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Scott Keyser

The Three Word Wars: the War for Trust

Write for Results

Three wars are raging in business: a war for attention, a war for trust and a war for ideas.

If you’re not aware of this, you’re already losing.

The War for Trust

Trusting someone means believing they’re honest and mean us no harm, so that we can deal openly with them; it’s safe to work with them. Confidence and faith are bed fellows of trust: confidence is from the Latin, meaning ‘with faith’, and faith is belief in the unseen. When we trust someone, we don’t demand constant proof that they’re alright.

Millennia ago, when a strange tribe appeared at dawn on the brow of a hill, our default was not to trust them; doing anything else jeopardised our very survival. These days, thankfully, it’s less about life and death, although trusting the wrong people can still hurt us.

How do we build trust through the written word? In two ways: mindset and style.

The trust-forming mindset

Whether you’re writing a blog, article, post, bid or thought leadership piece, you need to adopt a mindset of giving, not getting.

Your aim should be to add as much value as you can to the reader — freely, unconditionally.

You may be thinking ‘But if I do that, I’ll have nothing left to say and they’ll probably run off with my best ideas anyway.’

If you’re an expert in your field, have strong views and confidence in your expertise, you’ll never run out of stuff to say. And, yes, a few readers may nick your ideas and parade them as their own, but my 30-year experience of business tells me that’s rare.

The likelier reader reaction is ‘Wow! If they’re willing to give that much away, how much more do they know?!’

The more value you give your reader, the more they’ll trust you and look out for your words. You’ll become both a source and a destination.

Give vs Get. A simple (but not always easy) shift in mindset.

The trust-forming writing style

One of the biggest hurdles in business/corporate writing is overly formal language. In linguistics this is known as ‘register’, the scale of formality of your writing.

Let’s take ‘money’ as an example.

Synonyms for money put words like dosh, dough, bucks, cheddar, plastic, wonga, lucre, LVs (not luncheon vouchers, but lager vouchers) and spondooliks at the bottom of the register. Words like emolument, remuneration, consideration, legal tender, funds and proceeds sit at the top, while plain English words like pay and cash sit in the middle.

As we move up the register, the words get longer and harder to spell; they also get less concrete and more abstract. We can’t pocket remuneration in the same way that we might trouser a wadge of cash. Abstract concepts demand more processing power from the reader and make them work harder. Formal, high-register words tend to be more solemn and less emotive than their lower register cousins. They’re also more dull. The result is distance between you and your reader.

Mid-register plain English, on the other hand, is vivid, visual, conversational language. In Ronseal terms, it does what it says on the tin. Everyone gets it immediately. We all know what cash is and what it does; it creates a mental image in a way that remuneration doesn’t. Mid-register words have more energy, too: consider the difference between negatively impact and crush, wreck, ruin, hurt, hammer, damage or destroy. Can you hear and feel the difference?

Plain English is connective language; it builds rapport with the reader, brings them in close.

To avoid sounding like a corporate drone or a propagandist, we need to adopt an authentic tone of voice; we need to write more as we speak. Gone are the days of ‘B2B’ or ‘B2C’ copy. Now we’re writing ‘H2H’ — human to human. Sounding like a human being will make your reader feel more connected to you, and connection builds trust.

The bottom-line

Combine a giving mindset, loads of valuable content and an authentic tone of voice to start winning the War for Trust.

Next week: the War for Ideas.

If you’d like to know more about RHETORICA®, my writing workshop that will weaponise your words, then book a 15-minute slot to speak to me. Together we can assess the state of your people’s writing skills and I’ll share some new writing tips with you — whether or not we end up working together. (The only thing I ask is that you complete a short questionnaire, to make sure we’re the right fit and that I can help you; hope that’s OK with you. Here’s the link: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/B2K8P7X.) Speak to you soon.

And here are the readability stats for this blog:

war-for-trust

The Three Business Wars

Write for Results

Three wars are raging in business: a war for attention, a war for trust and a war for ideas.

If you’re not aware of this, you’re already losing.

The War for Attention

Attention is the first thing we need from our reader or listener. In Zag: The #1 Strategy of High-Performance Brands, Marty Neumeier claims that every single day we’re bombarded by 3,000 marketing messages, yet our ability to pay attention hasn’t changed a jot. If anything —thanks to the tsunami of competing demands on us — it’s declined.

