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.