Everyone’s heard of the 30-second elevator speech. But sometimes, it’s a much taller building. We were recently asked—and this will happen to you, too, soon, if it hasn’t already, so brace yourself—to present our pitch before a business group, with a six-minute time allotment. Quick: How do you present your business, to a target-rich environment like that, in six minutes? Follow-on question: How do you carve up those six minutes? Do you spend all of them, well, presenting? Audience first If you’ve read any articles from us here at Copel Communications, you’ll know that we take a near-religious approach to taking a customer-back approach to everything we do. Start with the customer. What do they want and/or need? Then work back from there, i.e., “customer-back” approach. Same thing applies for your six-minute preso slot. Know who’s in that audience, in advance. Do your homework. Are they like-minded businesspeople in a similar or adjacent vertical? Or—as was the case for us—are they perhaps members of a networking group, looking to lubricate the two-way process of referrals? Get your best possible grasp on who they are. What they need. How many will be in the room. The type of room: real or virtual. How much time will there be for Q&A? Is that baked into the six-minutes? Or is it additional? And if so, how much? Rule of thumb: The more annoying you can be with preliminary questions like these, the more you’ll succeed. Working backward So. We were going to be facing a business networking group—a common venue. What kinds of businesses? All kinds, with the distinction that they, like us, all operated in the B2B space. How did they differ from us? Oooh. That’s a good question you should ask yourself. In other words, how can you differentiate yourself and your offerings? That’s how you’ll cut through the clutter, make your presentation interesting and engaging, and increase your odds of successful business development. For us, fortunately, the answer to the “how do they differ” question was easy. While we toil in marketing, and many of the others in the audience either do, too, or certainly have exposure to it, we were unique in that our background is 100-percent based in creative services. So that made for a neat way in. Outline, outline, outline Turns out, for us, the six-minute allotment included the time for the Q&A. That’s a huge detail. So our outline went something like this:
Close, close, close Odds are, your business doesn’t do anything like what we do here at Copel Communications. Yet we’ll bet that that outline above is easily 90-percent useful to you. Some things are just universal. A speaking opportunity like this, is just that: An opportunity. Seize it. Work the room. Book meetings and calls. Send follow-up emails. Need help prepping for a six-minute presentation, or other similar opportunity? Contact us. We help our clients with challenges like these all the time.
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We recently had a client dump a whole bunch of input on us, as part of a larger marketing project we were helping them with. This data dump, incidentally, was incomplete. They gave us links to videos, and slide decks, and web pages, and Word docs… yet when we cross-checked the lists of stuff we were supposed to receive vs. the stuff we actually received, we found gaps. Plus there was stuff—input—that we flat-out didn’t understand. Was it even relevant? Were we missing something? Clearly, a big team meeting was needed. But our preliminary order of business was simply wrangling all of the input—and making sure that the checklists indeed teed up with requirements of the final deliverable. This was not easy. So. Where are we going with this? And how does this help answer the perennial question of “How will this help me make more money?” Seeing the bigger picture Sure, we’d needed to book, organize, and run, a meeting. And the clock was ticking. This, incidentally, gets to the answer to the italicized question we’d posed above. Time is money. And when you multiply the number of people in the room by what they’re worth, on an hourly basis, the stakes go up real high, real fast. So this is about more than just booking a meeting. There are bigger takeaways than that. This is about bringing different people together in service of a larger—and more profitable—goal. And it’s, frankly, about sweating a ton of details in advance. Chop, chop Know what we ended up creating from all this mess? A “next steps” email to the team we were working with. Think about that. How many times have you had to compose a “next steps” email? It’s hard. We had to lay out:
