Airlie Center has been called “an island of thought” by TIME magazine because many creative ideas have been spawned at conferences there: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s March on Washington and Earth Day are two notable examples.

We discussed the challenge of finding words that adequately convey the extraordinary beauty and facilities and amenities of Airlie Center, particularly in prospecting email messages.

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. One very smart salesperson has been appending relevant images of Airlie Center in the signature of her prospecting emails.

PROSPECTING EMAIL EXAMPLE:

Unlike a hotel, Airlie Center is a dedicated Conference Center with all inclusive packages.  Our Complete Meeting Package (CMP) begins with dinner, and includes the following:

Seven Guesthouses Accommodating 217 guests

Each guestroom offers serene charm coupled with modern amenities including:

• Cable television
• Lighted work area with analog and T1 data ports
• 2 private telephones with voicemail
• Personal coffee pot, hair dryer, iron, ironing board

17 Conference Rooms boasting 17,000 Square Feet of Meeting Space

• Designed to accommodate each group’s needs
• Understated décor, abundant windows providing natural light
• Comfortable ergonomic chairs
• Latest conference support technology

Recreation & Relaxation

Airlie’s picturesque, rural campus provides a perfect backdrop for jogging, walking, biking, fishing, and other nature based activities.  There is also a fitness gym and an outdoor swimming pool.  Team Building Activities, such as a certified ropes course instruction, can be arranged (additional cost will apply).

Airlie’s Whistling Swan Pub provides a warm ambiance for after-hours relaxation complete with darts, billiards, fireplace, and overstuffed leather chairs.  A game of golf, winery tour, skeet shooting, horseback riding and trip to enchanting historic Old Town Warrenton can also be arranged.

Dedicated Conference Planners
Airlie’s professional Meeting Planners work closely with you to deliver customized results.  From meeting room selection, setup and equipment requirements, guest room requirements, to food presentation and menu selections, our professional Meeting Planners simplify and streamline your job!

Day Meeting Packages are also available.

TIPS

• Be certain to customize the images to your audience. Send only those images that reflect the relevant services for your prospect.
• More tips on using email signatures for marketing messages.
• We tested Airlie’s signature images on three email systems: gmail, MS Outlook and a college proprietary email system. None required a separate click to download the images, as is required for images in the body of an email message in these systems. (NOTE: this was an anecdotal test only, and not conclusive, but does suggest that images in the signature are are more likely to be seen.)

If your products or service is visually compelling, use this wise practice from Airle Center to engage your reader and immediately differentiate your message.

Too many cooks, throwing in too many ingredients, can easily muddle the audience focus and requisite content:

How to Write by Committee:

• Make sure roles are clearly assigned. You need a writer/editor and the sign-off designee:
  • Choose your best writer as writer/editor and recipient of all team feedback.
  • Choose the team member most familiar with the audience needs and benefits and product as sign-off designee.
  • All team members can, and should, provide feedback.

1. Start with a group meeting. Identify audience and content. (As taught in Effective Business Writing Techniques.)
2. For the first review, solicit feedback, not text editing, from the full team. What information do team members want changed? Make sure they are able to explain why they want that information changed.
3. Let the team writer/editor revise the document, based on the team feedback received. To hold clarity and voice, it’s best if multiple team members do not edit text.
4. For the second review, have team proofread for typos and errors, as well as message.
5. When the editor feels the document is ready, present it to the sign-off designee.

Beware committee bloat. If you have important documents that are shaped by committee, be sure to identify roles and process. You’ll save time and frustration, create documents that reflect your audience’s needs, and present a clear message.

~David Ogilvy, Advertiser

AIDA is an easy to remember acronym for writing persuasively. It reflects the writing elements needed to help you make a sale:

A = Attention

I = Interest

D = Desire

A = Action

In business sales letters, the first step, Attention, occurs most often in two places:

1. The email subject line, if your sales letter is being sent via email.
2. The business letter heading.

TIP:
There are very few absolute rules in business writing, but here is one: never send out an email with no subject line, and place the sales letter heading in the body of the message. Your recipient won’t open the email.

Make sure your subject line or heading is specific and piques your readers’ interest.

TECHNIQUES:

• Provide news
• Arouse curiosity
• Promise a benefit

Strong headings or subject lines emphasize benefits. Truly effective headings and subject lines combine all three techniques. Examples:

• New Business Writing Courses Reduce Costs for Acme Company by 30%.
• Strong Business Writing Skills: Your Own Recession Defense
• CEOs Reveal Secret to Career Success: Business Writing Skills
• Online Business Writing Courses: Train Any Time, Pace or Place

Remember AIDA for your sales letters, and begin by claiming your readers’ attention.

Learn More in This Course: Sales Letter Writing

The researchers who compiled the list monitor the use of phrases in a massive language database, called the Oxford University Corpus, which comprises books, papers, magazines, broadcast, the internet, and other sources.

The database alerts the researchers to new words and phrases, and can tell them which expressions are disappearing, or being overused so much they have become irritating to hear or read.

The top ten most irritating phrases:

1 – At the end of the day

2 – Fairly unique

3 – I personally

4 – At this moment in time

5 – With all due respect

6 – Absolutely

7 – It’s a nightmare

8 – Shouldn’t of

9 – 24/7

10 – It’s not rocket science

Are there other phrases you find annoying in business writing?

Learn More: Business Writing Courses

Again and again in my career I have seen that people who can write well — in almost any field — give themselves a great advantage over their competition. I have former students in the business world, English majors all, who have kept their jobs or even gotten promotions when people with business and economics degrees were being laid off: their ability to communicate, especially in writing, was always the key.