And the clue’s in the language: pay attention. Giving something our attention incurs a cost to us, which is why we expect a return on our investment of time and energy. So a challenge in this war is to at once grab someone’s attention and convince them that it will be worth their while heeding us.

This is to do with communication devices, like headlines and opening statements, but it also involves reputation, branding, positioning and perception. Taking a genuinely distinctive or ballsy stance on a topic — in other words, taking a risk — is one way of doing it.

Marketers talk about ‘brand positioning’, ie influencing how the market perceives you. But to do that you must take a position on something that matters; you have to have a point of view.  And the bolder that point of view, the more you (or your organisation) will get noticed. This is about being ‘remarkable’. You communicate so strongly that other people talk about you and actively seek out your views; they become your upaid PR agency.

‘Marketing is the price we pay for being unremarkable’ (not my words, sadly).

Be remarkable and you’ll start winning the War for Attention.

Next week: the War for Trust.

In the meantime, if you’d like to know more about RHETORICA®, my writing workshop that will weaponise your words, then book a 15-minute slot to speak to me. Together we can assess the state of your people’s writing skills and I’ll share some new writing tips with you — whether or not we end up working together. (The only thing I ask is that you complete an über-short questionnaire, to make sure we’re the right fit and that I can help you; hope that’s OK with you. Here’s the link: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/B2K8P7X.) Speak to you soon.

RHETORICA — persuasive writing for the 21st century

Write for Results

I would like to thank those of you that attended my RHETORICA 1-day writing workshop last Friday. I really enjoyed meeting you all and hope that you got what you needed from the day to achieve better results from your writing.

If you couldn’t make it, make sure you keep an eye out for our next workshop. During the day I share practical, powerful techniques across the three steps of the writing process (planning, drafting, editing). The day is designed specifically to help you and your business win more work, sell an idea or simply change someone’s mind.

Here’s a taste of some of the feedback I received from delegates.

“Scott Keyser’s ‘persuasive writing for business’ course is full of insights and new information for both the aspiring and experienced business writer. I gained great illumination from the in-depth analysis he gave of a report I had actually read and remembered from a year earlier. The day was well-organised in a state-of-the-art, central London conference complex and the course material was very well-presented. Although fast-paced, there was plenty of time to absorb the information given and discuss delegate’s questions. His intelligent, full day’s presentation will help me to improve my writing immediately. This very practical course for serious business writing is unique and I look forward to his next seminar.”

JA, Business Owner

If you would like to find out more about how you and your business can get better results from your writing, contact me today on +44 (0)20 7183 8086 or email info@scottkeyser.com.

10 top writing tips from RHETORICA® – Tip #7: turn features into benefits

Write for Results

In this series of tips on persuasive writing, I’ve stressed the importance of talking more about the reader than yourself. Instead of describing what you’re going to do, describe what the reader gets as a result. Instead of talking about the features of your product or service, talk about the benefits to the reader.

If benefits are the way to go, let’s clarify three key terms:

A feature is a characteristic, attribute or property of your product or service. The reader may or may not value it.

An advantage is what your product/service does that others don’t do, ie what differentiates it from the rest.

A benefit is how your product/service makes someone’s life better in a way that they will value. It’s about the recipient getting a desirable, positive outcome, resulting in more persuasive writing. Example benefits include a well-behaved puppy, a good night’s sleep, a sizzling sex life, an ROI improved by 20%, staff turnover cut by 42%, twice as many leads converted into sales.

Too many writers confuse benefits and features, or simply list features without converting them into reader benefits. There are three ways to make that conversion:

  1. ‘So what?’
  2. ‘This means that you…’
  3. ‘This gives you…’

Persuasive writing, example 1:

Feature: Our firm has 3,000 competition lawyers in 20 jurisdictions around the world.

‘So what?’

Benefit: You get relevant, practical and current advice on competition law from local people who know the latest regulations and, in some cases, even know the regulators. What that means for you is insight into which of your new branded products will best satisfy the law in each particular jurisdiction and which ones carry the greatest risks in terms of anti-competitive activity.

Persuasive writing, example 2:

Feature: Our journal is peer-reviewed.