We still have the email we’d sent to our client. It’s just 397 words long. And yet it took us an hour to write. Yup. We can’t share it here—it’s confidential—but we’ll bet you could read the thing in under two minutes. And that was the intention. And that was why it was so hard to compose. Important point: Every recipient and cc on this email is very busy. We had to make our case, be ultra clear, and close with a specific call-to-action (“Shall we send you slots for a meeting?”). This email took us an hour to write because the initial draft was about double the length of the final one. We sweated the details. We moved paragraphs. We moved sentences within paragraphs. And we cut, cut, cut, as much as we could. Speed reading Honestly: Do you think that any of our client-recipients of this email would have guessed that it took us an hour to write this two-minute read? Of course not. They never gave it a thought. We didn’t want them to give it a thought. But we needed to get stuff done, quickly, succinctly, and efficiently, and this much-sweated-over email was the best way to do it. And think of this: What kinds of replies did this email elicit? Were they equally-well-thought-out, carefully-considered-and-organized responses? Of course not! They were more like “Good idea; how’s Wednesday?” Were we upset by this? Did we feel slighted or unappreciated? Nope. We beamed. Mission accomplished. Because when you fast-forward this story, 1) all of the missing input magically appeared, prior to the meeting, 2) all of the related gaps were filled, and 3) the meeting itself went swimmingly—a full-court press in which seemingly impossible goals were surmounted in a shockingly short timeframe. And, frankly, none of it would have happened without the “next steps” email. Now do you see the broader lesson here? People routinely dash off emails with nary a thought. But sometimes, when the situation calls for it, you’ve got to hunker down and really figure out the tactics of where you’re headed, and do the hard work of putting that into something that can be read at 10x the speed it took to write. Need help getting all of these “tactical marketing ducks” in a row, whether via email or not? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help. True story: We worked with a client recently who wanted our help, using a shared online Word doc, to rework the copy for one page of marketing material: a website page. The Word doc had a headline at the top. And then a big page of body copy. This was the client’s original, rough draft. As we’d noted, they wanted our help wordsmithing it. This client had booked us, via Zoom, for a one-hour screen-share meeting. And guess what? We spent pretty much the entire meeting just working on the headline. To you creatives out there, this is hardly shocking. But to this person who was an employee at our client and was new to this process, it was shocking. In this article, we'd like to cover 1) why this person was so shocked, 2) why headline writing is so hard, and 3) how you can lubricate the process. Two hands on the paintbrush To be clear: In the story we described above, we were forced to work slower than we usually do. Because we couldn’t just dive into our process; rather, we had to explain our process, at each step, before we undertook each step. So that took a lot more time and was, candidly, rather draining. It’s hard enough to do the work; it’s even harder to do it and describe how you’re doing it at the same time. In other words, a tip of the hat to Bob Ross! As we’ve noted before (specifically in this article), shared Word docs are a double-edged sword, which have a habit of cutting you more than others! Still, let’s discuss why the headline part of this assignment required so much more time than the ensuing body copy; we didn’t even sweat the latter. And that’s part of the reason. With body copy, you’ve got lots of time and space and leeway to make your point. A headline is the opposite. You have just a few words. Plus, a headline needs to be, well, “headline-y.” It has to read like a headline. It has to look good on the page. And it has to sound good in your head—to your inner ear. It needs a good rhythm. And cadence. It must convey the exact right tone: if one word is off, it collapses. Oh, and it should be clever. Good luck with that! Tools for your box A way to help you surmount this challenge—in fact, a few of the component parts at once—is to start with something familiar. If there’s something familiar that rings true, and you can spin it your way, then you’ve got a great headline, seemingly ready-made. Don’t believe us? Look at Apple. Every headline on their website is written to try and meet this exact goal. An example from our business: We wrote a headline for a consultancy that helps businesses transform by using a library of proven templates. The headline we wrote for a page describing that process was: Reinvent your business. Not the wheel. Why does that headline work? It’s the exact same approach we’d just described. Everyone knows the expression, “Don’t reinvent the wheel.” But no one had spun it this way before: a ripe opportunity for us, and our client. Anyway, we’d promised you some tools for your box, so here goes. When it comes to headline-writing, lean, liberally, on tools such as:
That person who joined us on the Zoom call was kind-of shocked to follow us down these exact same rabbit holes. They didn’t realize that it took this much time and effort… just to write a headline that’s only a few words long. Know why? Because you can read a good headline in about two seconds. By that token, you can look at a great painting in the same amount of time. Need help with headline-writing? Contact us. It’s a specialty of ours. A client of ours recently wanted us to rewrite their team members’ LinkedIn bios, and then their website bios, in that order. Would you do the same thing? Should you? In that order? In this article, we’ll look at some of the too-easy pitfalls of team bio-writing, and also give you some good, quick, useful tips that can help you look great, and drive more business. Who’s on first? When that client asked us to start with the LinkedIn bios, we suggested otherwise. In this instance, it was better to start with the company’s own website. That’s because it was more free-form, less rigid than LinkedIn. We could do whatever we wanted. We could steal from it, for LinkedIn, later. And that’s what we did. For your business, you want your and your team’s bios to effectively accomplish two things: 1) You want to establish that person’s credibility. Do they know their stuff? Are they the absolute go-to subject matter expert for their field? 2) You want to make them come across as likable. (Not that they aren’t already.) The goal here is for the reader to think, “If I’m gonna be working with this company for the next several months, I’d be happy to work with this person. They seem cool.” Teaser alert: You can actually address both of these goals in order. But we’ll get to that in a minute. Person to person As you surely know, some website bios are written in first person (“I’m in charge of Finance”), whereas others are written in third person (“Jill is in charge of Finance”). Which should you use? (By the way, “Which should you use?” is in second person. But we digress.) Consider the arguments for each:
So this seems easy, right? “First person” carries the day. Not so fast. Think of Goal 1 from above: Establish Credibility. Here, you’ll want to blitz the reader with name-dropping and awards and accolades, so there’s absolutely no ambiguity about how technically superior this person is. Uh-oh. If you write that in first person, it comes across as conceited. Really conceited: “I have won awards for my work with major enterprises worldwide such as Coca-Cola and Amazon, where clients always told me how great I am.” Uggh. Don’t go there. And so, third person it is. More often than not: “Jill has won numerous client-elected awards for her stellar performance working with major enterprises worldwide such as Coca-Cola and Amazon.” The second act As we’d hinted above, the bio follows a two-act structure, in the order of the two goals ("Expertise," and "Fun to Work With"). So after you’ve wowed your reader with all the awards and name-dropping, you can get into just a few interesting, quirky details which are nice setups for conversation-starters when a client first engages you. We recently read the bio of a client we were going to work with, and it noted that she had previously served in an exotic location overseas, so we were curious to ask her about that. Stuck for ideas—or for getting consistent responses from your team—for this Act II assignment? We once helped an ad agency write their team bios, and we worked up a questionnaire which was circulated to the entire team. The initial questions were predictable:
But then, to button it, we made the last question a fill-in-the-blank:
They loved it. The answers were great and off-the-wall, and there was hardly any work required to edit them down to make them website-palatable. Indeed, the ad agency kept the “Questionnaire” format on their website—a good example of when First Person actually is the better way to go. Tying it all up Some basic pointers:
That said, leaders’ bios should generally be longer than team members’ bios. Twice as long is completely fine.
