​We recently worked on a book project, wherein we worked closely with the author (to be specific, we ghost-copy-edited the manuscript), and we were also involved, as a creative resource, when it was time to create the book’s cover. We had a great graphic artist we were working with. 
 
All of this will tie in—shortly—to the gist of this article: Directing other creatives. There’s certainly a fine line between over- and under-directing them. So how do you find that sweet spot? 
 
Quick tangent about book design. Regardless of the cute aphorism you were taught in grade school, we all judge books by their covers. In a word, Duh! That’s what they’re there for. You wouldn’t buy a technical how-to guide with a cover that teased a torrid romance, or vice versa. 
 
The cover needs to inform the would-be reader of what's inside. It’s as important to the book’s success as a poster is to a movie, or even further back in the day, what a record sleeve was to an album. (Contact us in case you don’t get either of those references.) 
 
So. Having worked with the author on this project, literally word-by-word, for months, we knew very well what the book was about. Far more than, say, our great graphic artist. 
 
Which is fine. It wasn’t her job to read the entire manuscript, and know who the target audience is, and all that. 
 
We knew that stuff. We also knew the mandatories for this project: For example, the author runs a company that figures prominently in the book; the company logo needed to be on the cover. Stuff like that. 
 
Who speaks what, visually
 
We quickly pencil-sketched nine different thumbnails as cover ideas for the book. And here’s where it’s important to know your different players well. The author of this book is not a graphics person. So he basically understood the thumbnails, but didn’t get any of them. He needed to see his favorites fleshed out before he could pass any real judgment. 
 
So we sent these along to our graphic artist, with fairly minimal instructions. We walked her through each one, explaining its basic intentions, but carving absolutely zero elements in stone, aside from the aforementioned mandatories (company logo, company color palette, etc.). 
 
And in this process, we very purposely downplayed the quality of the thumbnails themselves. Sure, there was the very real possibility that one of them would end up being “the” one, and thus the germ of the final cover art. 
 
But that wasn’t the point. The point was to inspire our graphic artist to improve upon what we’d sent her. To, for lack of a better phrase, show off. The thumbnails weren’t so dumb as to be negligible. But they were loose enough to require input and interpretation. 
 
And that’s the fine line you want to walk when you’re directing a creative person. 
 
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Creatives are a lot like athletes. While many creatives are ostensibly introverted, they still yearn to be challenged, and to strut their stuff, to flex their creative muscles, so to speak, and to outdo themselves and what they’ve done before. 
 
The winnowing
 
Despite what we’d hinted earlier, our thumbnails were actually clear enough for our client to pick a few favorites before we sent them along to the artist. This worked well: The client/author picked his three faves. We sent all nine to the graphic artist, with the three top choices highlighted; this way, she could see what the client had rejected, and possibly draw some inspiration from elements of the also-rans, if needed. 
 
This also had the very pragmatic effect of reducing time and budget. Having that artist work up nine different covers would be quite a bit of work. Three, on the other hand, was pretty reasonable. 
 
The good news: It was hard to choose among the three designs that the artist submitted! We had our favorite; the author had his. 
 
Guess who prevailed? 
 
Of course. The author. It’s his book, not ours. And his choice, while not our tip-top choice, was still among our favorites—and that’s counting back to the original nine. 
 
From that point, it was just a matter of iterating and refining. As we write this, the art is finalized, and the book is at the publisher. 
 
Importantly, everyone is happy. Our client has a great book cover (by which others will rightly judge that book!). Our graphic artist is justifiably proud of her creation. And we’re delighted to have helped the process along, walking that fine line between over- and under-directing our precious creative resource. 
 
Need help with a challenge like this? Contact us. We’d be happy to help. 

​We know a talented web designer who told us that websites age in dog years. That may well be true of the technology. But in this article, we’re going to talk about your branding and your messaging. 
 
If you’re considering a refresh of your site, or perhaps even a wholly new site, this article is for you. Even if a potential rework is way in the future, you can still learn some good time- and expense-saving tips here. So read on! 
 
Website in the spotlight
 
We have a client whose business recently pivoted from serving mid-level customers to very high-end customers. (We can’t give too much detail here, but there should be enough info for you to follow the story.) 
 
The high-end prospects would be more profitable for our client. Making this choice to pivot was the result of a lot of soul-searching and analytical number-crunching. It represented a switch from serving a greater number of decent-revenue-providing clientele to a smaller number of awesome-revenue-providing clientele. 
 
As we’d said, we’re gauzing up this story. But you now know enough to follow it—and to see the parallels that exist to your situation, and your website. 
 
Ah yes. The website. The moment this client of ours decided to pursue a newer, higher-end audience, their existing website (not to mention all of their other marketing materials) immediately became outdated. It was way “beneath” their new audience—and wholly lacking in the newly-refined service offerings they had developed. 
 
Our client knew that this would be coming. Recall all of the aforementioned soul-searching and number-crunching. 
 
So they called on us to help them create the new website. We don’t do this alone. We work closely with the client. They have a great web designer, with a full team, that we love. We also have some great video editors to help create the site’s embedded content (which we scripted). 
 
But here, in this article, we’d like to walk you through the process we employed—and get to those elusive “pilot pages” that we’d mentioned in the title. 
 
Starting wide
 
As we’d noted, the client had decided to serve a new audience. And if you’ve read any of our articles here at Copel Communications, you can practically do a drinking game for each time we mention “taking a customer-back approach.” We’re passionate about this. (Because it works!) 
 
In other words, start with the customer. Explore their needs. Then work backward to the marketing strategy and tactics. 
 
