Chapter 2
IN THIS CHAPTER
Strategizing for success before you write
Knowing your goal and audience
Making people care about your message
Using the correct tone
Finding opportunities to build relationships
Think for a minute about how you approached a recent writing task. If it was an email message, how much time did you spend considering what to write? A few minutes? Seconds? Or did you just start typing?
Now bring a more complex document to mind: a challenging letter, proposal, report, marketing piece, blog post, or anything else. Did you put some time into thinking about and shaping your message before you began writing, or did you just plunge in?
This chapter demonstrates the power of taking time before you write to consider whom you’re writing to, what you truly hope to achieve, and how you can generate the right content.
Prepare yourself for one of the most important pieces of advice in this book: Invest time in planning your messages. And that means every message. Even an everyday communication such as an email can have a profound impact on your success. Everything you write shows people who you are.
I can’t count the times I’ve received an email asking for a referral or an informational interview that was badly written and full of errors. I didn’t respond. Would you? Or a long, expensively produced document with an email cover note that’s abrupt and sloppy. A poorly written email message doesn’t help the cause — whatever the cause may be.
This strategic approach has no relation to how you learned to write in school, unless you had an atypical teacher who was attuned to writing for results. Start by tossing out any preconceived ideas about your inability to write, because in my experience, everyone can learn to write better.
When you have a message or document to write, expect your time to be divided equally between these tasks:
You probably wonder if this system helps you write faster or slower. For most people it’s a time shift. When you take a write-first-then-think approach, you probably get lost in the middle, then stare at your important messages for a while with vague questions about whether they could read better or be more persuasive. Planned messages are easy to organize, and the effectiveness is built in because you’ve already customized the content to your goal and reader.
The real issue is less about time and more about results. Planned messages bring you what you want much more often. Try the strategy I recommend and see what happens. My money is on more success. Also, this approach quickly becomes a habit and more — it becomes a problem solver. Practice it every day with routine messaging, and you’ll be ready to field big challenges with confidence.
A well-crafted message is based on two key aspects: your goal and your audience. The following section shows you how to get to know both intimately.
Your first priority is to know exactly what you want to happen when the person you’re writing to reads what you’ve written. Determining this is far less obvious than it sounds.
Consider a cover letter for your résumé. Seen as a formal but unimportant necessity toward your ultimate goal — to get a job — a cover letter can just say:
Dear Mr. Blank, Here is my résumé. —Jack Slade
Intuitively you probably know that this isn’t sufficient. But analyze what you want to accomplish and you can see clearly why it falls short. Your cover letter must:
You also need the cover letter to demonstrate your personal qualifications, especially the ability to communicate well. If you see that accomplishing your big goal, getting a shot at the job, depends on this set of more specific goals, it’s obvious why a one-line perfunctory message won’t do well against the competition.
A cover letter for a formal business proposal has its own big goal: help convince an individual or an institution to finance your new product, for example. To do this, the cover letter’s role is to connect with the prospective buyer, entice him to actually read at least part of the document, predispose him to like what he sees, present your company as better than the competition, and show off good communication skills.
How about the proposal itself? If you break down this goal into a more specific subset, you realize ideally the proposal must demonstrate:
To reap the benefit of goal definition, you must take time to look past the surface. Write every message with a clear set of goals. If you don’t know your goals, don’t write at all.
Try This: Invariably one of your goals is to present yourself in writing as professional, competent, knowledgeable, creative, empathetic, and so on, but don’t let me tell you who you are or want to be! Create a list of the personal and professional qualities you want other people to perceive in you. Then remember, every time you write, be that person. Ask yourself how that individual handles the tough stuff. Your answers may amaze you. This technique isn’t mystical, just a way of accessing your own knowledge base and intuition. You may be able to channel this winning persona into your in-person experiences, too.
You’ve no doubt noticed that people are genuinely different in countless ways: what they value, their motivations, how they like to spend their time, their attitude toward work and success, how they communicate and make decisions, and much more. One ramification of these variables is that they read and react to your messages in different and sometimes unexpected ways.
