Well, all right, hello and thank you all again for tuning into
yet another episode of the Professional Pricing Society
podcast. My name is Terrence and in
today's podcast we have a very special guest with us by the
name of Frank Luby. Frank has over 25 years of
experience in pricing in over 40 years as a writer and Akron
eight-year run as partner at Simon Kutcher and partners.
He Co founded Present Tense LLC in 2014 to help business
professionals improve their communication.
Frank also will be at our fall conference in Las Vegas this
upcoming October to conduct his highly rated writing workshop.
Frank, how are we doing today? We're doing great, Terrance.
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
How are you? Doing well, doing well.
Thank you so much for being on this episode with us to talk
about the importance of writing for for pricing.
Let's just go ahead and dive into this conversation because
it's, it's one of these topics that I feel like a lot of people
could always sharpen their skill set.
And when it just comes to writing and it just comes to,
you know, when you're a pricing practitioner, this is a strength
that you really do want to have kind of in your back pocket.
And let me ask you this why? Why is writing so important
specifically for pricing practitioners?
Yeah, I think pricing practitioners, we often don't
realize how often we write or need to write.
We sometimes take it for granted.
It's something that we do all the time, but we, we kind of
forget that most decisions that that executives will make, that
people will make are based on some form of written
communication that might have been delivered in person, in a
presentation, might be on a Zoom call, might be in a written
document. But at, at, at the end of the
day, you know, it starts with something that's written down,
that's organized, that's structured.
And I think especially someone who's really into pricing might
forget that, you know, you might have the most robust analysis.
You know, you've done a great job analyzing all your data, but
you're not gonna get anyone to believe in it.
And you're not gonna get anyone to act on it unless you you know
you know what you've written or what you've prepared.
Sets the right priorities, structured the right way, and
especially uses the right words. Good, good.
Now you know focusing on just specifically executives, what is
in your opinion with your expertise and your insight?
What is different when you prepare a story for them to to
hear or to read? Yeah.
I think the the first thing is the, the stakes are higher.
You know, these are, these are big decisions, these are company
moving decisions. These are sometimes market
moving decisions that they're going to make.
So your margin for error in what you've prepared and what you
write is, is often a lot smaller when you're dealing with
executives and executives as an audience.
They have less time, you need fewer words, and they also have
stronger biases that you need to be aware of and that you got you
have to overcome. The process is the same, but I
think you just need to invest that much more when the
executive is the one that's the audience for what you're
writing. OK, that's good.
That's really good to know and you make a great point because
you know, executives tend to have and your your opinion, you
know, less time to the point a little bit quicker.
You know when you say know your audience.
Let's dive a a bit deeper into that.
Elaborate on when you what you mean when you say know your
audience as it pertains to writing.
Well, I think the, you know, if you talk to anyone that that
works in writing or helps people learn how to write, they're
gonna at some point that it starts with the audience.
And in a lot of cases that you have to think of what you write
as an individual communication. So you might see some statistics
out there that say 60% of CEOs think this way or you know, 70%
want this and their presentations.
That means 30%, don't you know? So you need to know who that is
on the other end of the call, on the other end of your document
and who's reading it. And you need to know them
individually. So that means going beyond the
job title and looking at that person as an individual and not
their, you know, the Facebook things, you know, it doesn't
matter whether they like sports or they have a cat or a dog or
anything like that. It's about how much do they know
about pricing? You know, are they quantitative
or are they qualitative? What are they are expecting from
what you write and, and what are their motivations?
So really at a business level, what, what makes them tick?
What's and what what? How can you prepare something
that really matches who that person is?
Yeah, that's really good. You know, understanding what it
is that moves the needle for that individual is it's what
what it sounds like you're saying that it's going to really
make the biggest impact in in regards to writing for
executives. Now, understanding the audience
aspect, let's move forward to if you have any type of examples of
what's worked when writing for executives and what hasn't
worked in your in your experience.
Sure, the, you know, some of the things I'm I'm talking about
are, are, are hard won battle scars, so to speak from, from
really not having put in the homework to understand an
audience. So you know, there's ACEO that
I've worked with who wants 2 page summaries and does not want
a deck or a document that has more than 10 pages.
