Chapter 2
Planning Your Message: Your Secret Weapon
In This Chapter
Strategizing for success before you write
Knowing your goal and audience
Making people care about your message
Finding opportunities to build relationships
Think for a minute about how you approached a recent writing task. If it was an email, 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, or anything else. Did you put some time into 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 who you’re writing to, what you truly hope to achieve, and how you can deploy your words to maximize success.
Adopting the Plan-Draft-Edit Principle
Prepare yourself for one of the most important pieces of advice in this book: invest time in planning your messages. That means every message, because even an everyday communication like 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 informational interview, that was badly written and full of errors. Or a long, expensively produced document with an email cover note that’s abrupt and sloppy. A poorly done email doesn’t help the cause – whatever the cause is.
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, so start by tossing any preconceived ideas about your inability to write over the side.
When you have a message or document to write, expect to spend your time this way:
Planning – one third
Drafting – one third
Editing – one third
See Chapter 3 for no-fail writing strategies and Chapter 4 for editing tips and tricks.
Fine-Tuning Your Plan: Your Goals and Audience
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.
Defining your goal: Know what you want
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 know that isn’t sufficient. But analyze what you want to accomplish and you can see clearly why it falls short. Your cover letter must yield the following results:
Connect you with the recipient so that you’re a person instead of one more set of documents
Make you stand out – in a good way
Persuade the recipient that your résumé is worth reading
Show that you understand the job and the company
Set up the person to review your qualifications with a favorable mindset
You also need the cover letter to demonstrate your personal qualifications, especially the ability to communicate well.
If you see that your big goal depends on this set of more specific goals it’s obvious why a one-line perfunctory message can’t succeed.
A cover letter for a formal business proposal has its own big goal – to help convince an individual or an institution to finance your new product. In order to do this, the 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 then you realize the proposal must demonstrate:
The financial viability of what you plan to produce
A minimal investment risk and high profit potential
Your own excellent qualifications and track record
Outstanding backup by an experienced team
Special expertise in the field
In-depth knowledge of the marketplace, competition, business environment, and so on.
Defining your audience: Know your reader
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 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. (Check out Body Language For Dummies by Elizabeth Kuhnke to sharpen your ability to read people.)
Unless you’re sending a truly trivial message, begin by creating a profile of the person you’re writing to. If you know the person, begin with the usual suspects, the demographics. Start by determining:
How old? (Generational differences can be huge! See the sidebar ‘Generation gaps: Understanding and leveraging them’)
Male or female?
Engaged in what occupation?
Married, family or some other arrangement?
Member of an ethnic or religious group?
Educated to what degree?
Social and economic position?
After demographics, you have psychographic considerations, 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:
Lifestyle
Values and beliefs
Opinions and attitudes
Interests
Leisure and volunteer activities
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:
Professional background and experience
Position in the organization: What level? Moving up or down? Respected? How ambitious?
Degree of authority
Leadership style: Team-based? Dictatorial? Collaborative? Indiscernible?
Preferred communication style: In-person? Short or long written messages? Telephone? Texting? PowerPoint?
Approach to decision-making: Collaborative or top-down? Spontaneous or deliberative? Risk-taker or play-it-safer?
Information preferences: Broad vision? Detailed? Statistics and numbers? Charts and graphs?
Work priorities and pressures
Sensitivities and hot buttons
Interaction style and preferences: A people person or a systems and technology person?
Type of thinking: Logical or intuitive? Statistics-based or ideas-based? Big picture or micro oriented? Looking for long-range or immediate results?
Weaknesses, perceived by the person or not: lack of technological savvy? People skills? Education?
Type of people the person likes – and dislikes
And of course, your precise relationship to the person matters – your relative positioning; the degree of mutual liking, respect and trust; the simpatico factor.
For example, say you want authorization to buy a new computer. Perhaps your boss is a technology freak who reacts best to equipment requests when they have detailed productivity data – in writing. Or you may report to someone who values relationships, good office vibes and in-person negotiation. Whatever the specifics, you need to frame the same story differently. I’m not saying to manipulate the facts – both stories must be true and fair.
Brainstorming the best content for your purpose
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 which you need them 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, how much you’ll appreciate being chosen for the new role. But unless your boss Jane is a totally selfless person without ambition or priorities of her own, why would she 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 Jane herself most values.
A quick profile (see the preceding section) of Jane reveals a few characteristics to work with:
She likes to see good teamwork in those reporting to her.
She’s a workaholic who is usually overcommitted.
She likes to launch projects and then basically forget about them until results are due.
She’s ambitious and always angling for her next step up.
Considering what you know about Jane, the content of your message can correspond to these traits by including:
Your good record as both a team player and team leader
Your dedication to the new project and willingness to work over and beyond normal hours to do it right
Your ability to work independently and use good judgment with minimal supervision
Your enthusiasm for this particular project which, if successful, will be highly valued by the department and company
Again, all your claims must be true, and you need to provide evidence that they are: a reminder of another project you successfully directed, for example, and handled independently.