So here are the big things we did with this client, in order:

• Deeper dive customer discovery. Through a series of structured strategy sessions, we really dived into the new prospects they were targeting. What are their pain points? What are they doing now? What are their best alternative options, besides out client? What might “trigger” them to make a switch? Who are the secondary targets we needn’t address directly, but wouldn’t mind attracting? Who are the “tire kickers” we want to avoid engaging with? (We have a great article on that topic, by the way.) 

 

• Narrative creative concepts. Once we had nailed down the customer persona (sometimes called the “avatar” or ICP for Ideal Customer Profile), we worked up a number of written descriptions of what the new website would look and feel like. These “narrative creative concepts” are very time- and cost-efficient. They describe the theme, tone, and feel of a proposed new site’s treatment, talking about the imagery, copy, amount of white space, navigation, and so on. And we provided several to choose from, each with a slightly different creative approach. The client then picked their favorite. 

 

• Website wireframe. We then wrote this up, outline-style, and reviewed it with the client—moving, re-prioritizing, and adding and cutting as needed, until we had a nice tight version. (Want to learn more about how we do this—and you can, too? We’ve got a nice article you can check out.) 

 

• Pilot pages. No, we’re not gonna describe them here in this little bullet. These warrant their own subhead. 

 
Exciting new subhead: Pilot pages!
 
Mind you, all of the work we’d described above is upstream of the web designer. Why? Two reasons: 

• One: It’s essential to steer them in the right direction for what they will undertake. Not “kinda/sorta the right direction.” And that’s because of Reason Two: 

 

• Two: That’s a lot of people, working hard. It ain’t cheap. We’re frugal with our customers’ marketing spend here at Copel Communications. 

 
So what are these teased-to-death-by-now “pilot pages”? It’s actually really simple. Despite the wonderfully described tone from the chosen narrative creative concept, it’s time to create actual public-facing website copy at this point. 
 
So should you unleash your writer—even if it’s us—to pen all of these pages at once? You have, after all, an approved concept and a signed-off wireframe. 
 
Answer: No. 
 
Again, you want to be efficient and frugal. So go through your wireframe and pick out just a few—two, maybe three—pages that would be good tests of the final tone-and-feel verbiage. These will be your “pilot pages.” 
 
They’re easy to choose—but hard to write. Expect a bunch of revisions. But once you lock them down, the other pages go way, way faster. 
 
The obvious one to start with is the home page. That’s mandatory. After that, it depends on which one you think would be 1) difficult, 2) representative, and 3) a good model for subsequent/deeper pages. That last point is especially important if you’re going to be engaging a team of writers: You want them to be able to reference the approved pilot pages, and use them to make sure they’re sticking to the proper tone. 
 
Incidentally, once you have your approved pilot pages, you can then feed them, with confidence (along with the approved narrative creative concept and wireframe), to your web designer. From that point, it’s off to the races. 
 
Need help with your next website project? Contact us. We’ve done lots of these, and would be delighted to help with yours. 

​RFPs—that is, Requests for Proposals—come in all shapes and sizes. Broadly, there are the ubiquitous ones that populate the world of government services contracting. There are plenty of private-sector RFPs out there, too. 
 
In this article, we’re going to address the tipping point that must inform all of your RFP pursuits: the notorious “go/no-go decision.” We’re looking out for your best interests here, trust us. 
 
All-American competition
 
A little background first. Why would a company (or the government) issue an RFP? The bigger question could be: Why wouldn’t they? 
 
Think about it. If you’re an entity that needs to spend money on services (or products, but we’ll focus on the former here), it’s entirely safe to assume that 1) you want the best possible services at 2) the lowest possible price. And what’s fairer, what’s more American, than level-playing-field competition? 
 
So. You issue an RFP. And you let all these suitors compete against each other. You get exactly what you’d wanted. It’s a beautiful thing. 
 
Or is it? 
 
The race to the bottom
 
Let’s get real jaded, real quick. How well does the government do things, compared to private industry? By and large, not nearly as well. There’s no profit motivation. There’s no “Government 2” that they’re competing against. There’s a baked-in complacency and a literal ability to print more money if they need it. 
 
This shows in their work. Think of all the shoddy government services you’ve had to suffer through—IRS, DMV, U.S. Postal Service, Amtrak, you name it. Think of how many times you’ve said, “If only Amazon were running this!”
 
And the crazy thing is, tons of these shoddy government services are actually provided by private-sector contractors! Why? Because they came in with the lowest bid.
 
We’re over-simplifying here—there are other ways that the government procures things, and even in the private sector, there are SLAs or “service-level agreements” which stipulate a minimum required level of performance—but, as we’d intimated, nice and jaded, RFPs often represent a race to the bottom. Cheapest possible—and just passable. 
 
Now pivot this scenario to your business. Would you want to willingly join in, in this death spiral? 
 
To RFP or not to RFP
 
The upside, for you, of competing on an RFP, is that it’s typically a pretty big contract. And it’s all or nothing. You either win it, or you don’t. And either way, you’re putting in a ton of work. 
 
Hmmm. 
 
This gets to the very core of the go/no-go decision. 
 
We were told, years ago, about an NFL coach who had a plaque in his office. It read: “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing, Coming in second is un-American.”
 
Yowch. Painful. Brutal. But refreshingly similar to your RFP go/no-go decision. 
 
It boils down to this: Only respond if you can, and will, crush it. Partial measures are a total waste of time; expend that energy on other biz-dev. Assess your capabilities and those of your likeliest competitors. Can you crush the competition? If you can almost crush them, what would it take to push you over the top? 
 
