Written Skills Re-Emerge To The Fore

A remote work tech founder periodically (re)tweets lists of his summary of discussions within his target market.

He sees the coronavirus-spurred march of WFH as now unstoppable.

Here’s an abridged example;

📝 Building the organisational muscle of knowledge through written documentation is of massive importance.

Expanded elsewhere:

✍️ Written over spoken: documentation is the unspoken superpower of remote teams. The most successful team members remotely will be great writers. Companies are searching for ways to do this more effectively. Tools that enable others to write better will explode.

Documentation is tricky for salesteams.

The conundrum being that they acknowledge the importance of audit-calibre records, yet seldom seem to permit the time or systems to allow such creation to occur.

There are further issues too.

Like that salespeople tend to shy away from asynchronous work with prospects. Such as the sending across of a document requiring annotation with answers. Because there is then a perceived lack of control. Ceding tempo to the prospect. Not being able to talk things through and be at the behest of other forces and demands their side. Meaning deal progress docs don’t get written.

Or that your sensitive sales dna could land in competitor hands.

Or any benefits of qualification which reply or delay signal are outweighed by the sheer effort it takes to compile what you send.

Yet it does appear that the selling of the 2020s will require an embrace of the document.

Each ‘meeting’ has long generated multiple pieces of written work. Saying what happened before. Teeing up the next event. Context within overall plans and process.

Will we now see a growth in ‘aysnc’ pieces as well?

Docs that gather intel. Provide draft option choices. Drive meetings which you don’t attend.

Selling collaterals specifically tailored to the buyer considering them alone?

Finding what works and replicating it looks likely to be a key challenge of selling and sales management in the coming months.

What docs are you tracking and how?