So if you go beyond that, even in a slide presentation, you've,
you, you've lost him. He will literally leave the
room. There's CE OS that'll ask you,
would you bet the company on this?
And I think that's a, a standard that, you know, when we write
things, sometimes we, we kind of forget is that you really have
to think, would you make that same decision if you were in the
CEO shoes? Would you bet the company would
you make that investment had CE OS say your, your work on
profits? Excellent.
It's superb. We think in terms of market
share, that's what we tell investors, that's what we tell
our employees. So unless you can reframe what
you did in terms of market share for us, we we can't use this and
you'll run into executives, whether senior or or junior
executives that have a mistrust for things they don't like
market research. So we had one executive that was
very attentive during our presentation and said, well, I
need case examples. This is great.
But for me, it's all theory, market research, the findings,
it's all speculative. You need to give me examples of
how someone else has done something like this.
And then you have my ear. So these are all things that you
can learn in advance if you do your homework, whether you infer
it from things they've said, things they've written, others
that can help you get up to speed on this.
It's just you need to to know what that expectation is.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And you listen to these
different examples, just kind of makes it even clearer that you
can write something very profound and very strong for an
executive. But if it's that, if that is not
what moves their needle, if that's not what, what pushes,
you know, the, the pushes it forward, if you will for the
executive, you can still kind of miss the mark.
And so, you know, when when considering writing as a pricing
practitioner for the executive audience, I think it's really
important to kind of compile this into steps.
Do you, what steps would you say are the steps that need to that
need to be taken for a pricing practitioner to have success in
writing for an executive audience?
Sure. I think that's a a great
question and it's especially important because you'll see a
lot of advice out there on what to do.
And I think the most common example of advice is, is be
clear and be concise. And that's, that's a very
intuitive and it seems to make a lot of sense, but no one ever
tells you how to do that. You know, no one ever really
walks you through what process will get you to something that's
clear, that's concise, and also resonates, as you said, or moves
the needle with your audience. So I think what I like to do,
and this is something that will be elaborated on in a lot more
detail in the workshop, is I break it down into five areas,
starts with audience like we discussed.
The next part is meta level and I'll explain a little bit about
that in a moment. Purpose, structure and word
choice. That for me is the is the
progression. So audience, you know, besides
knowing them, you need to bring a healthy respect for their
time. And you know, pricing may only
be a small part of what they care about, even if it's 100% of
what you usually care about. So there's there's those
asymmetries or disconnects. Sometimes the meta level is
something that I think a lot of people neglect, even some
writers themselves. And it's what reaction do you
want them to have? You know, how how do you want
them to? What mood do you want them to
leave the room in? Do they want, do you want them
to come up and say, that was a good use of my time?
Do you want to thank you? You know, you, you're not
necessarily going to see them, you know, run out and sign some
papers to, you know, enact your pricing strategy at the end of
the meeting. But you, you know, you want to
draw out certain indications from them and the words you use
and the structure is going to help help do that.
Purpose is not grand or purpose or vision or anything like that.
It's, is, is what you're writing about to inform somebody or
persuade somebody. And that will guide how
intensively you, you need to make your arguments.
If it's just providing information, you may need to
give a little more context, but not much.
But if you're persuading, and that's a whole different ball
game. And that's when we get into
structure. And it's, it's interesting that,
you know, what works in business is often exactly the opposite of
what your English teacher taught you in 11th grade.
We're, we're, we're taught to vary our words, we're learning
vocabulary to take the SATS or the ACT, we vary our sentence
structure and do all those wonderful things.
And in, in business, I don't want to say it's more staccato,
but you, we work in simple declarative sentences.
We work with the right grade level for our audience.
And that could be very short and simple words.
I think it was great. I think someone said that Jerry
Seinfeld just gave a commencement address at Duke
University that had only a couple words that had three
syllables or more in them. So you can say a lot of things
in, in a, in a really compact way.
And you know, you, you want to figure out, build simple
constructions, you know, before and after.
You know, it's not this, it's this, we've been doing it this
way, we need to look at it this way.
And those, the, those sort of sudden or jarring contrasts help
it lock people in, change their perspective.
And these are things you wouldn't do in an English paper.
There are techniques that you know, you really need to, to
focus on in, in business writing.