Here’s a little anecdote for you. We were recently invited to compete on an RFP for a slate of marketing services. We could see, right away, that it wasn’t a great fit. We knew we could crush a certain part of what this company was requesting, but there were other parts that weren’t our specialty. 
 
We were just about to pass on this one when--hmmm—we learned, through the grapevine, that a few other companies, which we know and have worked with before, were also invited to respond to this exact same RFP. 
 
Know where this is going? Imagine where it went? 
 
Of course. We reached out to those other entities, and said, “Let’s consolidate!” 
 
And that’s exactly what happened. Working with the others, we created a veritable Dream Team… and crushed the RFP. 
 
By the way, there are interesting and creative ways to craft the actual RFP response itself, to help you win it, which go beyond the scope of this article. 
 
We’d love to help you in this realm. Contact us and let’s talk. 

You’re in business to make money. These days, that sounds like a dirty little secret, but all businesses exist to make money. To reward the owners. The shareholders. To turn a profit. 
 
Therefore, you charge your clients for everything you do. 
 
Or do you? 
 
Or should you? 
 
In this article, we’ll dive into the reasons you should, or shouldn’t, provide some hard, payable work for free. It’s based on lots of experience, with lots of clients—and often, their clients. 
 
The cold-reality ROI argument
 
You’ve surely heard of a “loss leader.” Something that gets a prospect in the door for a super-attractive price. “Super-attractive,” as in “untenable.” Hence the “loss” you take on it. 
 
Ever played a scratch-off Monopoly game at McDonald’s and won a free order of French fries? C’mon. You think McDonald’s will lose money on that one? Remember: You can’t claim that prize on that visit. You have to come back.
 
So would you ever, honestly, make a trip to McDonald’s, and only order French fries? Even if they’re free? Of course you wouldn’t. Neither would anyone else. 
 
Hence the “cold, hard ROI” argument for freebies. Which goes something like this: 
 
Sure, you can give away something for free—just so long as you’re virtually assured that you’ll end up making way more than the value of what you gave away, from that same client or customer.
 
Ooof. How cold. How… Darwinian. 
 
It’s the little things
 
First off, know that we here at Copel Communications toss out freebies to our clients from time to time. Typically, they’re what we’d consider “too small to charge for.” We recently did a little quick-turn project for a client that, while admittedly urgent, simply wasn’t a huge amount of work for us. 
 
So what were we going to do at the end of the month? Line-item it for, say, 50 bucks? 
 
Naah. We refuse to nickel-and-dime like that. 
 
Still, we did list it on that month’s invoice. But the price? “N/C.” 
 
Surprise and delight
 
Sometimes, tossing out the freebie is just the right thing to do—especially if you’ve got a longstanding relationship with a client and the right project comes along and you can afford to do it. 
 
Ever give your dog a treat not because he chased a squirrel away from your bird feeder, but rather "just because”? This is like that. 
 
True story: We have a client that competes in an incredibly high-tech field. In fact, among our tech-savvy clients, this is one of the savviest, to the point where it’s always challenging to write for them—to assume that mantle of brilliance. It’s difficult and daunting. 
 
Yet we must be doing something right, because this client keeps turning to us with projects for years and years. 
 
One day, however, the owner of this business hit us with an unusual request. Turns out he was running for town council in the area where he lived, and wanted our help with some of his campaign materials. 
 
Man oh man. We knew this would be a freebie the instant we saw it. 
 
He sent us some fliers. And posters. And emails. And what-not. Asking us to clean them up, and bill him for whatever it required. 
 
Now we know this guy and you don’t. Trust us: He’s a great person. Any town council would be blessed to have him aboard. 
 
We were flattered, and honored, to work on this stuff. Sure, we had other paying gigs on the calendar, but were happy to carve out time for him. And when we turned to it, we hit it out of the park. 
 
Our client was delighted! He was so grateful—perhaps especially because this assignment fell outside of his usual high-tech comfort zone. “Send us your invoice,” he said. 
 
And so we sent it. With every single item line-itemed. We showed the “rack rate” for each thing—what it would cost in the real world—and even added up the total cost. 
 
And then, below that, we subtracted the entire total cost, with the note: “Courtesy discount." 
 
Amount due? Zero. 
 
If you think this client was delighted by the work we did, you can only imagine how surprised and happy he was to find out he was getting it for free. 
 
And we felt great. It still feels good, simply re-telling this story. 
 
Happy ending?
 
So, this client immediately came back and rewarded us with zillions of dollars’ worth of fresh, new work. Right? 
 
Wrong. In fact, it was months before he needed our services again. 
 
Are we bitter? Not at all! This is the antithesis of the “cold-reality ROI” argument. We’d call it the “spark of humanity” argument. A little Christmas, when it isn’t Christmas. 
 
Businesses exist to turn a profit. But they’re also run by people who live lives. Sometimes you simply need to connect at that very basic level. 
 
Have thoughts on this issue or a story to share? Contact us. We’d love to hear it. 

​ChatGPT, as you know, was huge news about a year ago. So why are we writing about it now? 
 
Now is a good time. All the hype has evaporated. All the dust has settled. We can now discuss ChatGPT without the breathless hyperbole, without all the doom-and-gloom forebodings of the apocalypse. 
 
Quick teaser: We use ChatGPT. And so should you. 
 
Qualifier: When it’s appropriate, and useful, to do so.
 
Let’s dive in. 
 