And that’s about it. It sounds simple, but it’s really more straightforward than easy. The more succinct the bio, the better—and the more challenging. Need help? Contact us. We’ve helped lots of teams with tons of bios. And we’d be delighted to help you, too. Let’s dive right into this. It’s based on a disheartening episode we recently experienced with a client. Here’s the story: We’d been working, for months, with this client, to develop their new brand persona, by taking a meticulous customer-back approach to their business. And by “customer-back,” we mean, “starting with the customer—who they are, what they need—and then working back into all of the messaging and, indeed, offerings.” Done right, this is a powerful process. With this client, we did it right. We were developing some killer insights that would position our client head-and-shoulders above all their competitors. This positioning, then, informed the structure and content of the new website we were creating for them. (“Disheartening”? Stay with us.) So. We did the deep-dive customer-discovery work with them. We developed the new brand persona. We developed the strategy, and then the wireframe (“outline”) for the website. All of these were approved by the client. Then, using the approved wireframe, we wrote all the pages of the website for them. These, too, were heartily approved by the client. Everything was going swimmingly. Cart? Horse? Huh? Then, one day, the client surprised us by sending us a brochure to review. This was certainly a surprise: “brochure” hadn’t been discussed before. But that’s fine. We’re not parochial. We can go with the flow. If clients want to take the initiative and bolster their marketing, we’re all for it. Until we saw this brochure. Mind you, it was finished. Outlined, written, and laid out. The client told us they wanted to send it out, en masse, and wanted our quick review/sign-off before it went. Holy @#$#@$. Our first reaction was Who is this brochure for?? Yep, it was that far off of everything that had been previously, and laboriously, developed... and then approved. Yikes. There was not a sentence, not an image, not a pixel in this thing that was on-brand or on-message. It told a different, and confusing story. The imagery would have been off-putting to the specific target audiences we had worked so hard to define. The structure was confusing. The layout was amateurish: like a mediocre student project. There was no call-to-action. It was, in short, a train wreck. Tough love Now, we’ve seen lots of mediocre, and downright bad, marketing materials in our time. So along that continuum, this one was hardly a shocker or a standout. But what did make it so extraordinary was the way in which it simply disregarded all of the painstaking, groundbreaking work that had preceded it. Not only would it turn off the very people it was supposed to turn on, it—most importantly—squandered all of the effort that went into the main branding and site-building. We don’t enjoy giving tough love here at Copel Communications, but we also don’t shy away from it when it’s required. Here, it was required. It was not fun to tell this client that, while we appreciated all of the effort that clearly went into this thing, it would do more harm than good, and should simply be shelved. Ouch. So now you know the “disheartening” part of this article. But what about the “Steal from yourself” headline? Play it on the cheap You probably figured it out for yourself already. Between the prior branding, and especially the website and its already-written pages, this client already had everything they needed to quickly create a killer brochure, practically for free. It was the same messaging. In just a slightly different format. Indeed, it’s even easier: You don’t know how a visitor is going to poke around the different pages of your website. But they’ll start reading that brochure from the front cover, and turn through it, page-by-page, in order, until they reach the end. So it’s very straightforward to populate the thing, especially when you have all of the content and images already on hand. They’re not only polished and powerful. They’re paid for. And thus the “steal, steal, steal” advice we have to offer here: Steal from every great marketing piece you have, to create other great marketing pieces. Fine. We’ll be polite. We can say “leverage,” if you like. Fact is, too many clients get so caught up in their own marketing materials that they feel compelled to create something new every single time, when reality dictates the exact opposite: Never flatter yourself into thinking that some prospect has not only read, but memorized your entire website, and then will be put off, or offended, when they review your brochure which includes, effectively, the exact same content. So our client’s mistake here wasn’t uncommon. This was the trap they fell into. They just fell a lot harder than most. Their biggest mistake: Opting to “surprise us” while they worked on this thing—from ideation through completion—in the background. Boy, could we ever have nipped this in the bud—and saved them a ton of headaches, aggravation, time, and most especially money—in the process. Use web content for brochures. Leverage brochures for social ads. Use print copy for radio. Sales-sheet images for case studies. Video-script voiceover text for emails. It just goes on and on. Steal, steal, steal. One other way to look at this: If you do the opposite, you diminish your brand. You’ve got all these disparate looks and messages, and no target will ever connect those dots. But when it’s all unified and coordinated—which is actually easier, and less effort—your brand appears huge, unavoidable, and inevitable. Need help with branding challenges like these? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help! Quick question: You’re building your new website, and you have limited space to message that mobile-first audience. So which offer do you lead with: 1) “Download our information-packed eBook,” or 2) “Book your complimentary business analysis”? This isn’t an easy question to answer. It’s the exact question that a client of ours faced recently. There’s enough to this question, in fact, to fill an entire article. Like this one. So let’s dive in. Sales Funnel 101 You’ll see this graphic all the time. It depicts a funnel, wherein all these zillions of people enter at the top, and the vital few become hot new clients of yours at the bottom. Sound familiar? We’re not crazy about the concept, but it’s admittedly convenient for the purposes of discussion, and the title of this article. Basically, the definition of the sales funnel includes three tiers or levels, depending on the stage of the journey at which the sales prospect resides. The thinking goes like this:
All three levels of the funnel are arguably important. But this “eBook vs. audit” question speaks directly to different levels of the funnel. Who do you prioritize? What would you like? Bear in mind, there is no “right” or “wrong” answer to this question. It’s a matter of what you want. But consider the context:
The easy (read “cop-out”) answer to the eBook-vs.-audit question is “Both!” But remember: Space is limited. Only one fits above the fold on a cellphone screen. So which do you choose? For our client, who was faced with this exact question, we argued for the lower-funnel option. In this instance, our client was not only launching a new website, but a new business. They needed to get revenue going ASAP. Thus the choice of the lower-funnel option was, in our eyes, a no-brainer. Make that phone ring! As far as the eBook crowd, they weren’t ignored or forgotten. The eBook was still there for them. But we simply had our client push it off that precious above-the-fold space, moving it down further on the page. If you’re an eBook shopper, you’re a reader. You’ll find it. No problem. We once read that when Apple was designing its first retail stores, the team got into a heated argument about which shade of blue should be used for the background of the rest-room signs. We think that that’s pretty extreme. But taking the time to weigh the pros and cons of your high-funnel vs. low-funnel priorities—even when the end result is one button high on the page vs. another button low on the page—is totally worth it. When you put that kind of thought into all of your marketing decisions, the end result is synergistic. It makes you more money. Need help strategizing that next website or campaign? Contact us. We work on these types of challenges all the time. It’s that time of year again: time for our annual year-in-review wrap-up of our top articles from Copel Communications. We do two of these each December: one for our “Creatives” audience, and another for our consultants audience. This one (although it's posting first) is the latter. Here are the top articles we’ve published for consultants, chock full of counterintuitive tips and business-building tricks. In case you missed any of these, here’s your chance to get some fast, free pointers. Enjoy!
Have suggestions for topics you’d like us to cover next year? Contact us. We’ve love to hear from you. “Product-izing” isn’t a new concept. But it has regained popularity and momentum recently, for good reason. It can be a nice business-builder if you toil in the professional-services space. But what is it? And what’s this “it can” caveat? Don’t worry. We’ll dive into all the details for you in this article, replete with do’s, don’ts, and some recent client examples. Why are services so hard to sell? A good chunk of our clientele here at Copel Communications consists of consultancies and similar professional-services firms. A lot of them are in high tech, or are at least high-tech-enabled. They’re all selling services. So are you. That’s why you’re reading this. You, like them, want to grow more business. Here’s the thing: Product-izing any of your offerings doesn’t really change what you do. It’s not disrupting your business model. It’s mostly a marketing ploy. You’ll still be selling the services you want to sell; you simply want to increase your odds of selling more of them. So. As you likely guessed by now, “product-izing” a service of yours just means dressing it up to look like a product, in the eyes of the target audience. Which begs a couple questions:
Let’s answer the second question first. Services, by their nature, are conceptual. You’re going to be doing something for your client, to help them get from A to B. Which means they need help along that journey. You’re good at finding, and eliminating, the various sticking points; that’s your expertise. But wrapping your head around all of this, as a prospect, when you’re simply Googling or seeing an online banner ad or checking out a web page, is hard. Services are hard. Products, on the other hand, are simple. So if you can pitch your service as a product—and here’s the key: as an instantly familiar product—you can attract that prospect, and convert the sale, that much quicker and easier. Think of it this way. What if you cut your finger? What would you need? You’d need, after washing the wound, to somehow figure out a way to keep it closed and protected against the elements so it could heal safely and cleanly, in a way that’s convenient, cost-effective, and requires minimal training and maintenance. What a mouthful. What if we just said, “Band-Aid”? Aha. A product. Which actually performs all these service-like things. You get it instantly. So this answers the “Why.” It’s also a great segue into the “How.” To serve or not to serve First off, some guidelines. You can’t, you shouldn’t, product-ize all of your service offerings. You need to be selective. This is easy. You want to productize relatively inexpensive, self-contained, entry-level service offerings. You want to look through your offerings for easy “bundles” that lend themselves to, um, “productization.” “Isn’t this,” you might ask, “the same thing as a ‘bundled service’?” Yup. Pretty much. You’re just paying more attention to the packaging and perception. And remember “entry-level.” You’re not doing this whole exercise to sell products to your existing clients. This is a foot-in-the-door offering to new prospects. So let’s say you’ve scoped out a common set of services that could qualify as a “product.” Now it’s time to do a little work. Product development Remember our “it can” caveat upfront? Here’s where we get into it. To work successfully, product-izing takes creativity and effort:
The name game This is one that, surprisingly, surprises our clients (albeit pleasantly) when we mention it to them. Often, they’re so wrapped up in the creation of the “product” that they forget that the whole purpose of this is to make an existing service more “sell-able.” What if, for example, you had some kind of digital service offering that quickly protected against bad actors with minimal cost and effort? Sure, you could call it “The Advanced Automated Firewall Remediation Protection Package.” But what if you called it an “IT Band-Aid”? That’s not the greatest example, because 1) a Band-Aid has a less-than-stellar connotation as a makeshift fix (“That’s just a Band-Aid!”), 2) “IT Band-Aid” doesn’t sound like a product, and 3) "Band-Aid" is someone else's protected trademark. But you still get the idea. Working with our clients, we’ve come up with some cool names for some cool product-ized offerings which, for confidentiality’s sake, we can’t reveal here. But they’re similar to “Band-Aid” in their underpinnings, in that they leverage the immediate perception of something else that’s popular and instantly understood to be valuable, and adapt it for that client’s specific situation and product-ized offering. Again, we can’t get into specifics, but consider this broad-strokes analogy: For one of our clients, we helped them develop a product-ized offering that was, let’s say, similar to Coca-Cola. This offering turned out to be a huge hit. So did we rest on our laurels? Heck no! We saw the potential for “brand expansion.” Seeing how that “Coca-Cola” worked so well, we helped the client come up with… “Diet Coke.” It was its own new product, and had its own campaigns. But it was similar enough to the first one (“Original Recipe,” LOL!) that the advertising impressions made the first time around also helped to “soften the beachhead” for the spin-off product. Diet Coke led to Cherry Coke. And then to Vanilla Coke. You get it. We weren’t exactly inventing the wheel here, but we sure were greasing the bearings. Get help You’ll see lots of articles, online, about the advantages of product-izing your service offerings. But it’s easier said than done. So get some help with the doing. Contact us. We tackle assignments like this every day, and would love to help you, too. It happens all the time: You book a meeting with a hot new prospect, and they want to learn all about your company. Time for the PowerPoint deck. Only yours sucks. Sound familiar? There is so much riding on the quality of that deck. We can’t stress it enough. And so, in this article, we’re going to give you some surefire pointers and tips to craft that killer presentation deck which ostensibly “tells the prospect about your company,” but which really “helps you close the sale.” This is not a website We recently worked on a deck like this for one of our clients; they had a first draft which they shared with us. It felt like a website. Which is understandable: they’d copied-and-pasted lots of pages from their existing website into PowerPoint to make the deck. That might seem like a good idea, but it’s a mistake. A well-designed website acts like… a website. That is, it offers the visitor various options they can choose from (pages, links, buttons), so they can learn about your company and its offerings at their own pace and in their own style. If you take all those various pages and drop them into PowerPoint, you’ll have a mess. While you can certainly “nudge” a website visitor along via things like sub-pages and even bifurcated home pages (we wrote an entire article on this topic), you can’t control the narrative anywhere nearly as tightly as you can in a slide deck. That’s not a limitation. That’s an advantage. Their story and yours A PowerPoint deck has Slide 1, and then Slide 2, and so on. You control what the viewer sees, and when. It’s totally granular. With