Guest Post by Christopher Gillespie
On Monday, a salesperson gets blasted on Twitter for a presumptuous note. Tuesday, a new website is met with clickless silence and on Wednesday, a marketer triggers an avalanche of unsubscribes.
Unrelated mishaps, you might think. But the one thread ties these flops together: Mediocre writing.
“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place,” wrote playwright George Bernard Shaw. We often think we’re saying one thing, but readers hear another. And when salespeople and marketers choose words carelessly, their tweets, landing pages, and emails confuse and irritate 81 percent of prospects.
That equates to a lot of lost revenue. If teams truly wanted to close more deals, they’d stop chasing new tech and seek advice from a class of people who are famously unskilled at making money (often described as starving) but who know everything about printed persuasion: Writers.
Great writers will tell you that