When you meet someone in person and want to persuade her to your viewpoint, you automatically adapt to her reactions as you go along. You respond to a host of clues. Beyond interruptions, comments, and questions, you also perceive facial expression, body language, tone of voice, nervous mannerisms, and many other indicators.
Unless you’re sending a truly trivial message, begin by creating a profile of the person you’re writing to. There’s a really big payoff in doing this for people who are important to you, such as your boss. You emerge with illuminating guidelines on how to improve all your interactions with him or her, as well as knowing what to say and how to say it. This helps you with your face-to-face interaction as well as writing.
When the situation involves someone you don’t deal with often, or don’t know at all, the depth of the profile you create depends on how important the results are to you. If you’re responding to a customer query, you don’t need to know his decision-making style. If you’re writing to the department head with a request, you might want to find out how much information he prefers to have, what his priorities are, and more.
Before you try profile building, it might seem daunting to characterize someone when so much that drives each person is invisible. Trust me, you know much more about your audience than you think. In the case of a person already familiar to you, your observations, experience, and intuition go a long way. It’s a matter of drawing on these resources in a systematic manner, especially your memory of how she reacted to previous interactions.
Try This: Here’s the system I recommend. For now, suppose the person is someone you know. Begin with the usual suspects: demographics. Write down what you already know about the person, or take your best guess:
After demographics, consider psychographics, the kind of factors marketing specialists spend a lot of time studying. Marketers are interested in creating customer profiles to understand and manipulate consumer buying. For your purposes, some psychographic factors that can matter are:
You also need to consider factors that reflect someone’s positioning, personality, and, in truth, entire life history and outlook on the world. Some factors that may directly affect how a person perceives your message include the following:
And of course, your precise relationship to the person matters, as well as your relative positioning and the degree of mutual liking, respect, and trust — the simpatico factor.
For example, say you want authorization to produce a video explaining your department’s work to show at an employee event. Perhaps your boss is someone who’s enthusiastic about video. Or you may report to someone who values relationships and wants to cultivate a positive environment. This boss would probably welcome a way to show staff members they are valued. Or she may be a person who likes innovation and the chance to be first in the neighborhood. To gain approval, it’s best to frame the story differently for the specific decision-maker. I’m not saying you should distort the facts or omit any: The story you tell must be true and fair. But the focus and emphasis can be adapted.
Perhaps defining your goal and audience so thoroughly sounds like unnecessary busy-work. But doing so helps immeasurably when you’re approaching someone with an idea, product, or service that you need him to buy into.
Suppose your department is planning to launch a major project that you want to lead. You could write a memo explaining how important the opportunity is to you, how much you can use the extra money, or how much you’ll appreciate being chosen for the new role. But unless your boss, Mark, is a totally selfless person without ambition or priorities of his own, why would he care about any of that?
You’re much better off highlighting your relevant skills and accomplishments. Your competitors for the leadership position may equal or even better such a rundown, so you must make your best case. Think beyond yourself to what matters most to Mark.
A quick profile of Mark reveals a few characteristics to work with:
Considering what you know about Mark, the content of your message can correspond to these traits by including:
Again, all your claims must be true, and you need to provide evidence that they are. For example, you could include a reminder of another project you successfully directed and handled independently.
Your reader profile can tell you still more. If you wonder how long your memo needs to be, consider Mark’s communication preferences. If he prefers brief memos followed by face-to-face decision-making, keep your memo concise, but still cover the major points to secure that all-important meeting. However, if he reacts best to written detail, give him more information up front.
Creating a reader profile enables you to create a blueprint for the content of all your messages and documents. After you’ve defined what you want and analyzed your audience in relation to the request, brainstorm the points that may help you win your case with that person. Your brainstorming gives you a list of possibilities. Winnowing out the most convincing points is easy, and you can organize simply by prioritizing, as I show you how to do in Chapter 3.
