Your story is always there, but if you lose sight of the best way to tell it, your ideal reader will certainly never be able to find it.

Hire a marketing communications writer who can tell you to cut out all the bull and get to the point.

One marketing manager needed a writer to help tell a sales transformation story. He showed me the creative brief that he was going to send to the writer:

We have a 100-slide presentation on our sales transformation process. We need you to help us do the following:

• Understand the key elements of the company’s Sales & Marketing Transformation
• Confirm that we have captured the right information relative to your participation in the transformation
• Brainstorm ways that we could best disseminate the story to its client and internal audiences
• Outline possible roles that we each can play in further tailoring this content for differentiated audiences

“Who put that together?” I asked. “A management consultant? It’s ghastly.”

“Fix how we tell our story.”

It isn’t that a good writer doesn’t understand all the fancy words. It’s that nobody will read about a sales transformation, and absolutely nobody will read a 100-slide presentation about a sales transformation.

However, a lot of people will read a story about a sales transformation. And a good writer can deliver that kind of story.

“Instead of sending that brief to the writer,” I suggested, “tell her you need her to fix more than sentences and paragraphs. Tell her you need her to fix the way we tell our story.”

“What makes you think that will work?” he asked.

“Because if she’s a writer, she should know how to tell our story. If she doesn’t, then she’s not the writer for us.”

Have you ever told a writer, “Help us tell our story better”? Did you find a writer who could do it?

photo credit: Seattle Municipal Archives