What it is… and isn’t
 
When ChatGPT hit the scene, everyone with a pulse was accosting us about this supposed existential threat to our business here at Copel Communications. Wouldn’t we be subsumed by this marching monster that threatened all creative jobs? 
 
No. 
 
We weren’t afraid of it then. We’re not afraid of it now. 
 
Ignorance is what breeds fear. 
 
Knowledge, on the other hand, breeds power.
 
We’ll take the latter any day of the week. 
 
ChatGPT, quite simply, is a tool. Just like a hammer. Or a pen. Or a paintbrush. It’s only as good as the person using it. 
 
You wouldn’t hand a hammer to a surgeon. (Or if you do, run.) The surgeon knows what tools to use. 
 
ChatGPT is no different. As a large-language model, it’s capable of stringing together astonishingly coherent sentences in technically excellent English. (Detect our qualifiers there?) It “knows” tons of stuff, effectively from scouring the entire internet (more qualifiers forthcoming). And it’s fast: Ask it something, and it answers. Instantly. 
 
All of which begs the question: Is ChatGPT creative?
 
Oh come on. See what difference a year makes? 
 
Of course it’s not. It never was. It’s not even intended to be. 
 
It’s a tool.
 
We were asked, many years ago, when Apple introduced iMovie, if Hollywood movies would be going away. 
 
See? You’re laughing. 
 
Because 1) they didn’t go away, and 2) they weren’t exactly threatened by iMovie. To the contrary: A pro version of iMovie (called Final Cut Pro) came out, and many Hollywood editors embraced it. They still do.  
 
So now, with all the hype in the rearview mirror, it’s easy—and often quite useful—to embrace ChatGPT. That said, there are some caveats. 
 
Some caveats
 
ChatGPT doesn’t “know” everything. As the site itself will warn you, it’s only scoured the internet up through April, 2023. After that, it’s clueless. So don’t expect any recent information in its database. 
 
It’s also a classic case of the old computing adage, “Garbage in, garbage out,” or GIGO. There’s a lot of bad, and biased information out there on the internet (really??), and ChatGPT has Hoovered it all up with nary a hiccup. It will spit out the same junk, to you, that it’s sucked up, from others. 
 
And ChatGPT doesn’t have a “B.S. meter.” Sometimes, it will flat-out lie. We’ve tested it. So can you. It’s easy. (We’d asked it, for example, to name some famous dialogue quotes from a movie we have effectively memorized. And while it listed several good quotes, it also spat out others that had nothing to do with that movie whatsoever. And no “red underlining,” as you’ll find in Word for a suspiciously-misspelled word. As far as fact-checking goes, you’re on your own.) 
 
The good stuff
 
Granted, we don’t use ChatGPT every day. To the contrary: We hardly use it at all. But every now and then, we’ll get an assignment that’s easy to hand off to ChatGPT. And to be clear: We will tell our clients whenever we use ChatGPT.
 
We do this for many reasons: 

1. We’re honest. 
2. It provides pricing transparency. We never charge for querying ChatGPT. 
3. It provides us with plausible deniability: “Here’s what ChatGPT spat out; don’t be surprised if you find garbage here.” 

​So what kinds of assignments are good for ChatGPT? In our experience, it’s great for coming up with lots of “ideas” for basic things that have already been ideated by others. That’s a huge distinction. (It’s like the “technically excellent English,” we’d mentioned above—which checks all the boxes for spelling and grammar, but hasn’t an iota of creativity to it.) 
 
Some examples: 

• A client of ours was slated to attend a trade show. They wanted to come up with promotional ideas for getting contact information from people (prospective clients) who would visit their booth. Clearly, this is an exercise that’s been performed by countless others, countless times. Why reinvent the wheel? We asked ChatGPT. It spat out about 20 suggestions; our client actually used about two or three. We consider that excellent. 

 

• Another client of ours was looking for provocative discussion-starters to post on social media, centered around a certain business issue. We asked ChatGPT. Sure enough, others had thought of the same stuff before; ChatGPT was able to effectively organize it for us in a matter of seconds. 

 
Now, it’s incumbent on you to ask ChatGPT in the best way possible in order to get the information you seek. We’re good at it; we have a nice feel for how it was programmed, and thus can effectively “reverse-engineer” our prompts. 
 
So ChatGPT is like Word. Or a pen. Or a paintbrush. Just another tool in our kit. 
 
Need help with that next assignment—whether it requires ChatGPT or not? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help! 

​This dilemma is surprisingly common among our clientele of B2B consultants here at Copel Communications: 
 
They’ll get prospects arriving into the sales funnel. They’ll spend time and effort cultivating and qualifying them. 
 
And yet those prospects will turn into either 1) deadbeats who don’t convert, or 2) clients who are so much work and hassle that they’re not worth the time. 
 
Uggh. 
 
Has this ever happened to you? Of course it has. 
 
In this article, we’ll dive a little more deeply into this problem; more importantly, we’ll tell you how to address it—to head it off in advance—so the likelihood of your ever confronting it again plummets. 
 
Who are the tire kickers? And why do they kick?
 
Excuse us, but we can’t make any assumptions here. There’s a decent chance that you don’t know the origin of the phrase “tire kicker,” so we’re obligated to explain it. 
 
Quite simply, it refers to someone who, in the old days, would visit a new car showroom and take up the salesperson’s time, seemingly checking out a car they’d like to purchase (literally kicking the tires to test them for soundness), and then walking out, without making a purchase, much to the salesperson’s chagrin. 
 
The common assumption, at least in automotive retail (and we’ve worked in advertising for this space, so we have some experience here) is that these tire-kickers simply don’t have any money in their pockets in the first place. Maybe they just like to get a good whiff of that new-car smell. Maybe they just like to sadistically waste sales reps’ time. 
 