Benefit: This means that you can rely on the content, currency and intellectual rigour of every academic paper in our journal. Not only has it been written by an expert in that particular field, it’s been reviewed by one. Authors know that their work will only be published when approved by our review panel. So when you subscribe to BioGenetics Gazette, you know you’re reading scientific papers of the highest quality.

Persuasive writing, example 3:

Feature: We only publish the results of double-blind, randomised, controlled trials (RCT) of medical products.

Benefit: An RCT is considered the gold standard of clinical trials. This gives you the most objective test results, with minimal bias, that you can reliably base critical clinical and business decisions on.

The bottom-line on persuasive writing: when we talk about features, the predominant words are we and our. Yet when we talk about benefits, the predominant words are you and your. Using these magic words in your writing shows that your mindset has shifted to being reader-centric — another reason to major on benefits.

Scott’s book on persuasive writing — RHETORICA: persuasive writing for the 21st century, published by ReThink Press — is due out summer 2016, but you can get a sneak peek at his 18 March open course in central London (). And if you’d like a 15-minute consultation with Scott, to assess your/your team’s writing and get three insights into how to improve it, click here to book a slot: https://calendly.com/scottkeyser91/15min. 

What Terry Wogan teaches us about writing

Write for Results

The much-loved British broadcaster and radio legend died on Sunday aged 77 after five decades in radio and TV. When he retired in 2009 from his BBC Radio 2 breakfast show, his simple goodbye ‘Thank you for being my friend’ spoke volumes about his skill as a communicator.

Despite addressing millions of fans in that farewell, he made each listener feel as if he was talking to them and them alone. He did that by using the magic word you in the second-person singular, and by keeping friend singular, too.

He could have said ‘Thank you all for being my friends’, but that would have betrayed an ‘audience’ mindset. Keeping things singularly personal showed his true mindset: he wanted to speak to each individual. Radio allowed him to achieve ‘mass personalisation’, to establish an intimacy over the airwaves with each of us. As a result, he made us feel special and part of his Radio 2 family.

This simple shift in mindset applies to written communications, too.

Avoid the multiple personality disorder

When addressing multiple readers in a communication — whether an email or an article —inexperienced writers tend to use you in a plural phrase, eg ‘some of you’ or ‘all of you’, as if their readers were huddled around one copy of the document or suffering from multiple personality disorder. When I see phrases like that, I look behind me to see who else is in the room reading over my shoulder.

As David Ogilvy, the great copywriter and founder of ad agency Ogilvy & Mather, said: “Do not address your readers as if they were gathered together in a stadium. When people read your words, they are alone.”

The word audience is another symptom of this disorder.

When I run writing workshops, I often hear ‘I’m writing for my audience’. There are five problems with this word:

  1. ‘Audience’ suggests people are listening (the Latin root of the word audiare), but — despite the fact there is an auditory aspect to writing — our readers read our words.
  2. ‘Audience’ is too broad. It lumps all our readers into the same bucket, implying they’re all the same, which of course they’re not. It also suggests we’re broadcasting our message in the hope some of it lands, rather than personalising it to individual readers or reader-types. It’s the difference between ‘broadcast’ and ‘narrowcast’.
  3. Audiences tend to be passive. Picture an audience in a theatre or cinema: they sit passively, taking in the spectacle; traffic tends to be 1-way. Good writing should feel more like a conversation than a lecture.
  4. Audiences don’t take decisions; individual readers do.
  5. Finally, when you read something do you feel like an ‘audience’? No, of course you don’t. You feel like you: a unique, special, distinct individual and you want to be addressed that way.

When you adopt an ‘audience’ mindset, your connection with the reader is weak. When you have a ‘reader’ mindset (aka being ‘reader-centric’), your connection with the reader is strong. The stronger the connection, the more receptive they’ll be to your message. And that means — if you’re trying to persuade them to do something — they’re likelier to do what you want them to do.

If you have any doubts about the power of personalisation, consider this: if you happened to spot your own name — the ultimate personal word — in a piece of writing, would it make you more or less likely to read it? The answer is obvious.

The more your writing makes an intimate and personal connection with your reader, the more persuasive it will be. That’s why ‘Write for your reader’ is Technique #1 in my RHETORICA® toolkit of 21 persuasive writing techniques. It’s a meta principle, because it supports and informs the other 20 techniques.

You’re writing for an audience of one — your reader. As a natural communicator, Terry Wogan understood that perfectly.

