17: Mark Birch talking about Business Communication

so hey everybody john barrows j barrows consulting super excited to um introduce my guest today mark birch uh mark was with the uh enterprise sales forum sales meetup and mark you want to give everybody kind of a little quick little intro on who you are what the enterprise sales meetup is all about and where they can find information on it yeah thanks sean glad to be here uh name mark birch i founded this thing called enterprise sales forum to bring b2b sales people together live situations you get the network share ideas and listen to really great skilled sales operators share their experiences and their insights and we have monthly in different cities so the best way to find us you can go to enterprise sales forum.com or you can go check out our individual chapter sites on meetup.com actually have a really great session uh tomorrow up in boston so if you're there i'll see you boston enterprise i wish i was man i love it um yeah i'm actually gonna be in new york so unfortunately i'm not gonna make it but um one of the things one of the reasons i know um but everybody should go if you're in boston you should go um but one of the reasons i reached out to you mark was because you posted a blog a little while ago on enterprise sales meetup um about writing skills and it it actually got me um it hit me because something that i've been noticing in the background of what's what i've been doing in my sales you know i i teach you know sales skills and a lot of it is rooted in the fundamentals so a lot of clients that i engage with um they like me working with some of their younger kids to to make sure that they have that foundation but what i've realized is you know and i've gotten this more than a few times where somebody's like yeah john i love the whole idea of the fundamentals of sales and that type of thing but do you all do you also do anything on like grammar and writing skills and it's caught me by surprise because i was just like the first first few times i kind of just laughed it off and said you know this okay whatever right but i you know after hearing it five six seven times and then you posted something i'm like we might have a problem here and and i wanted to address that and and then we're going to extend this to the evolution of sales and how sales have progressed in their careers but let's let's as crazy as this sounds to me let's address the whole business writing skills and just overall communication skills help me understand what are you seeing out there right now um based on the people that you interact with and some of the clients you work with and stuff yeah john it's it's something that's been a pet peeve of mine for a very long time and i've noticed that there's been a deterioration over time now just for context i've been a sales professional for the past 20 plus years so when i went to school obviously pretty rigorous there's a lot of time spent on basic grammar english skills comprehension writing and you just went through that process and even in college even in engineering school that i went through you still have to take some basic humanities and english literature understanding courses so that was my background i can't necessarily speak to what is going on today in schools or colleges but i believe that we've gotten away from the fundamentals of what good clear concise business writing is all about i think there's two things that are going on one i do think that there is a much more of a i'd say a liberal take on communications you know in the age of snapchat and twitter and you know we're condensing our thoughts into you know emojis emoticons uh shorthand brb lol so there's some of that but i also think that in large part we've emphasized the importance of writing particularly in the sales profession because we've kind of thrown it over the board to marketing to tell us what to write what to say and that's a very bad place to be because if we think that the skills around concise business language are bad in sales well marketing they take something which should be clear understandable english and they muddle it with the worst just most obscene slaughtering of our language with buzzwords non-sentences and run-ons that go on for way too long yeah i and i hear you because my background is marketing so yours is engineering mine's marketing and i think that's really what gives me that perspective on being in sales and and kind of the difference between marketing language and sales language and then executive language because i think that's the thing that you know i i i think there's i don't begrudge anybody for not knowing how to speak the language of a ceo especially some 22 year old kid coming out of school that type of stuff but i'm having a hard time really you know wrapping my head around the fact that they can't even put together you know some of these sentences that i'm reviewing in some of these emails or some of these emails in general i look at and i'm like what like where in our education system did we fall flat here and not educate these kids on the ability to have these conversations because you can't have the executive conversation until you can have an actual grammatically correct and and by the way stones here throwing stones in a you know glass house type of thing i if there wasn't words if there wasn't a spell check on microsoft i wouldn't even send emails because i'm a horrendous speller my grammar is piss poor but i at least pay attention to it you know what i mean and when i'm writing something important i take a few extra minutes to take a look back at it and say okay is this is this accurate am i using you know am i using language that makes sense here am i making complete sentences so i guess i'm trying to figure out like what do reps do right now a i don't necessarily know if reps even recognize that they can't write effectively and so what can a rep do right now who's potentially watching this to say hey how do i even know if i'm writing effectively and two what can i do what