There's a couple additional rules I can get to if we have
some time on how to structure these things.
But the final one's word choice. And I like to use the analogy
that words are like Legos. And you know, if you, you got to
go to the box and pick out the ones that are going to make
your, your structure work or your machine work.
And, and sometimes it's, you have to pick the right word.
I, I, I suggest people make a list of keywords that they need
to build into the document. And those words will convey
tone. Do I want to use the word
success? Do I want to frame choices
positively or negatively? All of these are things that
words will help you do. So those are, you know, the the
five steps and A and kind of a quick overview.
Frank, I'm not going to lie, I'm going to be honest with you.
I've, I've been, I've never thought of writing it in this
fashion. As far as you know, you can go
pretty deep regarding them. This is just five steps.
And I'm sure there's there, there's more to this, but these
five steps make you think a lot, make you think a little bit more
in depth as it relates to, you know, how you want to speak to
somebody in order to get them on board to wherever it is you are
trying to take them. And so it is super interesting.
Now, I will say this, I've, I've written articles before.
I've written essays in school, you know, and I've written
different pieces of writing over the years.
One of the things that's fairly common, not just with me and my
experience in writing, but also just with others, other people
that I'm familiar with that love to write is a term what's known
as writer's block. Now, Now, what does someone do
if they find themselves stuck in this?
Like a season, if you will, sometimes of writer's block.
Yeah, I think there's. I think we we look at it in a
couple ways. One is to to think about why
you're stuck, and that might help figure out which of the
ideas I'm going to suggest might be the most helpful.
But you know, sometimes you're sitting there in front of that
blank sheet of paper and you think you got too little to say.
You know, you just, you look at your research, there's not
enough popping out. You need to make more out of it.
Sometimes you have too much to say and, and you don't know how
to take all of you could put a 300 page deck together for
someone. How are you going to boil that
down to 10 for that other CEO, you know, And the, the third
part is you're, you're not seeing the interconnections
between things, you're not finding patterns and all of
that. So it, it's usually one of those
three things. So you know what I suggest to
do? There's a, there's a couple
things to get started. One is just to start talking out
loud. You know, I, one of my most
helpful things to have on my desk is a little pocket
recorder. And I'll just speak into that
and say, you know, if, if and, and, and in different
situations, you know, I meet the, the, my audience on the
airplane and they say, what are you working on?
How would I answer that question?
I see someone in an airport lounge.
I meet someone, you know, one of my colleagues late at night and
they're saying, you know, you've been sweating on this.
What's, what's, what's the deal? What are you trying to do?
And sometimes in your answer to that, as incoherent as it might
seem at first, there's little Nuggets that you can pick up on
or inspiration you can pick on to get started.
The other thing I like to do is, is it's related to the keywords.
Is there's something that I call 1010 and that's 10 keywords and
10 sentences. Just, you know, skip the fancy
talk. Just try to write out, I've been
assigned this problem. Here's what the, the, the CEO or
the senior vice president is expecting.
They're working on this, they're working on that.
Here's three things that I found in my research.
And just sort of step back from that for a moment and see if any
patterns start to emerge from that very simple storytelling.
And that gives you a foundation to start dressing up.
It's kind of like building a house, you know, you need a
little bit of a blueprint, you know, you put the the sides up
the floor in. And then all of the stuff about
grammar, you know, making it fancy, making it look good.
That all comes last. You know, it's it's really
important to just start those ideas flowing.
You know, the one final thing if if you're into that, I think the
Michael Lewis, the famous author of many best selling books,
likes to say write on caffeine, edit online.
So meaning you need to, you need to get some ideas out quickly,
you know, force them out, get them on paper, but then step
back, you know, go for a walk, take a break, come back to it
and see if you can stand it down, grind it down into
something that's going to work for your audience.
Wow. OK, that's good.
OK, so we've covered your obviously your expertise and
your experience over the years. We've covered general steps to
take as it pertains to pricing practitioners writing for
executives, and we've also even covered we know some some
helpful tips that you can that you can exercise if you find
yourself in the season of writer's block.
Now, is there anything else a pricing practitioner should do
when they consider the totality of their writing?
Yeah, I think there's, I can think of a, a couple things.
