The #1 lesson from sales for academic writers
You need to start thinking more like a salesperson. It’s an association most academics reflexively flinch away from, but with just a little orientation it’s very easy to see why we need academics, and especially academic writers, to adopt some practices from sales, and especially from elite sales writers.
Important work, unimportant results
The harsh truth is that most scholarly books sell very few copies. People in the field might read them, but that won’t create the change you want to see, at least not at a noticeable pace.
You want to change something. Society, the academy, your organization. You need people to buy in. So doesn’t it make sense that you have to learn how to sell it, just a little bit?
The good, the bad, and the ugly
The summer I got married I worked as a car salesman. This is not the kind of sales I want you to learn, but it’s what most people think of when the hear the word.
When I moved into the office I found a grey desk, grey walls, and a phone programmed with a short loop of surprisingly good hold music. My to-do list that night had one item: “need decor.” After about 15 minutes of training, which was mostly “here’s where we keep the keys,” and “get them to fill out this form,” I was turned loose onto the lot.
The thing is, nobody likes car salesmen.
Many of them are liars, so they’re all painted with the same brush. I saw one guy who would crumple up the deal sheet before rejoining a customer. He’d say “my manager threw this in my face and told me to get the hell out of his office.” He’d tell them if they’d sign it now he’d go back back and force the deal through. Slimy shit. That guy was salesman of the month. He was also constantly anxious and routinely cut family vacations short to come back to the dealership and sell cars from his grey office.
I’m not asking you to be anything like him.
When a good salesperson gets you to buy something, you’re happy about it (that’s how you can tell they’re good). Because in order to make the sale, they got to know you and understood what you wanted. Knowing that, and knowing that they could offer you the thing that would make you happy, wouldn’t it have been wrong of them if they didn’t do everything they could to convince you to buy it? And because it really did make you happy, you’d do it again, and you’d be happy to send your friends to them.
People who do sales right don’t only make the first sale. They win repeat business, because they understand their customers. They get you to act. They get you to want to act. How can we do that, but with writing?
Skilled writers known as copywriters are responsible for most of the marketing and advertising you see in any format. Think of Don Draper from Madmen, but real.
They understand these key ideas about moving people to take action
write about one idea
write for one audience
ask them to do one thing
You should be approaching your writing with the same constraints.
Interlude: getting yelled at
A formerly very friendly older British man was standing at the bottom of the dealership steps, yelling at me. He was red-faced, pointing at a barely noticeable scratch on a nice used Toyota Corolla.
The day before, I’d sold the car to his sister. They’d come to the lot together, because he wanted to help his sister pick a new car before his visit to the US ended. It had been the day of one of those huge sales, and they test drove about a half dozen used cars, mostly Corollas. The one they bought was what we called a TRAC car—a speedy acronym for Toyota Rent A Car. (If your car needs multiple days of service, the dealership will rent you one of these. When they’re retired they usually have low mileage and look great.) I explained this to them, or thought I had.
Now they were back and the man was irate. As he spluttered, pointing at every tiny blemish that hadn’t bothered him yesterday, I felt like I’d been gut-punched. Had I done something wrong? No, I didn’t think so. This was not the same guy I had spent hours with yesterday. But I listened to him. I asked him why these little things were troubling him now, when they hadn’t before.
Finally, he said something that hit me like a slow-moving Toyota Corolla. “You never told us it was a HIRE CAR!”
I’d said “rental” and moved on. But I hadn’t understood who I was talking to.
The empty table and the ideal customer
Copywriters know a concept, often called the Ideal Customer Persona, or avatar. It’s a fictitious composite that helps them understand who they’re writing for. They take everything from demographics to personality, hopes, and motivations into account. It’s why sometimes advertising feels like the dumbest thing in the world, and sometimes it hits you perfectly square. The first one wasn’t for you, and the second one was.
When I learned about this, I felt smart for a second, and then I felt dumb as a brick, because it took me years of working with authors to come up with the same idea. I even call it by the same name: reader avatar.
I tell all of my authors they have to know who they’re writing for. Most editors say the same. But a handful of years ago I found a way to talk about it that gave authors the biggest shortcut to effective writing I’d ever seen.
Lately I’ve been describing it like this: I bring you into a small room with nothing but a table in the center—picture the interrogation room from your favorite detective show. But there’s a wall down the center of the room, cutting right through the table. You sit in the chair, staring at the wall. I tell you there’s someone on the other side. You won’t see them, and you won’t hear them, and you have one chance to make them understand the argument you’ve spent your career building. Sounds stressful, right? Where do you start? What words do you use?
What if I took away the wall and put your oldest friend on the other side of the table? Or a colleague from a different department? What if I let you choose who’s in the chair?
This is the exact same idea copywriters use to target the “ideal customer” they’ve defined. Only you get to pick who you want to write to. Pick the right avatar and you’ll know instinctively what to say, and what not to say.
If you can tell the right stories to the right people, you can move mountains.