can i do about it so that i can improve my writing skills um and and get to the point where i can i can write short concise direct uh business language that gets people to engage with me yeah hey john you you wrap a whole lot of things uh in what you just said and i'm going to go back to a point that we actually discussed previously before we got on this this session which is the idea of artificial intelligence writing better prospecting emails than most reps and maybe even you and i as well uh and i think that really says something it says two things i think we're trying to dumb down the language to try and get as concise like i love things tools such as five sentences yeah i love thinking about the uh i remember uh i took a class a while back ago on communications and this idea of creating an f-shaped email and all these different types of ideas or tools out there but at the same time i think we've lost a critical aspect of what goes between our minds and what we type on a screen which is we're not really thinking clearly and what you're really seeing is is a reflection of what is muddled from a language perspective when you read these sentences which don't make any sense whatsoever that are not compelling that confuse the reader what that really is is not only maybe a a lack of fundamentals or rigor around how people write but also a lack of rigor around how you think and i actually wrote in the last enterprise sales forum newsletter last week this whole section about strategic thinking because we are competing in this world in sales where we want to get a lot high volume you know high velocity you know in and out real quick we want to you know find the prospects we want to move them through the funnel and it's fast fast fast fast fast we're executing executing executing and i'm not saying it's a bad thing but we never stop at any point in time to think is that template i'm i'm sending to that contact in that targeted account is that what i should be saying and i think we're getting lazy throughout the processes not just reps it's also on the backs of sdr managers sales managers and sales leaders that are pushing this stuff out i tell you when i have the opportunity i'm i don't have a lot of time available but sometimes i'll get some of these really bad prospecting emails and i will write back to the head of sales that company and said this is what your team is sending out you may want to rethink because i'm not going to blame the rep for sending that yeah i'm going to blame the people that are creating those templates because it's obviously these are templates and who's approving that so i think across the board there's a lot of blame on why our writing is is poor and i want to extend that to this this idea of trying to speak to executives because it's not only affecting that very first engagement you have with the prospect but it's also all the subsequent conversations and communications and so if you think about what a cfo cares about or a cio or a ceo you know these are people that have been in business for a while they're they have to think strategically they probably have pretty good backgrounds in you know whether from education or business and so they know how to effectively communicate for the most part and then they receive these atrocities of business communications and there's nowhere to go because you've already lost credibility and if you can't if you can't present yourself in a way that is able to deliver whatever message you're trying to convey in a way that's concise and understandable like you lose credibility like that yeah yeah and that's actually because my question and you answered it there was going to be like does it matter right does writing skills because ultimately what we're talking about here is like we're picking on communication skills because that's the i'm sorry writing skills because that's the obvious one you can look at it and say that's a terrible sentence or whatever but overarching communication skills and it leads to that right because the question i have you know a lot of times is i got a pet peeve about something but does it really matter so for instance you know does it really matter that a kid doesn't know calculus or doesn't know this because i mean the calculate i don't know i mean i just punch it into a calculator i'll give a quick example i you know i just went to italy for two weeks and you know i wanted to learn the language but i didn't have time and so i didn't so what did i do i got this app on my phone that i literally just spoke into and said look i got to find the bathroom please show me where the bathroom is i'm about to explode and it would just translate it directly into italian perfect with you know with a got an italian guy speaking it so like do i really do i really need to know another language um so communication skills and i'm getting to what you hit on which is the importance of both written and verbal communication skills through the progression of your career to be able to get across your point because the people that are making the decisions they have legitimate communication skills and they can cut through bullshit pretty fast and they can see bullshit really fast so that kind of for those kids out there who are like yeah whatever you know i got spell check i got this ai thing you know who cares you know i'm getting by okay you know talk to me about you know i guess maybe reinforce a little bit more of why from a career standpoint it's critical to improve those skills ernest hemingway which is who i started the yes that essay with when i published it and you uh you picked it up ernest hemingway said that good writing is good conversation only more so and it it was a real astute point because we think about communication i'm going to talk to a c-level executive well before you even get there what are you going to talk about no one actually very few people actually do this but i actually want to write out an outline of the things i'm trying to get across like i do sales planning right and so even if i'm