Writing that gets replied to

Why writing is your biggest lever

Writing is the one commercial skill where a beginner can be genuinely better than an experienced rep inside a fortnight: nobody can see your lack of quota attainment in an email, only whether it was worth reading. It is also where most of the internal selling that decides your deal happens.

Voice from the field

"Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills and meaningless jargon."
— William Zinsser, On Writing Well (1976)

Six clarity rules

1. One idea per paragraph. A reader scanning on a phone reads an email as a sequence of blocks; a block with two ideas loses the second.

2. Short sentences, mostly. Not uniformly short — that reads as staccato — but break anything over about 25 words. Orwell's rules from "Politics and the English Language" (1946) cover most of it: never use a long word where a short one will do; if it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out; never use the passive where you can use the active.

3. No throat-clearing. "I hope this email finds you well. My name is X and I'm reaching out from Y…" is two sentences before anything happens. Delete the first two sentences of everything you write and check whether anything was lost. Usually nothing was.

4. Concrete verbs and nouns. "We help organisations optimise their sample lifecycle" says nothing; "we reconcile paper consent records against your database" says something checkable. The test: could a competitor's marketing team have written it unchanged?

5. Their jargon, never yours. LIMS, chain of custody, DTAC and aliquot signal credibility because the buyer uses them daily. "Solution", "leverage", "synergies" and "best-in-class" do the opposite.

6. Every sentence passes "so what?" If you can't answer with something they care about, delete it. Ruthlessly applied, this halves most emails.

Two directional, correlational findings from Boomerang's analyses of very large email corpora: response rates peaked in the 50–125 word range, and simpler reading levels outperformed college-level prose.

Rewrite 1: the bloated first email

Before (148 words of body):

Subject: Introduction — Lattice Bio / sample management solutions

Dear Dr Adeyemi,

I hope this email finds you well. My name is Alex Doyle and I am reaching out from Lattice Bio, a leading provider of innovative sample management solutions for the life sciences sector. We work with a wide range of academic and commercial organisations to help them optimise their biobanking operations and drive efficiencies across the sample lifecycle.

I wanted to introduce myself and explore whether there might be an opportunity to discuss how our platform could potentially add value to your operation. Our solution is highly configurable and has been designed with the needs of modern research organisations in mind, with a particular focus on compliance, traceability and scalability.

Would you be available for a brief 30-minute introductory call over the coming weeks to discuss your requirements in more detail? I am generally flexible and happy to work around your diary.

Kind regards, Alex

What's wrong: the subject describes the sender. The first two sentences are throat-clearing, every noun is abstract, and the only ask is thirty minutes of her time for the seller's benefit.

After (78 words):

Subject: consent records that only exist on paper

Dear Dr Adeyemi,

Two biobank managers told me the same thing this month: their pre-2015 samples have consent status recorded only on paper, and every new access request stalls on it.

Is that true at the Marchwood biobank?

We built the reconciliation step for exactly that problem. It runs at roughly a day per 10,000 legacy records.

If it's relevant I'll send the two-page method note — no call needed unless you'd like one.

Alex Doyle Lattice Bio

Why it works: the subject names a problem, not a vendor. It opens on the reader's world, makes one checkable claim, asks one easy question, and offers a document rather than a meeting. Readable on a phone in fifteen seconds.

Rewrite 2: the rambling follow-up

Before (135 words of body):

Subject: Re: Great to speak

Hi Ruth,

Thanks so much for your time yesterday — it was really great to speak with you and I very much enjoyed learning more about the biobank. It sounds like you have a lot on your plate!

As discussed, I've attached our overview deck, which gives a good sense of the platform and the various modules, as well as a case study from a similar organisation which I thought you might find interesting. There's also a link below to our recent webinar on chain of custody.

I know you mentioned the migration piece is a bit of a concern, so I've asked our team internally whether there's anything we can share, and I'll revert once I hear back. In the meantime do let me know if you have any questions at all.

Best, Alex

What's wrong: the subject is empty, and none of the three attachments is the thing she asked about. "A bit of a concern" softens the most important sentence of the call into wallpaper. The only commitment has no date, and "any questions at all" is not a next step.

After (105 words):

Subject: Migration plan for the pre-2015 records

Hi Ruth,

You said the blocker isn't choosing a system — it's that nobody has shown you how to migrate fifteen years of records, including ~40,000 where consent only exists on paper.

Attached is how we'd do it: the reconciliation method, what your team would have to do, and how long it took at two comparable biobanks. Two pages.

One thing I couldn't answer yesterday: whether we can read your Access schema directly. I'm checking with our data team and will tell you either way by Thursday.

Worth 30 minutes with your data manager next week to test the plan against your real schema?

Alex

Why it works: it opens by playing back her framing, proving the call was heard. One attachment, aimed at the stated blocker. The open question is named honestly, with a date — how you build credibility with someone burned by a vendor. And it ends with one calendarable ask.

Rewrite 3: the jargon-stuffed LinkedIn note

LinkedIn's connection note is capped at 300 characters (limits change — check the counter), which makes padding impossible.

Before (333 characters — over the limit, and it deserves to be):

Hi Ruth, reaching out to connect as I'm passionate about driving digital transformation across the life sciences ecosystem. At Lattice Bio we empower research organisations to unlock the full value of their sample assets through best-in-class, end-to-end traceability solutions. Would love to connect and explore potential synergies!