Scott’s book on persuasive writing — RHETORICA: persuasive writing for the 21st century — is due out in April, but you can get a sneak peek at his 18 March open course in central London (). And if you’d like a 15-minute consultation with Scott, to discuss how to improve your comms and get three insights into how to improve your writing, click here to book a slot: https://calendly.com/scottkeyser91/15min. 

Case Study: The Economist

Write for Results

economist

 

The Client
The Economist Group, an international publisher of analysis on international business and world affairs. The Group includes The Economist newspaper, Intelligent Life, Economist Intelligence Unit, CQ Roll Call and EuroFinance.

 The Drivers
Good writing is a core value of The Economist Group. The Group prides itself on authoritative analysis, editorial independence, objectivity and topicality. It expects every member of staff to be able to write well, whatever their role.

In late 2003, Sally Bibb, then Director of Group Sales Development, decided to source external suppliers of sales writing skills. She turned to Write for Results, a writing training consultancy run and co-founded by Scott and top copywriter, Andy Maslen.

Sally asked Scott and Andy to create a 1-day persuasive writing skills workshop that could be rolled out across the Group to multiple, international teams. The goal of the workshop was to give staff a writing ‘toolkit’ that they could start using immediately and rapidly improve the speed, effectiveness and efficiency of their writing.

The workshop also had to be practical, interactive and enjoyable.

The Programme
The resulting workshop, piloted in The Economist’s Third Avenue office in a snow-bound New York in January 2004, was an instant hit.

Spanning the three steps of the writing process – planning, drafting, editing – the workshop covered dozens of writing techniques that are the stock-in-trade of The Economist’s journalists, such as how to open strongly, grab your reader’s attention and hold it from start to finish. Other techniques included: the best way of writing concisely; how to dramatise, emphasise and invigorate your writing; how to produce a better first draft faster and how to score the readability of your (and other people’s) text.

Interactivity came in the form of five writing exercises, with detailed debriefs on each, plus private feedback from the trainer to delegates on their writing samples. The workshop culminated in a ‘Show & Tell’, where delegates shared with the group what they had changed in their writing. Whoever showed the most radical improvement won a small prize (a leather-bound Moleskine diary).

The New York pilot was the prototype of a workshop that, over the last decade, we have now delivered to over 400 staff at The Economist Group.

The Feedback
The workshop gained a reputation within the Group and was always over-subscribed. Attendees rating it never gave it less than 4.5 out of 5.0, or 90% satisfaction, as exemplified here by a small selection of testimonials:

“Excellent course. Probably the most interesting, engaging and influential one-day course I’ve ever attended. Thank you, Scott.”

“Scott is an excellent teacher. I will definitely recommend this workshop to my colleagues. I’ve learnt a lot today.”
“Most useful training course I’ve taken while at The Economist. Excellent content and an excellent instructor. Thank you!”
“This workshop is excellent.”
“Excellent program. Great learning experience. I am looking forward to implementing the strategies.”
“Good blend of structured and on the fly. Very engaging.”
“Scott is an excellent presenter!”
“Very engaging and great tips.”
“Engaging, lively, great reminders.”
“The presenter made the topic interesting, the information is useful and will definitely be used from tomorrow. Thanks!”
“This class surpassed my expectations. It was fun and informative. I will be able to make positive changes in my writing immediately!”
“The instructor was excellent – very helpful!”
“You offered invaluable advice. I really enjoyed attending! I especially appreciated your patience and response to questions and issues. Good luck to you!”
“I liked the trainer’s energy levels and his way of interacting with us.”
“Very important and useful advice on effective techniques for communicating better with people.”
“Great class!”

#Scott’sMusings 14/07/15

Write for Results

growth

Overall, it’s been a good month for SJK Consultants. We’ve delivered: four writing skills workshops to teams in two of The Big Four accountancy firms in London and Geneva (average 95% satisfaction); a successful writing workshop to the PSLs (Professional Support Lawyers) of a ‘magic circle’ law firm; and four writing workshops to defence & security consultants (93% satisfaction). We also won a bid writing coaching programme with a small, innovative pensions consultancy, and helped a GP Federation get shortlisted for a London borough NHS contract.