not writing you know full-on essay that's going to be published somewhere i still am using language i'm using the skills that i've honed over the past 20 plus years in business to clearly and concisely lay out what my strategy is for having that conversation and building in the talking points that i want to convey and so and doing that in a way that doesn't sound rigid or canned or awkward right and that's the other thing about writing is that i think a lot of the challenges people have with writing is that it does feel very formulaic right people need to understanding that when you're just starting out when you're a young rep you don't know a whole lot you're probably talking to people that are way above your pay grade and experience level and you're trying to build credibility and you're trying to build rapport that's where it matters the way that you write reflects how you think and so when someone sends me something or even we have a conversation and i step back and say i'm not exactly sure i understand what you said what you say and what you write is is a symptom of how you think and actually i love that point about hemingway about you know what do you say the writing is is say that quote again good writing is good conversation but even more right because what i feel right now i'm i'm going through this exercise right now where i'm going back into studio um in july to cut up my you know my content and put it online and i already have like one program i'm trying to put the other program and the exercise that you like when you record video for learning purposes it you don't just light up the camera and be like all right cool let me talk to you about this there's a certain flow that you have to have in order for your point to get across and so my process for doing this is i literally write out word for word what i train so as i you know and i think through as because i've done it so many times from a training like standing up in front of a class that i can okay here's here's how i introduce the topics and here's how i go through but then what i realized is the way i the way i deliver in person actually i don't have that much flexibility in in in video i have to be much more concise and have follow a much more logical train of thought because when i train it's like i'll talk about a topic and then i'll bring it to another one and i'll kind of circle back to that other one and that's all well and good when you can interact with a crowd but on video it has to follow this this certain thing so the whole idea of literally i've written out every word and then i take that reorganize it and think through the the process of okay what makes sense now and how's this going to get through and even that process alone has helped me realize how important it is it's now restructured my on-site training going through that process of writing it down i'm like shit i'm all over the place with some of this stuff the way i actually present it i'm betting some people are a little bit confused with my train of thought here i need to kind of refocus on certain things so people get the core concepts here and so and that kind of leads me to like what can a rep do right like what can what should no what forget about what can a rep do what should a rep do to improve their writing skills um their presentation their language what can they do right now like a rep today say shit i gotta go do something and that isn't going to take me a ton of time but it will help me move the dial a little bit and help me get better at this what would your recommendations that could be yeah oddly enough i think that because i've been thinking through this and thinking in preparation for a conversation be in an environment where you're forced to think that could be a toastmasters club be some sort of you know some sort of environment where you have to debate but when you have to actually uh get up in front of people and convey an argument to make a point to debate a topic you have to be very much on point you need to be able to think clearly logically concisely speak in the manner that others will understand because what that also does is provide immediate feedback you see on people's faces pretty immediately when you've lost them right yeah and actually i think a lost art in a lot of sales training is just videotaping reps oh yeah just it's not something which is done i think in a rigorous enough manner but when you do that and you show people how they present themselves or how they discuss topics from video it's really eye-opening so being able to start to to control your thinking is really the first step in becoming a much better communicator and significantly improving your writing skills from a writing perspective it takes practice you gotta write more and so i i'd say you know if you can if you're in an environment where you you have the freedom to do so don't rely on templates actually write down original thoughts and start to think about if i'm if i'm selling to say a persona say a vp of marketing let me think from that perspective and write something that would be compelling to someone on the other end of the fence receiving this message the other thing is just practice writing in general and i realized this is not everyone's cup of tea but the way i became a much better much more confident writer was i started my own blog back in 2009 and i was just rigorous every day i'd write it wasn't anything fancy i put it up on tumblr it started to catch an audience and there'd be interaction and just the fact that you put something out there publicly makes you be more considerate in what you're actually writing and allows you to i'd say it it creates that that that internal fear that drives you to become better at what you do right it's like with anything like until you actually dive in you're never going to get better and it was that fear that like in a way i was able to harness and utilize into forcing myself to become a better writer more consistent writer each and every day and also because it is in the public sphere like