Every memo, guide, letter, article, post and advertisement your company publishes is a pitch. You are giving your potential readers — customers, prospects or employees — information and hoping they will take an action such as giving you their contact information, following your directions or just thinking of you when they need your expertise. For example, if you are sending an email congratulating a colleague on receiving an award, you might add, “Keep us in mind if you want help writing your next acceptance speech.”
Since there is no more definitive pitch than a business proposal, use these proven proposal strategies to strengthen all your written business communication:
Give them what they want. You need to know something about the people you are pitching to if you are going to convince them to take your proposed action. Without an actual request for proposal (RFP) in hand, which generally spells out exactly what a customer wants, you need to figure what will appeal to your audience. There are many ways to do this, including reviewing websites, posts and industry research. You also can set up a time to talk to members of the audience you are pinpointing. Once you know what business problem they face, you are ready to let them know how your service, product or process supplies a solution that meets their needs.
Fine-tune your pitch. Good proposals require you to think about the benefits of your solution, but how does that translate to other communications? For all pitches, you need to decide what you want your readers to do, such as buy your product or give you their contact information. To convince them, you need to know what benefits these actions offer and make them clear. Will it be time-saving, money-saving or happiness-inducing? If so, tell them how, as in, “No interest will accumulate if you pay now.” Once you have listed your benefits, quantify them where possible. For example, don’t say, “Our data collection app is the best.” Say, “Our customers’ sales increased by an average of 20 percent over a year’s time once they installed our data collection application.”
Stand out in the crowd. You created your process, product or service because you felt there was a need for it. Let your readers know what makes your offering special and why they should care. For example: “The only certified fiber laser reviewer, The Hudson Group, cited our laser equipment as 100 percent reliable — a claim no other company can make.” Here’s another proposal trick that can work for a pitch. Maybe you know that a competitor is terrible at security. Don’t come right out and say that. Instead, note and substantiate the high quality of your security, as in, “Two thousand customers rely on our fail-safe security system and none has ever experienced a data breach.”
Don’t leave them wondering what to do. Once you convince your audience that what you are pitching will benefit them, give them a straightforward action to take after reading your piece. Maybe you want employees to log on to a server to start a training program or prospects to contact you by email or phone. Make it clear and easy for them to do so.
Stick to a plan. Before you begin writing, estimate how long it will take you or you and your team to write a piece. Figure in research, reviews, rewriting, and publishing steps. A top-down approach works well for business writing so, depending on the length of the piece, you might want to start with an outline and fill it in — that way, you won’t miss an important point, add unneeded information or lose track of the goal of your communication.
Review it. Building in reviews for your writing from the outline to the final draft will help keep it clear and focused. Internally, reviewers might be in departments that have to deliver or support a solution or employees who have to use a new process. Externally, it may be a person not close to your offering who can give you an objective review. Ask for specific feedback. Is your pitch understandable? Are your benefits clear and convincing? Did you substantiate your claims? Oh, and can you use that reference? Better check before you include it. Finally, did you give the reader a clear action to take?
Be consistent. Whether you are a one-person shop and do all your own writing or you have a team involved, ensure consistency among written pieces with a style guide. Maybe style guides are foreign to you or you haven’t used once since college. Whatever the case, choose and follow one. Many businesses use The Chicago Manual of Style. Articles such as this one follow The Associated Press Stylebook (AP). Take the time to write down your style decisions for things such as capitalization, punctuation and acronyms, and share it with your team as needed.
Don’t be dense. Good business writing gets to the point quickly. We all have been guilty of padding our writing with phrases such as “on a daily basis” instead of “daily.” A good editor can help you avoid padding, jargon your audience might not understand, unnecessary phrases such as “we believe,” clichés, overused adjectives such as “great” and filler words such as “very.” Pay attention to your editor’s comments and add this sort of information to your style decisions.
Proof it. Now, suppose you finished writing and you spelled out your benefits, quantified them, told your audience what to do and listened to your reviewers. That’s great, but what if the link you included doesn’t work? What if you used “it’s” when it should be “its”? Maybe you took a great deal of time to make your piece eye-catching and convincing, but your typos distract your readers and you don’t get the results you want. Before you make your writing public, ask a reliable person to proofread your piece.
Always add value. Applying proven proposal strategies to business writing adds value for your readers. If you want to make your pitch a hit, take the time to understand your audience, clearly state and quantify the benefits they stand to gain by working with you, get your writing reviewed and make it easy for your readers to take a desired action.
Kate Reddy is a co-owner of McKinnon-Mulherin, a Salt Lake City firm that helps clients create quality corporate communication, from articles and proposals to presentations, training programs and employee handbooks.