Try to think of a written communication that doesn’t ask for something. It’s pretty tough. There’s an advantage to seeing every message as a request: Doing so sets you up to frame your message with the right content for the person to whom you’re writing.
Profiling someone you know is relatively easy, but you often write to groups rather than individuals, as well as to people you haven’t met and know nothing about. The same ideas covered in the preceding section apply to groups and strangers, but they demand a little more imagination on your part.
Like Buffet, you may be able to think of a particular person to represent a larger group. If you’ve invented a new item of ski equipment, for example, think about a skier you know who’d be interested in your product and profile that person. Or create a composite profile of several such people, drawing on what they have in common plus variations. If you’re a business strategy consultant, think of your best clients and use what you know about them to profile your prospects.
Even when an audience is entirely new to you, you can still make good generalizations about what these people are like and even better, their needs. Suppose you’re a dentist who’s taking over a practice and writing to introduce yourself to your predecessor’s patients. Your basic goal is to maintain that clientele. You needn’t know the people to anticipate many of their probable concerns. You can assume, for example, that your news will be unwelcome because long-standing patients probably liked the old dentist and dislike change and inconvenience, just like you probably would yourself.
You can go further. Anticipate your readers’ questions. Just put yourself in their shoes. The dental patients may wonder:
When writing, you may need to build a somewhat indirect response to some of the questions you anticipate from readers. Writing something like “I’m a really nice person” to the dental patients is unlikely to convince them, but you can comfortably include any or all of the following statements in your letter:
Everyone has a problem to solve. What’s your reader’s problem? The HR executive must fill open jobs in ways that satisfy other people. The CEO can pretty well be counted on to have one eye on the bottom line and the other on the big picture — that’s her role. If you’re pitching a product, you can base a prospective customer profile on the person for whom you’re producing that product.
Sending your words out into today’s message-dense world is not unlike tossing them into the sea in a bottle. Worse, your message is now among a trillion bottles, all of which are trying to reach the same moving and dodging targets. So, your competitive edge is in shaping a better bottle … or rather, message.
Any message you send must be well crafted and well-aimed, regardless of the medium or format. The challenge is to make people care enough to read your message and act on it in some way. The following sections explore the tools you need to ensure your bottle reaches its target, that the target is moved to take the message out, and that the message makes the impact you desire.
Only in rare cases do you have the luxury these days of building up to a grand conclusion, one step at a time. Your audience simply won’t stick around.
Suppose you’re informing the staff that the office will be closed on Tuesday to install new air conditioning. You can write:
Stop! No one is reading this! Instead, try this:
Notice in the preceding example that the subject line of the email is part of the lead and planned to hook readers as much as the first paragraph of the actual message. Chapter 6 has more ideas of ways to optimize your email communication.
In marketers’ terms, the acronym is WIIFM (what’s-in-it-for-me). The air-conditioning email in the preceding section captures readers by telling them first that they have a day off, then follows up by saying that they’re getting something they wanted. Figuring out what’s going to engage your readers often takes a bit of thought.
If you’re selling a product or service, for example, zero in on the problem it solves. Rather than your press release headline saying,
New Widget Model to Debut at Expo Magnus on Thursday
Try:
Widget 175F Day-to-Night VideoCam Ends Pilfering Instantly
If you’re raising money for a nonprofit, you may be tempted to write a letter to previous donors that begins like many you probably receive:
For 25 years, Freedom’s Path has helped incarcerated women transition to the outside world by providing job training, counseling, and support services. Your donations have been essential to equipping young transgressors to …
This sounds worthy but yawn-inducing. Would you respond better to a letter that opens more like this?
The second version works better not just because it’s more concrete, but because it takes into account two factors that all recipients probably share: (1) a concern for disadvantaged young people, and (2) a need to be reassured that their donations are well used.