there there's certain repercussions like you can't like and there were times when i wrote a really shitty post right it happens right get it out of your system what happens in that process though is another thing which is super important right and it gets back to that that hemingway quote about good conversation you want to find your tone you want to convey who you are there's too much business writing out there which is so wooden and it just doesn't it doesn't feel alive when i read something i want people that i want to know that the people that were writing that that person i was responsible for that writing believed in what they're writing so you've got to be able to find a way that you're comfortable and find a writing saw that works for you and you won't be able to do that if you're just sending out email templates and that's the extent of what you write so finding outlets right i think that's fantastic and actually the to that degree you know you don't know what you don't know until you get caught on it so for instance right so i mean as bad as this sounds you know the difference between there and there when you write you know what i mean like whatever way you spell it right and you misuse the word as soon as somebody calls you out on that right you'll never misspell it or you'll you'll always think about it when you write it again um it's just like when i got caught and i think every executive i'm guessing you did too uh has been caught with this one when they used to sit when i used to say you know to be honest with you you know when you say to be honest with you and i said that to an executive once and he stopped the conversation and he said hold on a second so you've been lying to me up until this point and as soon as i got called out on it i'm like holy shit all right and i'll never i'll never ever ever say to be honest with you again and it's i think it's the same holds true in writing like when you write something to your point you put it out there and you get critiques on it you have to be open for that critique and somebody calls you out on a really bad you know email that you wrote or uh you know you use the wrong verbs or phrases or whatever it is that sticks um and and then the recording i can't recommend that enough you know as far as public speaking in those like toastmasters those type of things because if you ever want to get improve on anything get yourself recorded doing it holy shit i went to a a presentation skills training once after three years of delivering this training so i was a trainer for three years on my own i was like oh you know what i and i was never trained on how to present i went to a presentation skills training just for my own like i looked at i found one i got an email blog or whatever oh sure let me go to this was local in boston and they did it they recorded you you stood up there you give whatever and they recorded you and then they come back and they show you and the whole idea is the trainer is supposed to kind of you know point out the trainer didn't have to say one word i looked at what i was on the screen of me the video of me presenting for less than five minutes and i was horrified i mean horrified by some of the shit that i was doing and i'm sitting there going wait a minute i've been doing this like let's put it this way so i used to you know how everybody has their own problems with their hands now they hold their hands right well i used to hold my hands like this but not here right around my belt line is that was my that was my positioning so pretty much for three years i was framing myself in front of the entire class and probably insulting almost every woman that i ever delivered training to right so i'm sitting there going what the fuck why didn't somebody tell me about this but as soon as i saw it i never did it again so i think your point of just practicing you know getting away from the templates you know create an original thought even if it's not a good one it's better than a template and being a monkey and this you know this just speaks to something that i'm a wholehearted believer in is just the over automation and fails and turning sales and reps into robots and monkeys that just kind of cranking template you know i just i i i worry and going back to the artificial intelligence stuff man i really do think i think writing skills are important communication skills are important the problem is i think in the next couple of years here none of us are going to trust an email that hits our inbox because artificial intelligence is going to be that much better at writing than most reps are and you get an you'll get an email your email in your inbox you'll read it like oh shit that's a really thoughtful email that rep really did a good job and then as soon as you find out that an artificial intelligence bot wrote it your confidence in who's writing these emails is going to go away so i think that's why the you know it's still important to to leverage that because of just the overall communication you know the ability to communicate with sales reps um but it's scary to me the reps that are just going through the motions because i think they're the ones that are straight up going to get replaced yeah i think it's a very very astute point because we're getting to a point where artificial intelligence can do some of that initial heavy lifting if all we're doing is sending out and by the way the templates that people are sending out are just not that good anyway like i don't need to see another email about your ceo uh said that we should chat like we've been there back in you know 2012 thank you very much for that but or one two or three stuck under a rock full of email that one right that one's my favorite oh yeah that's that's a good one yeah we we're not writing anything that's all that great or insightful whereas a computer can you can program an algorithm to go and scrape linkedin great google scrape all these various different data sources cobble some language together which could look like it came from you come