Your reader profile can tell you still more. If you wonder how long your memo needs to be, for example, consider Jane’s communication preferences. If she prefers brief memos followed by face-to-face decision-making, keep your memo brief but still cover all the points to ensure that you secure that all-important meeting. However, if she reacts best to written detail, give her more info up front.
Writing to groups and strangers
Profiling one person is easy enough, 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 I discuss in the preceding section apply with 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.
Imagining your readers
Even when an audience is entirely new to you, you can still make good generalizations about what these people are like – or, even better, their concerns. Suppose you’re a dentist who’s taking over a practice and you’re 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. You may wonder
Why should I trust you, an unknown quantity?
Will I feel an interruption in my care? Will there be a learning curve?
Will I like you and find in you what I value in a medical practitioner – aspects such as kindness, respect for my time, attentiveness, and experience?
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 prospective dental patients is unlikely to convince them, but you can comfortably include any, or all, of the following statements in your letter:
I will carefully review all the records so I am personally knowledgeable about your history.
My staff and I pledge to keep your waiting time to a minimum. We use all the latest techniques to make your visits comfortable and pain-free.
I look forward to meeting you in person and getting to know you.
I’m part of your community and participate in its good causes such as . .
Making People Care
Sending your words out into today’s message-dense world is not unlike tossing your message into the sea in a bottle. However, 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 very well-crafted and very 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 and makes the impact you desire.
Connecting instantly with your reader
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.
Say you’re informing the staff that the office will be closed on Tuesday to install new air conditioning. You can write:
Subject: About next Tuesday
Dear Staff:
As you know, the company is always interested in your comfort and well-being. As part of our company improvement plan this past year, we’ve installed improved lighting in the hallways, and in response to your request that we . . .
Stop! No one is reading this! Instead, try this:
Subject: Office closed Tuesday
We’re installing new air-conditioning! Tuesday is the day, so we’re giving you a holiday.
I’m happy the company is able to respond to your number 1 request on the staff survey and hope you are too. . .
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 emails.
Focusing on what’s-in-it-for-them
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. So rather than your press release headline saying
New Widget Model to Debut at Expo Magnus on Thursday
Try
Widget 175F Day-to-Night Video Recorder Ends Pilfering Instantly
If you’re raising money for a non-profit, you may be tempted to write a letter to previous donors that begins like many you probably receive:
For 75 years, Little White Lights has been helping children with learning disabilities improve their capacities, live up to their potential and feel more confident about their educational future.
But, don’t you respond better to letters that open more like this?
For his first five years of school, Lenny hated every second. He couldn’t follow the lessons, so he stopped trying and stopped even listening. But this September Lenny starts college – because the caring people and non-traditional teaching at Little White Lights showed him how to learn. He’s one of 374 children whose lives we transformed since our not-for-profit organization was established, with your help, nine years ago.
The second version works better not just because it’s more concrete, but because it takes account of two factors that all recipients probably share: 1) a concern for children, and 2) a need to be reassured that their donations are well used.
Highlighting benefits, not features
Features describe characteristics – a car having a 200 mph engine; an energy drink containing 500 units of caffeine; a hotel room furnished with priceless antiques.
Benefits are what features give us – the feeling that you can be the fastest animal on earth (given an open highway without radar traps); the ability to stay up for 56 hours to make up all the work you neglected; the experience of high luxury for the price of a hotel room, at least briefly.
Benefits have more to do with feelings and experiences than actual data. Marketers have known the power of benefits for a long time, but neuroscientists have recently confirmed the principle, noting 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.
Finding the concrete, limiting the abstract
The Little White Lights example in the earlier section ‘Focusing on what’s-in-it-for-them’ demonstrates how to effectively focus on a single individual and simultaneously deliver a powerful, far-reaching message. One concrete example is almost always more effective than reams of high-flown prose and empty adjectives.
Make things real for your readers with these techniques:
Tell stories and anecdotes. They must embody the idea you want to communicate, the nature of your organization or your own value. An early television show about New York City used a slogan along the lines, ‘Eight million people, eight million stories.’ A good story is always there, lurking, even in what may seem everyday or ordinary. But finding it can take some thinking and active looking. In Chapter 9, I show you how.
Use examples – and make them specific. Tell customers how your product was used or how your service helped solve a problem. Give them strong case studies of implementations that worked. Inside a company, tell change-resistant staff members how another department saved three hours by using the new ordering process, or how a shift in benefits can cut their out-of-pocket healthcare costs by 14 per cent. And if you want people to use a new system, give them clear guidelines, perhaps a step-by-step process to follow.