One, building on what I just said with the editing is edit
what you write aggressively, you know, and, and that means, you
know, don't play the devil's advocate, play the devil, you
know, really try to, to pick apart your arguments and that
helps you shore them up. You know, you're not trying to,
to depress yourself or, you know, get yourself in a, in a
bad state of mind. You're really trying to see does
this work? And one way to do that is to, to
swap roles. You know, I, I, I'll go so far
sometimes is to send myself something I've written by
e-mail. So I'm the recipient now and I
open it up and I look at it and immediately just that physical
act of, of looking at the document.
Am I getting invited in? Does this look useful to me
right off the bat? Am I, you know, in the first or
second paragraph, am I getting my attention?
And in a lot of cases you'll be like, Oh my goodness, I'm glad I
didn't send this to anybody. I've got to move some stuff
around. I got to pull some stuff up to
the front to, to get people's attention a little earlier.
And the final thing is, especially for executives, you
got to rehearse, you know, that's, you got to practice
reading. If it's a presentation or a
call, read it. If it's a written document, read
it aloud and see if it flows because the, you know, the,
that's an, I guess an advantage in some ways with executives is
the more the writing is conversational, engaging, the
more likely they are to respond to it.
I know we, I said earlier we shouldn't generalize about CEOs,
but that's more or less a universal experience.
So if it's tough to read what you wrote, there's a good chance
you need to go back and and work on it a bit.
Make it sound a little more natural and you know at their at
their eye level. OK, wow, this is this was good.
This was really good. Now I want to ask one more final
question, then I'll I'll let you go.
But you know, we are expecting you to be at our fall conference
taking place in Las Vegas in this upcoming October.
And this podcast is serving as a teaser to your writing workshop,
which I know is going to be very, very insightful because
this podcast was very insightful.
What can our community expect from your upcoming workshop
taking place this fall? I'll, I'll go back to that
concept of meta level that I mentioned to answer that.
I think it's, it's about gaining more confidence in your writing.
I think that's really the biggest thing.
You know, you'll, you'll leave the workshop with some practical
tools, techniques that can help you make your writing better
day-to-day and, and make persuasive writing more of a
habit that you know, eventually this will become more of a
natural way of doing things. So you know, it won't become a
burden. It'll become an asset for, for
you. And you know, in the workshop
itself, we'll go deeper into all the steps I talked about today,
but it won't just be me up front talking and talking and talking
till the coffee break comes. We'll have little breakouts
where you're applying what we talked about.
I, I encourage people to bring, you know, something they're
working on that they're stuck on or that's upcoming in their own
work and try to apply some of the things that we're working on
in the workshop to that piece of work.
And I think that really helps people see that, you know, this
isn't, this isn't a, a side topic.
This is something that can really get a lot of mileage out
of. Sure, absolutely.
OK, awesome. Well, thank you so much for your
time, Mr. Frank Luby. And one more question for you
where, for those who are interested, can they go to learn
more about you, your company and what you stand for?
Sure, I got a a couple places they can go.
One is the my corporate website, whichispresenttensellc.com,
present tense, like in English class present tense.
And that gives an overview of the kind of work that I do.
And we have a blog hasn't been updated in a little while, but
has a lot of really specific advice and a lot of issues.
And then more broadly, you know, I do a lot of ghost writing and
I work as a writing partner, but I also write for myself.
And I have a site called bluesandmore.net.
And if you go to the blog there, there's some some essays that
that I write from time to time. And that's a bit away from
pricing and business. But I'm hoping you'll still see
some of the things that that I talked about today come through
and how those are put together and, and trying to, you know,
just have some fun. And then that sense, not that
business writing isn't fun, but you know, sometimes you gotta
gotta do some personal things as well.
So those would be the two places to catch up.
Terms of general, there's two books I'd recommend, Elements of
Style, DB White, and a book called Writing That Works.
It's an older book by a gentleman named Gentleman named
Ken Roman, and his partner is Joel Raffelson.
And those books should be really inexpensive.
I think you can pick them up anywhere and they're quick to
skim. They're great to have on your
desktop, and they're extremely helpful.
Awesome. OK, A man of resources as well,
Mr. Frank. Well, I thank you again for your
time today telling persuasive pricing stories to executives.
Until next time, we'll see you all later.
Have a good one. Bye bye.