What's wrong: entirely about the sender, nothing that couldn't be copied onto any other vendor's note, and an ask that means nothing. Seven vendor words in three sentences.

After (241 characters):

Hi Ruth — I read the notes from your talk at the biobanking network day, particularly the part about paper consent records. I work on sample tracking and that problem comes up in almost every conversation. Would like to follow what you post.

Why it works: it proves five seconds of research, names something specific she said, and asks for something small and true. It doesn't pitch, because a connection request isn't the place.

Field note

The tell that you're writing for yourself rather than the reader is the first-person opening. Count how many of your emails begin with "I" or "We" — for most beginners it's nearly all of them. Rewriting the first sentence to begin with "You", "Your" or the reader's own words fixes the majority of bad sales emails in one pass, because it forces you to have something to say about them.

Three habits carry across all three: the subject line names the reader's topic in about six words; there is exactly one ask, because two halve the chance of either; and the draft is read aloud and checked on a phone first.

4. Phone and video presence

Presence is not charisma, but a set of mechanical variables you can measure and change.

Pace, pitch and volume

Conversational English typically runs around 120–150 words per minute, and formal presentation is usually recommended slower. Nerves push you above your own baseline, and the faster you go the more you sound like someone with something to sell.

You are almost certainly too fast. Vary it — uniform pace is what makes a delivery a drone — and slow down for numbers, names and anything the other person needs to write down. Gong's call analysis suggests successful reps slow down under objection while less successful ones accelerate.

Pitch is what makes you sound certain or unsure. Watch for the rising terminal — ending a statement on an upward inflection so it sounds like a question. "We'd run the migration in two phases?" undoes its own content. The opposite fault is monotone, which comes from reading rather than talking: keep notes as bullets, never sentences.

Volume: slightly louder than feels natural reads as confident; quiet reads as tentative regardless of content.

Filler words, and how actually to reduce them

"Um", "uh", "like", "sort of", "basically", "just" — fillers aren't evidence of stupidity. They're evidence that your mouth started before your sentence was finished.

Before you panic: listeners judge filler frequency badly: in a study by Nicholas Christenfeld, participants asked to count filled pauses misjudged them systematically, in one condition reporting an average of around 22 "ums" in a three-minute recording that contained none at all. And listeners focused on content notice fillers less than listeners focused on style — interviewers following your reasoning are not tallying your ums.

That said, dense fillers read as uncertainty. What works:

1. Substitute silence. The only durable fix. A filler is a placeholder for thinking time; a pause does the same job and sounds deliberate.
2. Slow down, and shorten your sentences — long clause-heavy ones produce a filler at each join.
3. Count them once a week. Record five minutes, play back, tally — awareness alone reduces frequency.
4. Kill hedges separately. "I just wanted to ask", "does that make sense?" These aren't fillers, they're apologies: "does that make sense?" implies you doubt your own explanation, where "what questions does that raise?" doesn't.

Don't try to eliminate fillers entirely. Filler-free speech sounds recorded.

Smiling on the phone

Sales-floor folklore that happens to have support: research by Amy Drahota and colleagues at the University of Portsmouth (Speech Communication, 2008) found listeners could distinguish kinds of smile — and non-smiles — from the voice alone. Smiling changes the shape of the vocal tract, and it is audible. Put a mirror or a note where you'll see it, and stand up for phone work.

Camera, framing and light

Video presence is mostly setup, and the setup is a one-off job.

• Camera at eye level, head-and-shoulders framing, eyes roughly a third down the frame. A laptop flat on a desk shoots up your nose; books under it cost nothing.
• Light in front of you, not behind. A window behind you makes you a silhouette.
• Look at the camera for the important sentences. Looking at their face on screen means you appear to be looking down. Nobody holds camera contact throughout — do it deliberately.
• Hide your own video. Jeremy Bailenson's 2021 paper on video-call fatigue (Technology, Mind, and Behavior) identifies constant self-view as one of four contributing mechanisms, alongside close-up eye gaze, the cognitive load of producing and reading non-verbal cues, and reduced physical mobility. The cheapest fix available.
• Wired headset or decent earbuds, neutral background, no filters. Audio quality affects perceived competence more than video does.

Field note

Test your setup by recording a two-minute solo call, watching it with the sound off, then listening with the screen off. The silent pass shows what the buyer sees — angle, light, whether you look present. The audio pass shows your pace and your fillers. It fixes things you'd otherwise carry for years.

Nerves, and recovering from a stumble

Nerves are physiological arousal, and "calm down" mostly fails because you're trying to move from high arousal to low in ninety seconds. There's a better-evidenced move: Alison Wood Brooks's research (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2014) compared telling yourself to calm down with reappraising the same arousal as excitement, across singing, public speaking and maths tasks, and found reappraisal produced better performance. Saying "I'm excited" out loud relabels arousal you already have, rather than trying to eliminate it.

Alongside it: a slow exhale before you speak; your first sentence written out verbatim, because the opening is where nerves do most damage; and a question ready, because handing the ball over converts a performance into a conversation.

Recovering from a stumble matters more than the stumble. Lost your thread? Say so plainly — "Sorry, I've lost my thread; where I was going was…" What buyers can't stand isn't the slip, it's thirty seconds of visible flailing. Said something wrong? Correct it immediately. Tripped over a word? Carry on and don't comment — half the room didn't notice, and commenting guarantees they all do.