Business Writing Example #2

Upvoted both examples because I would like to see more content of this broad kind on lesswrong, even if they don't become the most popular posts.

While I agree that the revised response is vastly superior to the original, and that the points about fully answering inquiries and offering low/no cost add-on services to assist with a customer's pain points is spot on the bull's eye of customer relationship management.

However, I think a key point has been missed. Why did the other questions go unanswered? That seems to be the core problem to solve and offering a solutions alone doesn't really seem to bridge the gap between error and improved response in the future.

Put differently, we seem to have identified the inputs and outputs (customer query and the company response) but treated the response process a bit like a black box.

I think you're not optimizing for the goal Make the Sale and instead optimizing for Make the Customer Comfortable.

Sales is a complicated field with a bunch of techniques. There's some highly skilled practitioners and there's really strong selection pressure. This implies that the really effective sales techniques, unlike the really effective rationality techniques, are complicated and can't be easily learned.

I'm not salesy and I know it. I'm better making agreements with folks when I follow rote advice from salesy people rather than doing what feels natural or trying to figure it out myself. It's better for me to follow rote advice that I don't even understand. And it's not because my natural communication skills are terrible. My job (that has little to do with sales) is 80% persuading smart, critical people that my technical explanation of this field is correct and that they should adopt it for themselves. But sales, definitely sales in the context you're talking about, it's a very different kind of persuasion.

When sending a formal e-mail my natural response would be very similar to yours. Keep everything comfortable, provide all necessary information, keep it brief, keep it sensible. That's how you optimize for efficient communication between intelligent folks. But making a sale is not about good communication. Sales and efficient communication aren't necessarily opposed to each other, but it's perfectly reasonable that the e-mail which best conveys your ideas is a terrible e-mail for making a sale.

My mom is a very salesy person. Her job is selling and upselling services to customers. Show people how it's worth spending 30% extra to get premium services from her rather than cheaper and lower quality services elsewhere. Have them figure out how it's better to spend thousands when it's really worth it even if they only planned on spending a few hundred. It hurts to listen to her talk on the phone sometimes. I can tell when somebody is in a rush and they just want information. And when I sense that I make sure to quickly cut to the chase. I think she can tell too. Nevertheless, when the customer wants to just cut to the chase that's always when she slows everything down. She talks about needless emotional stories, obvious deflections, boring filler. Sometimes I cringe when someone matter of factly asks about the price and my mother talks for minutes about what the customer must be feeling and how they should deal with it and how they really need to take care of it this way (which costs a lot of money btw). Rarely, customers are very direct and my mom is forced to either tell them the prices or they'll hang up the phone. But more often she's able to mellow people out and get them committed to pay more than they expected they would going into the conversation.

I really don't know why it works. Maybe people treat long conversations as sunk costs, maybe it's that folks respect someone who sticks to their guns, or maybe its a bunch of factors that I don't know or understand. All I know is that her sales style works, the same style works for other people too, and it has nothing to do with clear communication.

So my general criticism for ideas such as:

When replying to a business email you should answer every question as completely as you can.

Is that this shouldn't be taken for granted. Maybe your Chinese friend is better off not answering every question if it keeps the customer in an ongoing dialogue with her.

A customer can always get lower prices by routing around you. They buy from you because it is simpler. Your job is to make buying things easy. You create convenience. An eager salesperson makes buying effortless.

Like, maybe not. Definitely not that your friend's job is to make buying things easy. Her job is to get people to buy things and how difficult or easy it is doesn't matter unless that's correlated to the job. Maybe getting people to focus more on a transaction makes them more inclined to pour even more money into it. They're thinking about how to close this damn deal all the time so your business must be pretty important to them.

I'll bet there's different sales styles for different situations. Maybe your post is only meant to comment on this one particular type of sales and maybe your clear communication style is very effective for this type of sales scenario. My mom's salesyness probably wouldn't work if she was working behind a gas station counter trying to sell cigarettes. I love sales as a communications example because clear rational discourse is definitely not the optimal strategy.

Strong upvote! We need more posts that make things like this legible.

[deleting my comment because it was in reply to a comment which was deleted]

[also: UI feedback. If I'm replying to a comment, and the comment was deleted in the interim, and I click Submit, I would like a notification + "are you sure?" rather than my comment just posting.]