Benefits have more to do with feelings and experiences than actual data. Marketers have long understood the power of benefits, but psychologists now confirm that most buying decisions are made emotionally rather than logically. You choose a car that speaks to your personality instead of the one with the best technical specs, and then you try to justify your decision on rational grounds. You buy a dress that makes you feel beautiful, not because the seams are cleverly designed.
The Freedom’s Path example in the previous section demonstrates that focusing on a single individual delivers a more effective message. One concrete example is almost always better than reams of high-flown prose and empty adjectives. Make things real with techniques like these:
Proof comes in many forms: statistics, data, images, testimonials, surveys, awards, promotions, case histories, biographies, social media followers and likes, and video and audio clips. Figure out how to track your success and prove it. You end up with first-rate material to use in all your communication.
Presentation trainers often state that the meaning of a spoken message is communicated 55 percent by body language, 38 percent by tone of voice, and only 7 percent by the words. Actually, this formula has been thoroughly debunked and denied by its creator, the psychologist Albert Mehrabian, because it misinterpreted a very limited study. However, it does suggest some important points for writing.
But even lacking facial expression and gesture, writing does carry its own tone, and this directly affects how readers receive and respond to messages. Written tone results from a combination of word choice, sentence structure, and other technical factors.
Also important are less tangible elements that are hard to pin down. You’ve probably received messages that led you to sense the writer was upset, angry, resistant, or amused, even if only a few words were involved. Sometimes even a close reading of the text doesn’t explain what’s carrying these emotions, but you just sense the writer’s strong feelings.
Pause before writing and think about the nature of the message. Obviously if you’re communicating bad news, you don’t want to sound chipper and cheery. Always think of your larger audience, too. If the company made more money last month because it eliminated a department, best not to treat the new profits as a triumph. Current staff members probably aren’t happy about losing colleagues and are worried about their own jobs. On the other hand, if you’re communicating about a staff holiday party, sounding gloomy and bored doesn’t generate high hopes for a good time. The same is true if you’re offering an opportunity or assigning a nuisance job: Find the enticing side.
And you want to be especially careful if you’re writing to someone in another country, even an English-speaking one. Most countries still prefer a more formal form of communication than American business English.
Authentic means being a straightforward, unpretentious, honest, trustworthy person — and writer. It doesn’t mean trying for a specific writing style. Clarity is always the goalpost. This absolutely holds true even for materials written to impress. A proposal, marketing brochure, or request for funding gains nothing by looking or sounding pompous and weighty.
People whose job is answering the phone are told by customer service trainers to smile before picking up the call. Smiling physically affects your throat and vocal chords, and your tone of voice. You sound friendly and cheerful and may help the person on the other end of the phone feel that way, too.
The idea applies to writing as well. You need not smile before you write (though it’s an interesting technique to try), but be aware of your own mood and how easily it transfers to your messages and documents.
Hal, Jeanne: I just can’t believe how indifferent purchasing is to my work and what I need to do it. This ignorance is really offensive. I’m now an Associate Manager responsible for a three-person team and regular meetings are essential to my …
Put yourself in the recipients’ places to see how bad the impact of such a message can be — for you. At the least, you’re creating unnecessary problems, and at worst, perhaps permanent bad feelings. Why not write (and just to the purchasing officer) this, instead:
Hi, Hal. Do you have a minute to talk about my request for a small conference table? I was surprised to find that it was denied and want to share why it’s important to my work.
Try This: If you don’t have the luxury of waiting for a good mood to hit before writing, try a method I often use. I churn out the basic document regardless of my spirits, and later when I’m feeling bouncier, inject the energy and enthusiasm I know the original message is missing. Typical changes involve switching out dull passive verbs and substituting livelier ones, picking up the tempo, editing out the dead wood, and adding plusses I overlooked when I felt gray. Chapter 3 is chock-full of ideas to energize your language.
People naturally prefer being around positive, dynamic, enthusiastic people, and they prefer receiving messages with the same qualities. Resolve not to complain, quibble, or criticize in writing. People are much more inclined to give you what you want when you’re positive — and they see you as a problem-solver rather than a problem-generator.