from me and be way more personable than anything that most humans are writing at this point in time and i think we're we've definitely done a disservice because i think the automation has really created a barrier between the sellers and the buyers right so they don't want to like see any of these emails right and so that's why i will tell you this anyone who's out there watching this who's prospecting every day they're not seeing results they don't seem to be getting anywhere to banging their head against the wall stop it with the templates if you can write doesn't have to be short but just a very but a concise email that shows that you've done your homework and that you can present something which is insightful like i send out emails and these emails will take me they could take me half an hour to write sometimes longer so i'm trying to be really thoughtful and i'm reaching out to you know cios and ctos on behalf of the company i'm employed with stack overflow but that's those are our buyers ultimately those are the people i need to make decisions and i'm not going to get anyone to open up my emails with a crocodile saying hey were you eating by a crocodile like that's not going to be very compelling and we had last week at the enterprise sales forum in new york city i actually invited a cto and a svp of engineering to speak and convey their thoughts on what they're seeing every day out there being on the recipient on the receiving end of all this and it was really interesting they said so many like at least nine out of ten if not more of the stuff that's coming in their inboxes crap and they will never open it but every so often they will get something which looks thoughtful which obviously there's a call to action which yeah i'd like to spend some time they don't have a problem with that they have a problem with everything that goes before any call to action which just doesn't seem to add any value doesn't even typically make sense and they don't even really care like it was funny because uh one of our speakers vikram he sees or no rajiv he said that uh yeah sometimes they'll read an email and they'll see like some grammar mistakes or whatever but and someone asked you know does that bother you and he's like no i don't that doesn't bother me because the rest of the message was spot on and we had a conversation that's where good clear concise meaningful writing can make an impact you put in the effort you know what 30 minutes may sound like a shitload time to dedicate to one communication but that one communication could be your next you know 50k deal 100k deal million dollar deal yeah it's not about the volume it's about how much you want to care and i think actually to transition that to what you had said about just start writing right like it could be a blog just get your words out there that could be it right maybe it's one email a day where you literally spend 15 to 20 minutes really thinking through just one email and and crafting it in a way and thinking it through and reading it over there's your blog right you don't have to start a blog you don't have to you know do these toast master stuff but once a day pick an account that you really want to get into do some homework and try to develop that concise messaging and i think to your also to your point um it doesn't necessarily you know we kind of started with the grammar and writing skin you know that type of stuff it doesn't actually have to be perfect it's it's the it's the it's the it's the i guess the trend um the point that you're trying to make and how clear you can be with it not necessarily if you use the right grammatical phrasing of it or even spelled something you know misspelled something even though that tends to some people do pick up on that and they have pet peeves about it but it's really more about how you're conveying the message and how quickly you're getting to the point uh from a business value standpoint that is the most critical piece of this and you're not going to learn that unless you do it and and to your point get away from the templates every once in a while i understand volume needs to be there where i feel like we're in this weird world right now of you know we're still telling reps to make 50 60 70 dials or whatever activities a day but we know that quality is what matters and so reps are getting this mixed message right now but exactly send out your send out your template email do your stuff that your managers are telling you to but once a day pick one account write a thoughtful email and see what happens if for nothing else to improve your skills right you might not even get a response but if nothing else it'll hone your skills in writing original content original thought that'll help translate into having conversations with executives and such so cool man well i appreciate we're up on time here this is a great conversation as always um there was a million other things i wanted to get through with you but uh but i think this was as odd as this is this is i think this is actually becoming more important this this communication skills thing and i think that you hit on it and i've been seeing it out there so um i really appreciate you coming on with me here again tell everybody where they can find uh enterprise meetup so that they can go check it out we get because i think you know if you can come to the boston one tomorrow fantastic but where do they go again yeah go to enterprisesalesforum.com put your email in you'll get the newsletter which advertises all the upcoming events around the country and world because we have 21 different chapters you can also go on meetup.com if you just type in enterprise sales forum you're gonna find if we have a chapter net city you'll find it will be the top result awesome and i'll put that link in the facebook post once this goes out so uh again mark it's been a blast talking to you as always and uh let's uh let's keep this conversation going all right all right same here thanks sean thanks brother peace out you you you you you you you you you you