Regardless, they would (and certainly still do) trickle into auto showrooms, and it was incumbent on the sales reps themselves to identify these tire-kickers in order to avoid the wasteful time-suck they would present.
 
This is not a tangent.
 
The story above has everything to do with your B2B marketing. 
 
Clone wars
 
We had a client in the tech space who complained to us that lots of the work they were doing was effectively clean-up of technical messes made by lesser-skilled (read: “Upwork”) technicians on projects where they’d been hired by clients seeking to cut costs. 
 
Burned by those poor technicians, these same clients would then turn to our client to “clean up this mess.” 
 
And our client hated-hated-hated it. 
 
Interestingly, they also didn’t turn it down. 
 
(Feel familiar? It’s not an uncommon trap.) 
 
Anyway, this tech client of ours was looking to do some re-branding, and as part of our customer-discovery effort, we asked them (just as we’d ask you), “What kinds of customers do you have now that you’d love to clone?” 
 
It’s a great question. Devote some nice biz-dev time to answering it. 
 
It also sets up the flip side: 
 
“Which kinds of customers do you have now that you’d love to avoid and never see again?”
 
Well, you certainly know how our tech client answered this question. 
 
(In case you were curious, they were willing to finish any existing projects with these “energy vampire” clients and their technical clean-up jobs, but didn’t want to actively attract any new ones in the future.) 
 
This leads to the branding. It leads to how you can head off these energy vampires at the pass. And yes, it ties right back to that automotive showroom story we’d spun above. 
 
Cleanup on Web Page Four
 
While this article pertains to overall branding (including all the vehicles and mediums you’ll employ to fill your sales funnel), let’s drill down to your website as an easy-to-illustrate example. 
 
Let’s ask you one simple question: 
 
Does it look conducive to tire-kickers?
 
Aha! In other words, there’s a very simple way to dissuade these personae non gratae, and get them to self-select their way... elsewhere. 
 
Here’s the analogy: 
 
What happens when your Toyota Corolla buyer accidentally walks into a Lexus showroom? 
 
He looks around sheepishly. Blinks. Hands up. Apologizes to the approaching high-end sales rep: “Oh. Sorry. I didn’t realize I... was...” And he quietly backs out the door. On his own. 
 
So if you want to avoid the Corolla buyer (nothing against them, or Corollas, for that matter), make your website the equivalent of the Lexus showroom.
 
We have another client who wants customers with at least $100k to spend on their services. And they clearly don’t want to run a headline above-the-fold proclaiming “Great Services If You Have At Least $100k To Spend.”
 
Of course not. But they totally got the “Lexus showroom” idea when we pitched it to them; combined with upscale messaging which addresses the problems of their ideal prospect, it makes the whole experience self-selecting for the great targets... as well as those who should politely exit the premises. 
 
That’s not mean. It’s actually helpful. For those who can’t afford our client’s services, it saves them time and aggravation, too. They don’t want to learn more about stuff they can’t afford. 
 
Unless they’re actual tire-kickers who simply enjoy the sadistic abuse of sales reps. 
 
They’re out there. You can’t avoid them entirely. 
 
But you can make the others go away. So you can focus your efforts on the ones you’d love to clone. 
 
Need help with customer-filtering challenges like these? Contact us today. We’d be delighted to help. 

​Y’know, it’s funny. A voiceover is truly an old-school skill: it dates back to the birth of radio about 100 years ago. And radio itself, while still around, isn’t the front-and-center medium it once was. 
 
But what about voiceovers? Have they suffered the same fate?
 
Au contraire.
 
They’ve not only survived. They’ve flourished. They’ve exploded. The internet—specifically things like B2B and B2C videos on YouTube and Vimeo, cross-posted to platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook—have made them ubiquitous. Essential. 
 
And the way they’re done has changed, too. 
 
But we’ll get into that in a minute. The point of this article is to help you get more out of each voiceover you buy, so that your target audience buys more stuff from you. Basic premise, but packed with nuances. 
 
The new reality
 
As we’d noted above, online videos are everywhere. And pretty much all of them have a voiceover—if not for the entire thing, then definitely portions of it. Even if (and this is common) it’s a little video that will scroll by, with the sound off, and big “closed captions” rolling past, Karaoke-style, you’ll still have that voiceover track, which you can hear, the instant you click the “un-mute” icon. 
 
Voiceovers are important. Sure, they tell the story. They explain what’s going on. But, done right, they do much more than that. In a subtle way, they represent, and sell, your brand. 
 
Is that voice authoritative? Seductive? Approachable? Intelligent? Likable?
 
Or what if it’s the opposite? There’s a lot at stake here. Which leads to casting. Which leads to the new modality of simply producing voiceovers. 
 
The new modality
 
Here at Copel Communications, we’ve been directing (and of course writing) voiceovers for decades. Back in the day, we’d do them at sound studios and/or radio stations, and everything was in person. We’d show up. The voiceover artist would show up. The engineer would show up. We’d bring the script, printed on paper, in triplicate, so each party could have a copy. And then we’d sit in the control room while the V.O. artist sat, on the other side of the soundproof glass, in the booth.  
 
We could see each other. (Although we could only hear each other via headphones and microphones.) And seeing is a huge asset when recording a V.O. As the producer, we could see how the artist was performing. They could see our reactions: good, bad, and indifferent. 
 
And there was instant feedback. After a take, we’d rate and review it. We might request a quick punch-in fix. And we could get everyone out of the studio pretty quickly, most of the time, with a great product in-hand. 
 