that in mind, think of what you want to get across. The usual knee-jerk reactions are: “Tell them what we offer! And why it’s better!” Ennhhh. Flip the conversation. Make this about them. Make it about their pain-points, their day-in-the-life problems, the issues they need solved yesterday. This doesn’t take very long—or many slides. It can be a series of provocative “can-you-relate” questions. You can see where this is going. You’re building up the problem, specifically so that your company appears (in “Act Two”) as the solution. And since you have slide-by-slide control of the narrative, you can (totally unlike a website) build suspense. Imagine a single slide which reads: “How can you do that?” Let that sit on screen for a while. Let ‘em chew on it. You can click to the next slide when you’re good and ready. Then you can get into the stuff about your own company. It’s Act Two. This is certainly a case of less-is-more. Select—curate—the vital few wow-facts about your company that you can present in just a couple of slides. “Name-drop” big-name clients you’ve served. (Show logos!) Tout the biggest numbers. Perhaps you have one great sound-bite-style quote to show, either from a client or the press. Use it. The point is to establish as much credibility as possible, as quickly as possible. And then—again, keeping it short—wrap it with the “Q&A” slide. This is where you’ll stop clicking through PowerPoint, and get to the real business of answering the prospect’s questions, and closing the sale. Go modular Here’s a great thing about PowerPoint. It’s not a one-off oil painting. It’s a basic computer file that’s saved on your hard drive (or in the cloud, whatever). Thing is, as with any computer file, you can easily “Save as…” to create an alternate version. Some guidance: Create the biggest version of your deck first. Because it’s always easier to cut than to add. Indeed, you might not ever even use that full-blown version. Not a problem. It’s like a repository for all your best stuff—a “master file.” As new opportunities/sales calls arise, simply “Save as…” and cull the parts you don’t need. Examples: “Mission and vision” slides are snoozers for prospective clients, but they’re valuable for potential new hires. Specific “client success stories” might work better for some prospects than others, depending upon the alignment of the situation. And some might be eliminated altogether if, say, that prospect can only give you a half hour, and you want to save as much time for the Q&A as possible. Get help We know about this stuff because we work on these types of assignments all the time. Need help with that crucial company-intro sales deck? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help you out. Here at Copel Communications, we’re tasked with writing tons of email campaigns for our clients. They keep coming back for more—evidence that they’re profiting off of the endeavor. These emails (to prospects and former customers, for example) lead to replies, calls, meetings, and sales. What’s not to love? So how do we go from all this goodness to the “Abuse yourself” verbiage in this article’s title? Hint: It might’ve been better to phrase it as “Disabuse yourself.” But we’re getting ahead of things. Who are you emailing to? Our religion here at Copel Communications—and one we’re not shy about proselytizing—is taking a customer-back approach to all we do. We don’t simply “get assignments” from our clients. We probe the heck out of them first. We want to know what their customers are going through: wants, needs, what’s keeping them up at night, and all that. Once you know that, you can “work backward” from the customer’s problem to how you present your own (or in our case, our client’s) solution. For the scope of this article, we can’t dive into all the specifics of our different clients, what they offer, and who they’re offering them to. But suffice to say, our clients are all toiling in the higher-end B2B space, with consultancy-style offerings generally targeted to business leaders such as execs or the C-suite. These audiences are incredibly time-constrained. You think they sit down to read the emails that we’re tasked to write for them? You think they look forward to this? Do you think they regard them as anything other than spam? So disabuse yourself. No matter how valuable you think your email offering is—and it may well be incredibly valuable—your target audience will see it as junk mail. Simple as that. Which begs a simple question: How do you un-junk-ify it? The stakes here are high. If a lot of your recipients flag your emails as “spam,” their ISP can flag you as a “known spammer.” In which case, even your non-spamming, business-critical emails will get sent straight to your recipients’ spam folders. Yes, we’re talking clients. Imagine that: You send a routine email to a client. They don’t respond. You email again. They don’t respond. You pick up the phone. They then discover that all your emails were automatically routed to their spam-box. We’re not making this up. This has happened to businesses we know, when they weren’t careful. So be careful. In other words, make your emails “less spammy.” So how do you do that? Yeah. How do you do that? Well, if you’re trying to get the attention of a time-constrained executive, do it properly. Respect their time. That means: “Keep it short.” It means: “Don’t beat around the bush; get to the point quickly.” Speak their language. That means: “Don’t be cute. Don’t be hard sell. AVOID ALL CAPS. And resist that temptation—and it’s tempting!!