What Sales and Customer-Facing Professionals Can Learn from On Writing Well
Devon had sent the same proposal template to a dozen prospects with only the company name changed, and it opened with "Our best-in-class, enterprise-grade solution empowers organizations to unlock transformative value." A prospect finally replied asking, bluntly, what the product actually did for a team her size. Devon reread the proposal and realized it never really said. It listed benefits in the abstract — efficiency, scalability, alignment — without once describing a specific task the software would take off someone's plate. Devon wrote back a plain paragraph instead: your ops team currently spends about a day a week reconciling two spreadsheets by hand, and this replaces that with one dashboard. The prospect wrote back within the hour, asking for a demo. Devon kept the polished template for the next pitch out of habit, then deleted the opening paragraph and started, every time after that, with the plain sentence instead.
The whole book, compressed
This edition works through 4 core lessons — take them one at a time, not all at once.
What's different for your conditions
Tap whichever ones sound like you. Nothing here is sent or saved — it's just for your own noticing.
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The core lessons, applied to you
Clutter is the enemy in your proposals and outreach
A salesperson sends a cold email full of phrases like "revolutionize your workflow" and "unlock unprecedented efficiency" without naming a single specific task the product changes. The prospect can't tell the email apart from ten others in the same inbox using the same phrases, and deletes it without replying. Practice: Rewrite the first two sentences of any outreach to name one specific, concrete task or number relevant to the prospect's actual situation, with no adjectives borrowed from a template. If a sentence could be sent to any company in any industry unchanged, it needs a specific detail added or it needs to go.
Rewrite the first two sentences of any outreach to name one specific, concrete task or number relevant to the prospect's actual situation, with no adjectives borrowed from a template. If a sentence could be sent to any company in any industry unchanged, it needs a specific detail added or it needs to go.
Clarity of writing requires clarity of thought about what you're actually offering
A salesperson writes that a product "drives operational excellence across the value chain" without being able to say, if pressed, exactly which task it replaces or how long that task currently takes someone. The vague pitch is standing in for an offer that hasn't been thought through in concrete terms yet. Practice: Before writing any pitch, write the plainest possible sentence describing the exact task or pain the product addresses, using no marketing vocabulary at all. Build the outward-facing version from that plain sentence rather than starting from the polished language.
Before writing any pitch, write the plainest possible sentence describing the exact task or pain the product addresses, using no marketing vocabulary at all. Build the outward-facing version from that plain sentence rather than starting from the polished language.
Revise ruthlessly on the emails prospects actually read
A salesperson writes a follow-up email quickly between calls and sends it with three separate asks buried across four paragraphs, so the prospect isn't sure what response is actually being requested. The email gets a polite non-answer instead of a decision. Practice: After drafting any customer-facing email, cut it down to one clear ask stated in the first two sentences, with supporting detail after. If there are genuinely two asks, split them into two emails rather than one crowded one.
After drafting any customer-facing email, cut it down to one clear ask stated in the first two sentences, with supporting detail after. If there are genuinely two asks, split them into two emails rather than one crowded one.
Personality survives simplicity in customer-facing writing
Once the inflated marketing language is gone, a salesperson's actual expertise and care for the prospect's specific problem tend to come through more clearly, and buyers notice the difference between a template and someone who has actually thought about their situation. A plain, specific email reads as more confident, not less polished, because it shows the writer already understands the problem well enough to skip the performance.
Sales training and brand guidelines sometimes require specific approved phrases that lean toward the inflated end of the spectrum, so cutting all of it may not be fully within your control. Where you have flexibility, keep required phrases to a minimum and spend the rest of the message on plain, specific detail about the prospect's actual situation — the required language shouldn't be the whole pitch.
Name one thing, honestly
Pull up your last outreach template — how many sentences in it could be sent to a different company, in a different industry, completely unchanged?
Good. Now look back at the "Try this" line under whichever lesson feels most connected to what you just wrote, and treat that as this week's actual assignment — not all 4 at once.
The practices from this edition
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Run this for seven days
After drafting any customer-facing email, cut it down to one clear ask stated in the first two sentences, with supporting detail after. If there are genuinely two asks, split them into two emails rather than one crowded one.