Fast-forward to the 21st century. No one works like that anymore... at least for the scope and budget of projects such as those we’re discussing here. For the business videos you’re producing, you’ll be posting them online—and you’ll be casting and producing them online, too.
 
The downside is you lose the eye-contact and the immediacy. But pretty much everything else is better: 

• You have infinitely more talent to choose from. 

 

• You can schedule sessions easier, and often get faster turnaround. 

 

• Prices have absolutely plummeted. 

 
About that last point. Decades ago, we’d pay about $150 for a voiceover session in a studio. Today, we’re getting the same product (actually a better product, since it’s digital and not analog) for about a third of that. And that’s after decades of inflation, so the real cost was higher then... or less, now, depending on how you look at it. 
 
There are lots of places to find V.O. talent. There’s Upwork. We’ve had good results with Fiverr.
 
Which gets back to that first bullet: “Infinitely more talent.” We recently wanted a Morgan Freeman-style voice, and searched on “Morgan Freeman-style voice,” and found lots of them. And many of them were quite good! Just like that! It was a real gig-economy moment: This obscure Morgan Freeman sound-alike was just sitting there, when, bang!, he got work from us. Everyone was happy. 
 
Direct without directing
 
We won’t get into the intricacies of casting here; that goes beyond the scope of this article. So we’ll assume you’ve found the talent that you like and need. 
 
But they might be halfway across the country... or the world. (We use lots of British voices, for example.) So how do you direct them if you can’t be in the control room while they’re in the booth? 
 
The answer is the script. That might sound like a no-brainer, but it’s how you craft the script that matters. 
 
Sure, you’ve got your “V.O.” in the “Audio” column of the script. (The other column is “Video.”) But you need to help that announcer along. Consider this V.O. passage (which we’re making up) for a corporate video aimed at banking executives: 

• “When it comes to SOX and the OCC, you may need to issue adverse action letters to clients.” 

 
That’s tricky! There are a few ways a V.O. artist could read this... but only one that you want. 
 
Let’s make it a little more artist-friendly: 

• “When it comes to SOX [“socks”] and the OCC [“O-C-C”], you may need to issue adverse-action letters to clients.” 

 
“Brackets” signify “directions to the artist.” Pretty obvious. As fixed, above, you’ll now know that your artist won’t say “S-O-X” or “Ock”, which wouldn’t help you. 
 
Also note the addition of that hugely important hyphen. “Issue adverse action letters” became “Issue adverse-action letters.” So “adverse-action” will get read [“red,” not “reed,” get it?] as if it were just one word (technically a compound adjective), and just guide that artist along. 
 
Help them with things like numbers, too. Don’t write “1,600.” Choose what you want: either “one-thousand six-hundred” or “16-hundred.” Make it clear. 
 
Here’s another trick: Toss some intriguing direction, for the artist, on the overall character and tonality, at the top of the script. Make it challenging and fun for them; they’ll love you for it... and deliver a better read. We recently penned a script which included a voice for a robot character who was “nerdy yet likeable” with a touch of “efficient British butler” to him. We got a dynamite read out of our artist for that one. 
 
We work on this kind of stuff all the time (heck, we even served as preliminary judge for the Clio Awards for “U.S. Radio”). Need help? We’d love to come to the rescue. Contact us today. 

​Are you scaring away the very prospects you seek to attract?
 
This is a good one. We’ll bet you’ve encountered a situation like the one we’re about to describe—specifically, an offering to your clients and prospects—and been faced with the same dilemma. 
 
This is a “silver lining” story if ever there was one. 
 
Let’s dive in. 
 
What does your business offer?
 
For this assignment, we were helping a business to launch a new brand, and its associated website. So everything was pretty much from-scratch. We’d helped our client to ideate some elements, but many others they did on their own. We—us and the client—were both working hard, and fast, to meet a set-in-stone deadline for the unveiling of the new site, and business. 
 
Then it came at us. 
 
And by “it,” we mean, the “Services” page. 
 
Okay, you’re asking: How can this become an entire blog article?
 
Even more astutely, you’re asking—you’ve been asking--What on earth does this have to do with the words “tax” and “benefit” in the title of this story?
 
Stay with us. 
 
This client gave us the raw input for writing the copy for the new business’ Services page. To our client’s credit, they endeavored to keep everything as simple as possible. We can’t divulge the details here, but suffice to say that our client was looking to “product-ize” a number of service-based offerings, and list them on the Services page under five different categories, or tiers, of offerings. 
 
Our job, ostensibly, was simply to clean up the copy for this five-column matrix. So far, so straightforward, right? 
 
A sticky sticking point
 
This is where we saw a problem—and a huge opportunity. The input went something like this (again, we need to be fuzzy here for disclosure reasons): 
 
There were five different offerings. Well, actually, there were really only four: Four one-off service packages that this client of ours wanted to sell. 
 
Huh? 
 
What, then, was the fifth one? 
 
The fifth one, as we were told, was a requirement for any prospective client. It said that, “If you buy Services 2, 3, or 4, you also need to buy Add-On Number 5, which is a monthly maintenance package.” 
 
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re smart. You’ve figured out this entire thing—including the teaser words “tax” and “benefit” in our headline—already. Haven’t you? 
 
Don’t worry. We’ll spell it all out anyway. 
 
Here’s the thing: Our client wanted to—and had every right to—demand that their new clients who signed up for Tiers 2, 3, and 4, should also sign up for Add-On Number 5: the monthly-maintenance package. This is because the actual baseline offerings of Tiers 2, 3, and 4 were pretty complicated things, and thus needed ongoing maintenance in order to function properly, and keep working as advertised. 
 