There is no doubt that strong writing skills enhance every career. As Peter Drucker stated, “As soon as you put one foot on the career ladder, your success depends on your ability to write clearly.”

If you’re a good writer, you can actually use that to differentiate yourself from most other candidates. That probably says more about us than about our potential employers. Some people, their verbal abilities further atrophied by texting and tweeting, might not be aware of this deficiency, but companies absolutely hate it when their employees can’t write a proper sentence and string it into a paragraph. Some departments in the Michael G. Foster School of Business have mandated more writing in business courses as a top-down measure after companies complained that graduates lacked sufficient writing skills.

I hear this over and over from companies I work with. All employees, in every position, need to be able to write clearly and correctly if they are to convey information and connect meaningfully. Without this skill, employees are far less valuable.

Here are excerpts:

Q. Let’s talk about hiring. What are you looking for in job candidates?

A. Typically, when you’re hiring a vice president of a company, they already have the résumé and they already have the experience base. And so what you’re trying to find out about are the intangibles of leadership, communication style and the ability to, today, really adapt to change.

Q. What are you listening for as somebody describes their family, where they’re from, etc.?

A. You’re looking for a really strong set of values. You’re looking for a really good work ethic. Really good communication skills. More and more, the ability to speak well and write is important. You know, writing is not something that is taught as strongly as it should be in the educational curriculum. So you’re looking for communication skills…It’s not just enough to be able to just do a nice PowerPoint presentation… You’ve got to have the ability to communicate.

Q. And is there any change in the kind of qualities you’re looking for compared with 5, 10 years ago?

A. I think this communication point is getting more and more important. People really have to be able to handle the written and spoken word. And when I say written word, I don’t mean PowerPoints. I don’t think PowerPoints help people think as clearly as they should because you don’t have to put a complete thought in place. You can just put a phrase with a bullet in front of it. And it doesn’t have a subject, a verb and an object, so you aren’t expressing complete thoughts.

And a lot of what we do in communication, when you write e-mail, you need to express yourself very clearly so people understand whether we’re going to L.A. today or we’re going to Boston today.

Read the full interview in the New York Times.

Strong business writing is absolutely essential to advance your career. As Peter Drucker stated, “As soon as you put one foot on the career ladder, your ability to succeed depends on your communication skills. The memo, the sales letter, the report…these are critical tools of the employee.”

Calculate the value of your own better business writing skills to your organization with this spreadsheet.

(Photo Credit: Librado Romero/NY Times)

After the power went out in my neighborhood, I called PSE&G to alert them. After holding a very long time, a customer service representative came on the line and told me there was an “unknown cause of power loss in your area.” That’s understandable, of course, and I was relieved they were aware of the problem.

Where the customer communication broke down was her following statement:

“Power will be restored either before or after 10:30pm this evening.”

I puzzled over this for a moment, and even over the phone I could feel the besieged customer service representative brace for criticism. I asked her if that was the information she’d been given to relay to customers with no power. She paused, and said yes, and at that moment we both burst out laughing.

We both agreed I was in the better situation. No lights or heat beats having to be the bearer of that message!

THE LESSON:

1.  Be truthful and authentic with your customers:

“There is a power outage in your area. Currently we do not know the cause of the outage, but are actively investigating. At this time, we do not yet have an estimated time your power will be restored.”

With this information, a customer would know PSE&G knows of the problem and is working on it, and with no facts yet known, it’s logical a power restoration time estimate would be just a guess. Stating a convoluted, meaningless time puzzle just annoys customers.

2.  Don’t obfuscate with meaningless jargon, to avoid truth. Connect authentically with your customer or reader.

I felt badly for the customer service representative, who was very kind and clearly uncomfortable delivering that non-message. Whoever crafted that communication statement for the customer service representatives to deliver harmed both customer and employee relations. (I suggested the customer service representative tell her supervisor that she needed a break, but would return before or after the end of her shift!)

Even if the news isn’t welcome, good business communication tells the truth and respects all of the people in the communication cycle. In this case, the customer service representative had nothing of value to work with, and the obvious dance-around-the-facts message was disrespectful to customers.

The first message I heard was:

“All CSRs are busy. We’ll be with you momentarily.”

I had to puzzle over this for a moment before I realized “CSR” likely meant Customer Service Representative. This term is problematic for several reasons:

- CSR is internal jargon to this organization. They likely refer to this position with this acronym, but a customer does not immediately identify with it.
- Using jargon to an external audience who does not use this term causes an immediate customer-disconnect.

I had to hold for several minutes, and the subsequent messages became increasingly unwelcoming:

“All CSRs are still busy. They’ll help you as soon as they can.”

The intonation here is fully focused on the speaker, not the customer; “…when they can” places most value on the Customer Service Representative, instead of the customer.

A simple shift in both tone and structure, placing value on the customer, would capture the communication opportunity:

“Thank you for calling the company name rewards program. A representative will assist you shortly.”

The second message, if needed, should engage the customer and acknowledge their time and value:

“We’re sorry you are encountering a delay, but representatives strive to answer all questions fully and are still working with other customers. We will assist you shortly, and thank you for your patience.”

Good business communication focuses on the reader or customer, not the writer or speaker, and uses language that best resonates for that reader or customer.

Mary Cullen
Instructional Solutions

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If you do have a Facebook account, become a fan (Facebook’s term, not mine) and receive updates and access to the interactive forums where you can post questions. Instructors and I will answer all questions posted so it’s a great place to get individual help.

This is a central repository of our business writing support information. This blog and our monthly newsletter will be posted here, along with other resources. Most importantly, this is an interactive resource, so you can post questions, ideas and comments and we’ll respond.

Please remember, “Write as if your career depends on it. Because it does.”

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