6 Steps to Influence Others With Your Business Writing
Business writing used to be simply about communicating -- getting information across to others. Not anymore. Now you have to influence, not just communicate, with your writing.
And it’s not just ad copy, sales material or proposals that need to influence. Whether you are competing for business or competing for career advancement in your organization, everything you write should be designed to influence the readers to like you, buy from you and even talk about you. That includes your staff, colleagues, boss and customers.
If you aren’t influencing, your competitors or colleagues probably are, and that’s driving increased attention and business for them.
If you simply sit down and start writing that letter to the customer, memo to your employees or anything else, you’re writing backwards. Before you put pen to paper, you need a strategy to influence.
It’s not as hard as you think. You don’t have to be a salesperson, copywriter or public relations guru. All you need to do is follow these six steps for everything you write:
1. Establish Your Purpose
Everything you write needs to have a purpose, otherwise why would you bother writing it?
If you’re writing a memo to your employees, you try to influence them to follow your instructions or procedures.
When writing a report internally or even a memo or status update for your boss, you are trying to tell them how your initiatives are succeeding and influence them to see you as a high performer.
When you write a letter to a customer, you want them to agree with your position, buy more from you or simply feel good enough about their interaction with you that they’ll become a repeat customer.
When you write a sales letter or proposal to a prospective customer, you are trying to convince them to become a customer because of the benefits you provide and attributes you have.
When you tweet, write a blog on your company website or post a Facebook update, you’re trying to get interest in your product or service.
By understanding the purpose of what you are writing, you can then develop the strategy you need to achieve the influence you want.
2. Analyze Your Audience
To be influential, you need to know what will actually influence your audience. Then, you can write in a way that is tailored to what matters to them instead of what matters to you. Do this by targeting your message and your arguments to their interests. That means you might even have to write more than one version to target different audiences.
Take a step back and think about the issue from your readers’ perspective. For instance, if you’re introducing a change in policy, what will it mean to them? What will be the impact? What will they care about? What will they think of your motives or reasons for doing this? Depending on what you’re writing, you’ll be able to come up with many questions that will help get to the question about what matters to them.
If possible, seek out trusted members of your target audience, such as customers or even employees and run your initial thoughts past them to get their reaction. Incorporate this into what you write.
3. Deal with Their Objections
While it’s part of analyzing your audience, their possible objections are something you need to specifically deal with. Unlike a conversation or a sales call, you won’t have the opportunity to clarify what you write or respond to their questions while they are reading.
Think about questions they might ask or objections they might raise and answer them in the first place. Don’t be afraid to raise issues if you have an answer for them. If you leave a vacuum, the reader is more likely to think you are hiding it or don’t understand it and it will remain a concern to them, making it hard for you to influence them.
One way to do this is to ask someone else to look at what you write. Have them tell you what they would want to know that you haven’t said or what objections they would raise. Then address what they tell you in your document. Don’t be afraid to get several people to give you input if it’s important.
4. Provide Evidence
Quite simply, facts sell. Don’t be general when you talk about issues -- provide evidence and facts that they can relate to, which means not just giving them raw numbers, but putting them in context.
If you have to, dig up details and do some number-crunching to back up what you are saying. Find examples you can use and even tell a story to make what you sell believable and make it relate to the reader.
This is particularly important in a sales letter, proposal or other material you use for selling, but it is also important for internal memos, reports and business cases.
5. Make It Clear and Concise
No one has time to read long, fancy writing that makes the writer look like a scholar but quickly loses the reader. Your readers don’t have the time to absorb long documents or complex sentences and paragraphs. Your goal isn’t to impress the reader with your writing skills; your goal is to influence them.
Keep your sentences as short as possible and don’t write long, blocky paragraphs. Break them up to make them easier to read and absorb.
Think about everything you write as an executive summary and keep it short and to the point, focusing on the important things and leaving everything else out. If you need to include background information, provide it separately, either in another background document or in an appendix. If they need to see it, they will read it. Otherwise, it won’t dilute what’s important.
6. Structure Your Writing
Along with writing that’s clear and concise, structure what you write to make it easy to read and to see the important information, arguments and points.
Use headings to introduce paragraphs and switch some paragraphs into bulleted lists, which will be easier to read. If writing a business case, throw out the traditional headings and make your headings meaningful, even converting them to questions such as “What is the Issue?”, What are the Options?”, “Why is this Option the Best?”, etc.
Use tables to present information, such as pros and cons, options or anything that you are comparing. You can even use a 2-column table with headings to the left and content to the right instead of the traditional format where the headings and content follow one after the other. Include key information in pull-out boxes that the rest of the text wraps around (this is easy to do in nearly all word processing software), or make a wide left margin and include details and facts, including charts and graphics where applicable, in the margins to support the main text beside it.