So, on that basis, it was a reasonable demand. 
 
The thing that was unreasonable, in our eyes? Demanding it. 
 
When bad becomes good
 
As soon as we saw the five columns of input, we could see not only what was wrong, but the simple way to fix it: 
 
Eliminate Add-On Number 5.
 
Done. Why list an additional charge, as some kind of requirement, some kind of tax, for something else that a customer would want to buy already? 
 
In other words, don’t force it on them as an add-on. 
 
Instead, bake it in, as a feature of Tiers 2, 3, and 4. 
 
Ta-dah. 
 
Now it’s not a tax. It’s a benefit. It’s a feature. Indeed, it’s an incentive to upgrade. 
 
Think of ordering a new car online. You’re accustomed to seeing the columns of different feature packages: Base, Upgrade, Ultimate. Same thing here. 
 
The “base” is Tier 1. You get what you get. But when you upgrade to Tier 2, not only do you get more bells and whistles, but you also get professional maintenance, month after month, to make sure you get the most out of your investment! How wonderful is that? 
 
Tiers 3 and 4 each add more features (and thus value, and thus price), and also include the monthly maintenance—again, as an added benefit.
 
This sure is making Tier 1 look pretty bare-bones by now, isn’t it? 
 
Not only that, it’s radically streamlining the “Services” page. Four columns are that much easier to digest than five, and that whole fifth column was confusing and off-putting, anyway. 
 
Take it to the bank
 
Now you know how that “Services” page ended up getting structured. The client was delighted with our suggestion, and let us run with it. 
 
This story, and our reason for telling it, extends way beyond that one client of ours, and that one offering-matrix and “Services” page. It speaks to the the panoply of value that you offer to your customers and prospects alike. It frees you from the fear of “needing to ask for more.” It enables you to make more, while making your clients even happier in the process. Everyone wins. 
 
The stumbling block, then, is perceptual. You just need to see this story—and others like it, which will confront you frequently—in the proper light. 
 
Need help with a challenge like this? Contact us. We solve these kinds of issues all the time. 

If you’re a consultant, this is an important question: Are you giving away your sniff-test?
 
Huh? 
 
Where’s this going? 
 
We’ll tell you. It’s inspired by one of our clients, who definitely does give away their sniff-test. It’s a brilliant idea, and one you should emulate, in case you aren’t already. 
 
We’ll give you all the details—answer all your questions—in a minute. 
 
Start with what you know
 
This article, be advised, is all about landing new business. (Pretty much all of our consultant-focused articles are.) So this is about helping you cross The Great Divide between clients you have, and clients you’d like to have. 
 
Your existing clients, we’ll assume, love you. They value your expertise, experience, and service. They know you. 
 
In other words, they don’t need to learn about you.
 
In the beginning of your relationship with them, this wasn’t the case. You might have started with a toe-in-the-water engagement, delicately dancing around who-trusts-whom. Once you earned your credibility with this client, they became less cautious, less cagey, and entrusted you with more and more work, assignments, and responsibility. 
 
That’s a fairly natural progression. 
 
But all of the work, from a business-development standpoint, was at the beginning. Your old client, back when they were a new client, didn’t appreciate you. To be fair, you didn’t understand them as well as you do now, either. There was a learning curve for both of you to climb. 
 
This gets back to the ongoing, thorny problem of enticing new clients to trust you with their business. It gets straight back to the sniff-test. 
 
What’s it smell like?
 
Just in case the phrase “sniff-test” is unfamiliar to you, we’ll give you our broad, street-level definition of it. Think of someone (more specifically, a single guy, because knowing that will make this more realistic, if not funny) who’s dashing out the door to go someplace important, such as a job interview or a first date. Of course, the laundry’s piling up, it hasn’t been washed in far too long, and there’s that perfect shirt that the guy wants to wear. Just sitting there. 
 
Was it washed recently? Not sure. Can’t remember. 
 
Thus, the sniff-test. He buries his nose in the thing, inhales deeply, and braces for the worst. If it’s got an airy scent of fabric softener, it’s a “go.” If it just smells neutral and not bad, it’s still passable. If it reeks like day-old roadkill, it failed the sniff-test. 
 
See where this is going? 
 
Nose it, gratis
 
This other client of ours has years and years of deep, focused experience in their area of expertise. Importantly, what takes others hours, or even days, to discover, often leaps out quickly for this client, from even a cursory review of input from a potential client.
 
This quality—this Spidey Sense, if you will—surfaced during a conversation we’d had with this client one day. “Can you really just tell when something looks wrong, or doesn’t feel right, amid mountains of arcane input?” we’d asked. 
 
“Usually,” was the reply. 
 
“Wow,” was our rejoinder. 
 
And thus, it became a business outreach strategy. We branded it (with a name we won’t share here, to protect our client) and used it as an offer in all outreach materials to prospective clients-of-our-client: “Call now to book your free sniff-test.” 
 
Think about the beauty of this: 

• It’s a wonderfully simple and concise call-to-action: “Send us your input materials. (We’ll even sign your NDA in advance, if you like.) We’ll give you, say, 30 minutes of our time, gratis, to review them. And we’ll give you the no-punches-pulled assessment. If you’d like to proceed with us afterward, by all means, do so. If not, there’s no obligation. We think it’s worth the 30-minute risk on our side.” 

