What Sales and Customer-Facing Professionals Can Learn from The Elements of Style

Renee's proposal opener used thirty-one words to avoid making one specific claim. Salespeople often pad pitches with phrases like "the potential to deliver significant value" and "the opportunity to further explore," because the vagueness feels safe — it can't be technically wrong if it never says anything specific.

Write the concrete claim first — the number, the timeline, the specific outcome — before adding any framing language around it. If a sentence in your proposal could be copied into a competitor's proposal without changing a word, that sentence isn't earning its place.

"Support could be provided to help your team achieve its objectives" hides who does what for whom, and "results have been seen by other clients" avoids saying which clients, which results, or how they were achieved. A reader skeptical by default has nothing solid to evaluate.

Replace vague benefit language with a specific claim and a named mechanism — "our onboarding team walks your staff through setup over four days" instead of "we support your onboarding objectives." A concrete claim is also one your prospect can actually verify, which builds more trust than a claim too vague to check.

A proposal buries the pricing detail in the middle of a paragraph about implementation, so a reader skimming for cost has to hunt for it. An email response addresses the prospect's second question first and their first question last, making the reply feel disorganized even when the content is solid.

Answer questions in the order they were asked, and give each distinct topic — pricing, timeline, implementation — its own paragraph or section so a skimming reader can find what matters to them. Keep the response and the pricing table in the same message rather than as a separate attachment they have to go find.

None of this means every pitch needs to read like a spec sheet; rapport, tone, and a sense of the relationship still matter in sales writing. These habits are meant to sharpen the claims inside a pitch, not flatten the pitch itself, so a prospect has something concrete to respond to underneath whatever warmth you bring to the message. A salesperson who has practiced this can still write a warm, relational email that also contains a specific, checkable claim.