Use visuals to explain and break up the words. Readers who need to be captured and engaged generally shy away from uninterrupted type. Plenty of studies show that people remember visual lessons better, too. Look for ways to graphically present a trend, a change, a plan, a concept or an example. In a way that suits your purpose and medium, incorporate photographs, illustrations, charts, graphs and video. When you must deliver your message primarily in words use graphic techniques like headlines, subheads, bullets, typeface variations and icons – like this book!
Give readers a vision. Good leaders know that a vision is essential, whether they’re running companies or for public office. You’re usually best off framing your message in big-picture terms that make people feel the future will be better in some way. I’m not suggesting you make empty promises; instead, look for the broadest implications of an important communication and use details to back up that central concept and make it more real. Focusing a complicated document this way also makes it more organized and more memorable – both big advantages.
Eliminate meaningless hyperbole. What’s the point of saying something like, ‘This is the most far-reaching, innovative, ground-breaking piece of industrial design ever conceived’? Yet business writing is jam-packed with empty, boring claims.
How the product improves people’s lives
How the non-profit knows its money is helping people
How the service solves problems
How you personally helped your employer make more money or become more efficient.
Proof comes in many forms: statistics, data, images, testimonials, surveys, case histories, biographies, 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.
Choosing Your Written Voice: Tone
Presentation trainers often state that the meaning of a spoken message is communicated 55 per cent by body language, 38 per cent by tone of voice, and only 7 per cent by the words. Actually this formula has been thoroughly debunked and denied by its creator – the psychologist Albert Mehrabian – but it does imply 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.
The following sections explore some ways to find and adopt the right tone.
Being appropriate to the occasion, relationship and culture
Pause before writing and think about the moment you’re writing in. Obviously if you’re communicating bad news, you don’t want to sound all 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: make it as enticing as possible.
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 formal form of communication. (See Part IV of this book for some ideas on effective global communication.)
Writing as your authentic self
Never try to impress anyone with how educated and literate you are. Studies show that in reality people believe that those who write clearly and use simple words are smarter than those whose writing abounds in fancy phrases and complicated sentences.
Being relentlessly respectful
Address people courteously and use their names
Close with courtesy and friendliness
Write carefully and proofread thoroughly; many people find poorly written messages insulting
Avoid acronyms, jargon, and abbreviations that may be unfamiliar to some readers
Never be abrupt or rude or demanding
Try to understand and respect cultural differences
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:
Madge, I need you to read this book tonight and give me a complete rundown of the content first thing tomorrow. Thanks.
Or:
Madge, I need your help – please read this book tonight. The author is coming in tomorrow to talk about engaging us. I’m reading another of his books myself and if we can compare notes first thing tomorrow, I’ll feel much more prepped. Thanks!
Either way Madge may not be thrilled at how her evening looks, but treating her respectfully and explaining why you’re giving her this intrusive assignment accomplishes a lot: she’ll be more motivated, more enthusiastic, more interested in doing a good job, and happier to feel part of your team. At the cost of writing a few more sentences, you improve her attitude and perhaps even her long-range performance.
Smiling when you say it
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.
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.
Suppose you’ve asked the purchasing department to buy a table for your office and were denied without explanation. You could write to both your boss and the head of purchasing a note such as the following:
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’ heads 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.
Sometimes the challenge isn’t to control bad feelings, but to overcome a blah mood that leads your writing to sound dull and uninspired when you need it to sound persuasive and engaging. Knowing your own biological clock is helpful, so you can focus on the task that requires the most energy when you’re most naturally up.
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.
Using Relationship-Building Techniques
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.
Personalizing what you write
In many countries, business emails 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 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 – 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.
Similarly, it feels friendlier and less formal to use contractions: isn’t instead of is not, won’t instead of will not. But if your message is addressed to a non-native English speaker or will be translated, contractions may be confusing. Part IV explores other techniques for communicating effectively between cultures.
Framing messages with ‘you’ not ‘I’
Just accept it: people care more about themselves and what they want than they do about you. This simple-sounding concept has important implications for business writing.
Suppose you’re a software developer and your company has come up with a dramatically better way for people to manage their online reputations. You may be tempted to announce on your website:
We’ve created a great new product for online reputation management that no one ever imagined possible.
Or you could say:
Our great new Product X helps people manage their online reputation better than ever before.
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 more powerful:
You want a better way to solve your online reputation management challenges? We have what you need.
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 complaint has been received . . .
Or:
Thank you for writing to us about your recent problem with . . .
Coming up with a ‘you frame’ is often challenging. Doing so may draw you into convoluted or passive-sounding language – for example, ‘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 want to relate to your reader instantly, figuring out a way to start with ‘you’ can be worth the effort and a brief dip into the passive. (See Chapters 3, 4, and 5 for ways to expand your resource of techniques for fine-tuning your tone through word choice, sentence structure and customized content.)