An object lesson in how NOT to write stuff people will read
Do you send out reports – White Papers and so on?
It’s a great way to convince people you’re an expert.
I sent off for one just now called, “Agency Over-servicing: Who Pays?”
That is an excellent title – deceptively interesting to anyone running or employing an agency.
Whether you’re a client or an agency you’re curious. You wonder … You worry … You want to know …
Who is paying for this over-servicing? Is it the agency? Is it the client? Is it me? Is someone else doing better out of it than me? Am I doing better than them? Are they paying less than me? Am I paying more? Am I delivering too much service? Can I save money? Is my agency serving others better than me? Are agencies not making enough money? Are they making too much? What is the truth? What can I do?
Just as the headline is the most important part of an ad, the title is usually the most important part of any communication. If it doesn’t grab them, you’re screwed.
You can sell a dreadful book with a good title. (My favorite example is The business secrets of Attila the Hun).
When you think up a title, you make a promise.
You must fulfill that promise immediately.
So how did these people deliver?
With this first, incredibly long, sloppily written paragraph:
There are a lot of misunderstandings and misconceptions regarding the management of profitability in ‘Agency’ businesses. This research highlights a number of the issues and yet more remain hidden. The biggest reason for many firms never quite getting a grip on profitability is their failure to really understand the basic principles of doing business by selling time. Take Client (or Account) Profitability for example, (an area where conventional ‘Agency’ wisdom and the principles of selling time oppose each other) an area where over-servicing rears its ugly head. We all know that eliminating over-servicing would improve our client profitability and so we spend a lot of effort trying to do just that. However let’s just assume that through our diligence we have been really successful and eliminated over-servicing entirely so that every account is delivering our targeted profitability, does that mean that we are nowa really profitable business? Well, no actually. Because just by killing over-servicing all we have done is create lots of unsold capacity! The real secret to business profitability is People Profitability – ensuring that every client-facing person is needed and properly utilised on ‘paid-for’ work.
That was written (you might have guessed) by a management consultant. Sloth and incompetence lurch through every phrase. Note the redundant quote marks round the wrongly capitalised word Agency.
If you run that literary catastrophe through the Flesch-Kincaid readability measure it is over twice as hard to read as recommended.
It is poorly organised, full of jargon, lazy, and doesn’t begin to answer all those questions I had in mind. It is amateur night at the opera. It killed my interest stone dead.
I started on the rest of the report. Nothing was quite as bad as that paragraph, but it was deadly dull.
What a missed opportunity!
Are you happy with your reports, by the way?
If not, maybe, my How to write and Persuade will help. It is turning out to be the most popular thing I ever did.
D