But it’s not all been plain sailing…We worked with a professional services firm on a major bid and failed to even get shortlisted. They’d over-estimated the quality of their relationship with the buyer. It was like being slapped in the face. But what did I learn from it? That bidders must assess with brutal honesty the quality of their relationship with each buyer, and bid consultants mustn’t accept the bidder’s initial assessment at face value!

Amusing note: the other day I was looking a consultancy website that preaches the merits of personalized communication. Guess what their email address was? info@domainname.

You don’t win a bid from behind a computer

Write for Results

videoshot

Over the last 13 years we’ve observed or been involved in 100s of bids, tenders, pitches and proposals, from a range of organisations across many industries. The beleaguered bid team pour their heart and soul into writing the bid, working late nights and early mornings, often at the expense of their personal and family life. But that’s the wrong thing to focus on; it’s often too late by then. Too many firms over-emphasise the bid document and under-emphasise the relationship with the buyer. You don’t win a bid from behind a computer. The process of winning starts far in advance of this step and the stats seem to back this up.

Most businesses we talk to strive for a win-rate of 75%, ie they’re winning three out of every four pitches they go for. If you were offered this you’d probably take it, wouldn’t you?

Our win-rate is 86%. So what are we doing differently for our clients to hit this rate?

We help our clients to pre-empt the bidding process and tilt the odds of winning in their favour. We do this by front-loading the process, in five steps. We help our clients to:

  1. Nail their value proposition. Without articulating this clearly, the odds of success are against you.
  2. Identify the organisations they want to work with, and the individual buyers in those organisations.
  3. Raise their profile with those buyers and get to know them.
  4. Understand those buyers’ major headaches and put together a proposal for how to overcome them.
  5. Rinse & repeat.

Compare this proactive approach to the typically reactive response of many businesses to RFPs, ITTs and EOIs. Our approach is about playing by your own rules and time-scales, not someone else’s.

So my message to you is this: if the client doesn’t know, like and trust you and your organisation when they issue the tender, your heroic efforts on the bid document are likely to be in vain. The harder you work at the front of the process building great relationships with buyers pre-tender, the more business you’ll win.

Trouble is, most people are poor at building rapport, asking great questions and listening whole-heartedly to the answers, without an agenda. The micro-skills of client relationship building are the biggest business development challenge facing professional services firms today – especially fee-earners who are great technicians but not natural communicators. But that’s for another blog…

To learn more about improving your win-rate, download a free chapter from SJK Consultants Director, Scott Keyser, by clicking here.

Solved: Why most business writing is dull

Write for Results

Sleeping young businessman

Having trained thousands of business people all over the world in writing, I’ve identified three elements of good writing:

Top Content – I can’t help you with this. It is up to you and your business to apply your expertise through research, consultation and thought.

Clarity – if an idea is clear in your head, it will be clear in writing.

Personality – this is what I want to focus on. This is what most business writing lacks.

Many business writers suffer from The Myth of Professionalism.  They believe that to write well it must be ‘professional’, resulting in formal language. The problem with formal language is that words tend to be long, hard to spell, less understood and create a gap between the writer and the reader.

Formal writing is de-humanised and makes the writer sound like a corporate drone. Business writing is too formal and that’s why it’s dull. What do you think?

To read this post in full, click here

What’s more persuasive: head or heart?

Write for Results

Comic Relief

Last Friday saw the UK charity Comic Relief raise an impressive £78 million for individuals in need in the UK and Africa. As I sat, with my family, watching the programme without donating, I felt un-moved. That is until a story came on describing how a 72-year old Grandmother and her granddaughter search for food every day in a mountain of rubbish. The young girl was stalked by men trying to abuse her as she and her frail Grandmother rummaged through the waste for scraps of food. As I watched and listened to the TV, I felt outraged that anyone should have to live like this and it ‘moved’ me.

The language here is key; I was ‘moved’ to donate. ‘Move’ is a multi-layered word meaning ‘motivated to act’ and ‘affected emotionally’. This story is living proof that logic provokes people to think but emotions make them act.

Therefore, when writing, if you don’t affect your reader emotionally, they are less likely to do what you would like them to do.

One technique in my 21-technique toolkit is ‘Establish your objective’ using the acronym K.F.C. What you want your reader to Know, Feel and Commit to doing.

Knowledge is all about wanting to inform your reader, Feeling is about the emotions you want to arouse in them in order for them to take action and Commit to something as a result of reading your words.

To read this post in full, click here