 

• It helps the consultant and the new prospective client to rapidly climb the familiarity/expertise-comfort-level learning-curve. If you can provide that much insight, that quickly, for free... well, just imagine how much more you could deliver if you were actually paid? 

 

• It’s instinctive. We honestly doubt that any prospects (or you, for that matter), really needs to read our parable about “the origins of the term ‘sniff-test,’” above. “Send us your stuff. We’ll give it a free sniff-test.” It’s a simple, even visceral, message. When properly branded (as was the case here), it’s even more streamlined, elegant, powerful, and motivational. 

 

• It puts the toe in the water immediately. No dancing around “what will that first project be?” You both know it from the get-go. 

 

• It provides instant credibility. You don’t need to go proving yourself if you just delivered a brutal sniff-test to that prospect. (Note how we’ve not-too-subtly segued from “our client” to “you,” since our client already does this, and you will be soon, if you aren’t already.) 

 

• It provides instant value. Not just in terms of “My time is worth X dollars per hour; I’m giving you a half hour for free.” But rather in terms of “Even if you don’t engage with me, you’ve gotten something of value, that you can use immediately.” This is the antithesis of the “Services” page of your website or other such brochure; it’s the apotheosis of the gateway offer. 

 
Start sniffing!
 
As far as promulgating this offer goes, that’s a challenge unto itself. (Did we really just use “promulgating” and “unto” in the same sentence... a mere sentence after we’d slung “apotheosis” your way? Blame the caffeine!)
 
Still, it’s a straightforward challenge. The gateway offer of the free sniff-test, properly applied, is brilliant. And business-building. 
 
Need help crafting the details of your free sniff-test, or telling the world about it? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help! 

You’ve been handed a creative assignment to execute. Quick: How much input do you need? 
 
Question: Is that even a valid question? 
 
You bet it is. If you think this is simply a matter of “Well, it depends on what I receive,” then think again. 
 
Creative assignments vary in scope and medium, but they all have one thing in common: Interpretation. Your job, as a creative pro, is to take what is basically un-creative yet factual input, and come up with an enticing, all-new creative spin for it. “Don’t sell the steak; sell the sizzle.” That kind of assignment. 
 
Still, you need to know enough about the product or solution you’re selling—and, even more importantly, the target audience you’re selling it to—before you can begin ideating. 
 
Which begs a very important question that you may not have thought about before, because these things get tossed your way all the time, and they’re on deadline, and you just do them, so why would you think about it? 
 
But the question is the topic of this article: How much input do you need? 
 
Put another way: How much is too much? How much is too little? What, in other words, is the Goldilocks-just-right optimal amount of input for you to nail that creative assignment? 
 
Think big (or small)
 
Not-so-irrelevant digression: We’ve noticed that old people invariably pine to be younger. And kids invariably can’t wait to grow up. Which suggests that there must be one magical age that all people yearn to be. We asked a Generation Z’er. She said, without a moment’s hesitation: “Twenty-three.”
 
As we said, a digression. 
 
But not wholly off the mark. Your optimum-input dilemma follows a similar logic. An easy way to arrive at the answer is to think in terms of wildly exaggerated extremes, and then carve your way back to the sweet-spot middle. 
 
For example: You need to create a two-sided sell sheet. The client input consists of an email that says “Make something exciting about our ABC offering! It’s better than what others offer!" 
 
Clearly, way too little. 
 
You can see where this is going. But you might not see the profitable takeaway quite so easily. 
 
True story: Not long ago, we were assigned a two-sided sell-sheet by a client. The input? They emailed us 100 pages of material. 
 
Obviously, this was way too much. Not quite so obviously, it was also an opportunity. 
 
A time for leverage
 
When we received this 100 pages of input, we immediately told the client, “That’s too much.” They said, “No, we think it’s fine. Send us a bid for the project.” 
 
And so we bid on it, all right. Our bid included the massive amount of time it would take us to pore through all 100 pages of stuff, to cull out what we needed to create two pages. We’re not the greatest mathematicians here at Copel Communications, but even we can tell you that that’s a 50x ratio.
 
This bid was expensive. It had to be. We can’t simply carve out that much time and effort to create what would otherwise be a small, basic assignment, without charging to cover all that extra time. 
 
When they saw the bid, the client was taken aback. “Wow,” they said, “that’s more than what we expected.” 
 
Now comes the fun part. 
 
We were able, at this point, to be generous. “How about we make you a deal?” we offered. “If you can carve the input down to an essential five pages, we’ll knock the price in half.” 
 
Get this: They thanked us for that offer. The next day, five pages arrived. And everyone was happy. 
 
The golden ratio
 
The lesson here is that you need to speak up, and do so immediately. Don’t be shy. And certainly don’t wait until you’re on Page 32 of the input to go griping to the client that you need more time, more money, or both. But do couch it positively: “I’d like to do this for a lower price!” That will get their attention, every time. 
 
It will also condition them, going forward. Here’s another trick: (virtual) Post-It’s. That client probably doesn’t have the time to cull the individual slides from that massive PowerPoint deck, or diagrams from that report, but they can add little “stickies” to point out just the things you need to know... if you ask them to. 
 
And we ask. All the time. It’s not impolite. It’s professional.
 
Finally, to address the ingoing question of this article: Just how much input do you need? Well, the answer will depend on the type of assignment and the type of input, but we find that about a three-to-one ratio is nice. That’s for written input. If it’s visual input, the ratio can go much higher—as high as ten-to-one—because it’s easy to look through images quickly and make snap judgments thereon. 
 
Need help with that next creative assignment? Contact us. We’d love to help. And we won’t be shy when it comes to helping you cull the input.