is interested in doing business with people who think they're stupid.

Highly valued customers don't get called "highly-valued customers."

They get called by their names.

When we write, we make naked our assumptions.

And the audience will judge our assumptions as much, or more, than they will judge the information we are sharing.

Good Writing Requires Depth of Assessment

We suddenly live in a world where a 200-word LinkedIn post is considered "long text." Some clients worry that if they write too much in their thought-leadership social media posts, they will lose the audience's attention.

David Ogilvy, advertising guru, suggested the exact opposite. "Long copy sells more than short," he wrote. But, I would suggest there is a caveat: long _good_ copy sells more than short.

We don't pay attention to long copy because most people don't have particularly interesting thoughts.

It has nothing to do with the length of the text.

Good writing requires depth of assessment.

Although very few businesses seem to embrace it, good writing-- the ability to deliver credible and useful information to a market inside someone else's attention span-- is the unheralded business moat of our time.

Short copy, to me, is a Twitter cop out. It is not an exploration.

Credibility requires mastery and mastery requires assessment.

Assessment requires language.

Think, then write.

Writing Makes Us Vulnerable

For many people, writing anything at all leaves them nervous (and, with good reason). Whenever we frame information we are vulnerable to being judged on our approach.

That's why some employees get upset when they've put four hours into a three-columned table, stock full of 9pt text, illegible to the audience and you must have the tough conversation that it's too busy, too small, and unable to deliver information cleanly.

That moment stinks for everybody involved.

Two suggestions:

1. Check in with the staff member at the beginning, and at 30% of the way through the project-- have them show you how they're approaching it, and if you see the difficult moment coming, then:

2. Ask them: what are three ways we can approach this information? And what are the benefits and drawbacks to each?

Vulnerability makes people defensive-- having the skills to navigate the defensiveness, and improve product, is a budget-saving and culture-saving skillset.

The Value of Clear Writing

Organizations often learn the value of clear writing too late. If major judgments, or decisions, are being made on the quality of the argument and the validity of the information-- decisions that affect the stock market, the economy on the whole, the wealth of individuals and corporations-- ultimately, they are made from the language.

Writing training often arrives too late, long after the horses have left the barn.

Sometimes, and more often than we think, sentences really are worth billions of dollars.

Sometimes the sentence earns that much; and sometimes the unclear sentence loses that much; but, more often than we think-- it is worth that much.

We forget, far too often, that information ultimately is discussed in language. Once the lawyers stop speaking and the salespeople stop selling and the press conferences go away, the language is the thing that will be mulled over by the judges and the public and the decision makers. They will know when the argument is clean, and transparent, and they will know when the argument has gaps.

The gaps are always, always, found out.

Effective writing is the most important business moat in our country. 

Our Clients Want to See Us Think

"Coke is it" doesn't show that Coke tastes good; it just shows that Coke is, well, it.

Although a slogan can work for certain brands, the vast majority of us don't get to tell people we are "it"-- we have to show it to them.

I think, quite often, about the structure of the book "the Great Gatsby" and why Fitzgerald put the story in Nick's hands, not Daisy's, not Tom's, not Gatsby's, not an omniscient third person.

I believe it is because Nick has the intelligence to observe, his observations are interesting, and the audience relates to watching someone think.

That's it.

And it is this, exact, same reason that many businesses are frustrated with their content and internet marketing efforts. The marketing team is putting out slogans, clichés, getting views, and few clients.

It's because the overall strategy is a miss: our clients want to see us think.

The primary question of a prospect is: can I trust the person to get the job done?

See Gatsby: if they trust how we think, they will listen to the approach.

Well written thought-leadership is, ultimately, good branding.

 The Importance of Excellent Assumptions

The search for the planet "Vulcan," according to Neil Degrasse Tyson, was born of the expectation that what we knew (the laws of gravity-- Vulcan was needed to account for Mercury's orbit) was complete information. Turns out, Vulcan never existed. Our thinking about the orbit was incomplete.

I think about this story a lot. Reader comprehension is far more dependent on excellent assumptions of audience and purpose, than excellent sentence structure.

But businesses, as far as I've seen, almost never talk about their assumptions or purposes for the work.

Fairly frequently, I am asked to work with someone-- Joe-- who is struggling with his writing. What's the concern? "It takes him too long; I get very confused."

When I ask Joe "What is the purpose of this document and who is reading it, how much background information do they have?" He says, often, "I don't know." So Joe compensates by dropping a lot of data, just in case.

Discussing assumptions for deliverables is as necessary as discussing structure.

Clarity Always Wins

I love long sentences when, say, Philip Roth or David Foster Wallace write them; but in a technical document, when someone says "the effect of excellent data and regulatory processes on stakeholders is profoundly dependent on the..." I want to throw the document across a room. 

If there are only three useful words in a sentence, but it takes us thirty five words to get them out, they will have a reaction. 

We ask, with every sentence, for the reader to invest their most important resource-- their time. In schools, we teach writing terribly. We say more words = more complex writing (the opposite is true); we also teach tone = credibility, when credibility really relies on transparency and depth of assessment. Clarity always wins.

 If your organization is struggling with this-- two things:

1. No, the employees can't write more succinctly than this without training. It's not their fault, they were never taught how.
2. Let's not pretend it doesn't matter. We've all wanted to chuck documents across a room.

Language is Partnership

The thing they never told us in English class, but is, in my opinion, undeniably true-- language is partnership--it exists so the reader and the writer can take action on information.

In legal documents, to understand the validity of the argument.

In technical documents, to understand the validity of the investigation.

In marketing, to understand the validity of the service.

But due to, essentially, ignorant teaching of writing-- we end up with documents written to detail "what I did/what I think/what I do" not how " what I did/think/do affects you."

Therefore, our marketing focuses on "the service we are selling" and offers little partnership to the reader.

Recognize this? We drive client value, innovation, and optimization.

Gorgeous. Poetic. Just not helpful.

They're consultants, likely: but in wealth? insurance? medical procedures?

Every business in the world seems to be in the business of pretty words and no client partnership.

Effective language must land actionable information to another party.

It's the same process, in every deliverable. There's a takeaway, and there's the reason the takeaway is credible.

Same structure: legal document, or marketing one-pager.