—to use lots of exclamation points!! In other words, if your email to this executive looks a lot like his or her routine business correspondence, it won’t get flagged as spam. They might not read it right away, but they won’t lump it in the same category of emails for fake Viagra. Some made-up sample verbiage: Dear [First name], A recent survey of logistics executives revealed that their two most pressing strategic priorities are automation and improving customer experience or CX. You might be surprised to learn that a single solution can address both of these challenges at the same time, with remote implementation possible in a matter of weeks. As we said, we made up everything in that passage above. But it’s still illustrative. Ask yourself: Does that read like spam? No. Of course not. It reads like a business correspondence. But you can see—and that targeted exec can sure see—that it’s building toward a hook, a teaser, a sales pitch. But it’s doing it nicely. Politely. Professionally. Respectfully. And thus it skates past all the ISPs. What about the abuse part? Glad you asked. We recently worked on an email campaign for a client that wanted to tease, over a span of weeks, a huge new initiative they were launching. Spoiler alert: It was a re-branding campaign, because the company itself was pivoting in terms of what it chose to focus on, and the subset of businesses it would target. Now you know the answer, the “big reveal.” But our audience didn’t. Our job was to get them interested in what was brewing for this company. The audience, incidentally, was comprised of current and former customers of this business, as well as some very well-placed targets (read: “potentially very lucrative accounts”). We came to this assignment armed with the information about where the business started. We knew about the owner’s epiphany, in which they realized they wanted to chart a new course, and why. We knew all of the wonderful things about this to-be-launched company (largely because we also wrote the copy for the new website that was soon to be revealed). We knew how those potentially very lucrative accounts could benefit. So. How do you stretch this out over a period of weeks? And what on earth has this got to do with self-abuse? Storytelling Given the information we had, we knew we had to inject a decent amount of storytelling into it. No one wants to receive a bullet-list of changes to an upcoming business. But everyone wants to hear a story. And we had the makings of a good one here: The prior business. The owner’s epiphany. The problems which the targets are facing (remember: “customer-back”). The hint of something big coming soon. While we could write that as one huge narrative, that’s not what the assignment called for. Remember it needed to be strung out over the course of several weeks. There were about a half-dozen installments in this campaign; each recipient would get them all, in order. Now we get to the self-abuse part. Email 1 was easy to write. It set up the story, set the tone, and ended on a cliffhanger for the upcoming Email 2. It got progressively harder from there. Here’s why. Despite our delightful storytelling chops, we knew that there’s no way on earth that any recipient on that list would remember the contents of Email 1 by the time they received Email 2. And so on down the line. It’s true for us. It’s true for you. It’s true for any business that’s doing direct response (read: “spam”) emailing. Beat yourself up when it comes to gauging just how much your recipients will recall, retain, or even grasp in the first place, when it comes to that email you send them, which they will undoubtedly skim in a distracted hurry. There’s probably a mathematical equation for this, but since we’re not numbers heads here, we’ll describe for you the way this went: The overall narrative was not evenly carved into six installments. Rather, each subsequent installment contained less information than the one before it. Why? Simple: We needed to open each email with a recap of “the story thus far” before proceeding into the new material, and since each subsequent email necessarily required a bigger recap at the beginning, there was less room at the end to reveal new information. This is due to the simple fact that the reader is time-constrained; the emails couldn’t get longer with each installment. So it was a way of compensating to keep them all about the same length. And yes, this was baked into the strategy when we set out to write them all. Note that each recap had to be a fun, exciting read unto itself. Easier said than done—especially when you’re, say, at Email 5. Anyway. The campaign was a success. It all led up to a big live-reveal event, and the attendance numbers were based in large part on the success of the email campaign. Attendance was strong; the event went over well; and we considered ourselves properly self-abused, given the turnout. Get help Most consultancies do not have the time to delve into the tactical considerations of what we described above. And the results—or lack thereof—show up in the response (or lack thereof) to the emails that they do create. In other words, offload this work. To us! Contact us today for a no-obligation initial consultation. We’d love to boost your response, and your sales. |
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