Writing for the Ear, Not the Eye

I think my default writing style is reasonably conversational—until I put it to the test. Sometimes it sounds way different out loud than it looks on paper. This normally would not be a problem, because everyone expects writing to be a bit more formal. But there are times when it is critical that you should write for the ear and not the eye.

It’s especially important when you’re crafting a value proposition to start a sales call, or to leave a voice mail for a prospect that will get them to call you back. It’s not too hard to sound spontaneous, and it’s not too hard to sound clever, but trying to do both at once takes work. That work comprises three activities: thinking, writing, and saying.

Obviously, you need to start by thinking what the gist of your message is going to be. But a lot of salespeople stop right here. It sounds good in their head, so they’re confident they can wing it come showtime.

From my own long experience in personally botching unprepared statements plus coaching thousands of role plays, I’ve come to firmly believe in writing it down, because often you don’t know what you think until you try to write it out, and the process of writing and re-writing helps you refine and improve it. That’s where the clever part comes in.

The next step is to make it sound spontaneous. Why is spontaneity important? Because it’s more believable if it sounds natural and effortless. If it sounds like pre-prepared words read off a sheet of paper, you wonder if the speaker believes them himself. People want to feel like you’re talking to them, not at them.

So the third step is to test it by saying it out loud. Skip that step and you may run into a situation that once happened to me, when I called a sales VP at a prospect company to get an appointment. I gave him a beautifully written value proposition, with an exquisitely crafted sentence that contained a plethora of multisyllabic words, and then waited for his reply. After a few seconds of silence, he said, “I didn’t understand a word you just said.”

I think of that story every single time before I make a sales call, which is actually how I got the idea to write this post just now. Just a few minutes ago I prepared for a call to a prospect, and I wrote out a nice value proposition. Then I read it out loud, and the good news was, it didn’t completely stink. But then I said it again a few more times—not reading word for word, but repeating the sentiment, until it sounded both clever and spontaneous. Only then did I pick up the phone and make the call. I ended up leaving a voice mail, so I’m not claiming victory just yet, but at least I didn’t hang up the phone wishing I could go back and delete my own message!