As with tone, awareness that building relationships is always one of your goals puts you a giant step ahead. Ask yourself every time you write how you can improve the relationships with that individual. A range of techniques is available to help.
Apply these guidelines whether you’re writing to a superior, a subordinate, or peer. You don’t need to be obsequious to an executive higher up the chain than you are (in most cases), though often you should be more formal. Nor should you condescend to those lower down. Consider, for example, how best to assign a last-minute task to someone who reports to you. You could say,
Terry, I need you to research consultants who specialize in cultural change and send me 10 names tomorrow. Thanks.
Or:
Terry, I need your help. The CEO called a surprise meeting for tomorrow afternoon to discuss ideas for making some organizational changes. I’d like to be ready to describe some consultants we might call on. Can you do the groundwork by morning and come up with 10 possible specialists? I’ll appreciate it very much. Thanks!
Either way, Terry may not be thrilled at how his evening looks, but treating him respectfully and explaining why you’re giving him this overtime assignment accomplishes a lot: He’ll be more motivated, more enthusiastic, more interested in doing a good job and happier to be part of your team. At the cost of writing a few more sentences, you improve your subordinate’s attitude and perhaps even his long-range performance.
Whatever their age, people who report to you are doing your work and helping you perform better and look good. Why not make them feel as important as they are, in ways that matter to them?
In many countries, business email and letters that get right down to business seem cold, abrupt, and unfeeling. Japanese writers and readers, for example, prefer to begin with the kind of polite comments you tend to make when meeting someone in person: “How have you been?” “Is your family well?” “Isn’t it cold for October?” Such comments or questions may carry no real substance, but they serve an important purpose. They personalize the interaction to better set the stage for a business conversation.
Some techniques you can use to make your writing feel warm are useful, but they may not translate between different cultures. For example, salutations like Hi, John set a less formal tone than Dear John. Starting with just the recipient’s name — John — is informal to the point of assuming a relationship already exists. But both ways may not be appropriate if you’re writing to someone in a more formal country than your own. A formal address, such as Mr. Charles, Ms. Brown, Dr. Jones, General Frank, may be called for. In many cultures, if you overlook this formality and other signs of respect, you can lose points before you even begin. Or not even get the chance to begin.
Embrace this basic concept: People care infinitely more about themselves, their problems, and what they want than they do about you. This simple-sounding premise has important implications for business communication.
Suppose you’re a software developer and your company has come up with a new template for creating a home page. Your first thought for an announcement on your website might be:
We’ve created an amazing new home page template better than anyone ever imagined was possible.
Or you could say:
Our great new Template X helps people build beautiful home pages with the least effort ever.
The second example is better because it’s less abstract and it makes the product’s purpose clear. But see if you find this version even more effective:
Want a faster way to create a knock-out home page in half the time, with resources you already own? We have what you need: Template X.
The principle works for everyday email, letters, and online communication, too. For example, when you receive a customer complaint, instead of saying,
We have received your complaint about …
You’re better off writing:
Your letter explaining your disappointment with our product has been received …
Or, much better:
Thank you for writing to us about your recent problem with …
Coming up with a “you frame” can be challenging. It may draw you into convoluted or passive-sounding language, such as, “Your unusual experience with our tree-pruning service has come to our attention.” Ordinarily I recommend a direct statement (like, “We hear you’ve had an unusual experience with …”), but in customer service situations and others where you need to instantly relate to your reader, figuring out a way to start with “you” can be worth the effort and a brief dip into passive voice.
Before sending a message, always ask yourself: How will it make the person feel? When you care, it shows. And you succeed.
In Chapters 3, 4, and 5, I give you a full set of techniques to draw on for delivering your message clearly and powerfully. Discover how to use the tools of writing — words, sentences, and structure — to say what you mean in a way most likely to earn respect, support, and agreement.