Five ways to get approval from your reviewers

As a junior seller, I knew I had little to offer the people I called to bother. Which is why I was so dumbfounded the first time a chief marketer of a large electronics company reluctantly agreed to my meeting, didn’t show, and I guilted him into rebooking with the simple words, “You said you would.” And so he did. Even though he didn’t want to. And he eventually bought.

Sales was a menagerie of such tricks. Trainers taught us to set “upfront contracts” to encourage prospects to keep their word and to ask hypothetical to resolve future disputes now.

You may not often realize it but you are a seller too. Everything about the assembly of an article or guide that compels people through a series of agreements and drives to a concluding “Yes” is a sale. Writing is sales. So is pushing that article through a battery of internal approvals. As such, there’s a lot you can gain by learning to “sell” your writing. In this guide, I present five such stratagems.

Selling is helping

People have all sorts of associations with sales but let me reset yours—I spent four years in the profession and can say that you never convince someone to do something they did not already want to do. You merely guide and direct. Maybe they were going to buy from a competitor, but you persuade them to buy from you. Maybe they were going to buy later, but they buy now. You don’t get people who don’t need things to trade money for them; not in the professional world. Because reputations matter. They will demand a refund. They’ll call your boss. It is never worth your time to lie—your company will claw that commission back from you.

Professional sales is like curling: You can’t push the pin. But you can take lots of furtive, indirect actions to nudge that object. You are a guide. And a lot of guiding is getting people to get out of their own way. 

Ever have a boss or client who just couldn’t decide? Who perhaps went back on their word and undid old decisions, causing chaos? They don’t want that either. They’re just wrapped up in a toxic decision cycle. As the writer trying to help them solve a problem, you should intervene.

That’s why these sales stratagems can help you ply your craft.

1. Present zero-sum sliders

A big management consulting firm hired Fenwick to rewrite its careers site and told us to refer to their brand guide. But the brand guide was mute—just a scramble of loose adjectives, no examples. 

If I’d simply proceeded to write, I’d be fighting a rearguard action to argue that whatever I’d written “sounded right” to a group of smart people who nevertheless hadn’t any experience in separating their personal preferences from the brief. With ten commenters, agreement would be impossible. Failure was inevitable. 

So I used a trick I picked up years ago and created brand sliders. Select 4-7 spectra as pictured. Invite only the most senior reviewers to a meeting where they must agree on where the company belongs on each. Instead of arguing with you later, they argue with each other now. 

To my great delight, the group in question was in near perfect accord. It revealed that there really was an underlying truth, and it just hadn’t been documented. I used their input to write up a one-page example of exactly what their voice sounded like for them to approve—then it was a locked document.

This didn’t prevent quibbles later. But it gave me an artifact I could point back to and say, “This is what we all agreed on. How would you like to change the guidance?”

2. Pose hypotheticals—what if this or that happens? 

People too often leave the future unexamined, and get to exactly where they were going—the wrong direction. But with hypothetical questions, you can play out almost any workplace decision. Just ask: Okay, let’s say that happens—what then? 

This is particularly useful when people are delaying taking action until some other decision. They want to wait until Jennifer agrees the microsite is a good idea. But if pressed, they agree that if Jennifer were to say no, they’d still proceed. So they should just proceed anyway.

I also use this approach to help clients consider all the hidden implications of their request. One client asked to hire us to create an online magazine, and we dissolved that idea in a vat of questions: 

We said, okay, great (always ‘yes, and’), how is someone going to find these articles? And …

• Yes, they’ll require promotion. Who’ll do that work? Can you afford ads?
• And let’s say visitors arrive, how do you capture their emails? What can you offer? 
• And “capture” makes it sound like trickery—how are you going to provide so much value they want to be on your list?
• And what’s that six-word message that captivates them? 
• Yes, that’s hard to do. It flows from what’s true about you. Have you done brand work? 
• And say we resolve all that, what is your informational advantage, based on your product?
• And how will you automate getting that information to your writers, so they don’t get backed up?
• And how much time can those experts realistically devote to this?

So in the end, we created a tiny course which required no upkeep or maintenance. 

3. Get people to hold to their word with an upfront contract

How many times has someone changed their mind on you? Or decided not to decide? A client once hired us for a creative pitch and campaign, and we pitched a children’s book. This was a fairly serious healthcare company and the pitch was, by their reckoning too, a terrific idea—it poked fun at their even stodgier competitors and made the story of cost savings so simple a child could follow it. 

But they also had an odd habit of isolating the different vendors, and piecemealing out sections of projects without allowing them to talk. In our kickoff, I’d walked through slides on our process, including the principle Writing x Design, by which we only do it all of an asset—or none of it. This they readily agreed to.

We concepted. We wrote. We got approval. We sent them illustrator options, they chose one, agreed to the price, then went silent.

When I finally got them on the phone, they admitted they were under executive orders to “prove” that this couldn’t be done with AI on their own. Which triggered my upfront contract. I know from long years that the writing changes as design changes, and they intertwine; to drop in AI-generated images where the characters aren’t consistent and have that dead-behind-the-eyes look would make the book feel incoherent and sad. We weren’t set up to achieve their goals—which is what everyone forgets about—the point is to have an effect upon readers. So, acknowledging the contract, they kindly agreed to take it in-house. 

It’s not uncommon for these clients to come back later, and I welcome it. There are no hard feelings. Experience is a teacher and what do I know? Maybe they get it right.

4. End all the debates with a spark test

Sometimes marketing teams squabble over what the buyer wants. Nothing resolves these painful fanfiction debates like asking a real buyer to read it aloud. We call them spark tests—as in, anything here? Does this spark?

It’s quite simple:

1. Find a buyer lookalike—A customer, a peer, a coworker. 

2. Provide context—Tell them who it’s for, what it aims to achieve, and what feedback you want. To keep them honest, say you didn’t make it.

3. Show it to them—In-person or over Zoom. Record it.

Those resulting audio snippets end all discussion. You get to say, here’s a buyer. Or here’s five. Here they are telling us they do not care about this. Can we please proceed with the first draft?

Just so I don’t seem snide, I use it on myself too. This process has crushed innumerable darlings because I enter knowing that I’m not trying to win the debate, simply end it. You don’t really know anything until you try, and this is the best first step. 

Though it is not actually trying. Just a simulation. People say all sorts of things in conversation. To know their real behavior, you must run that campaign. But spark tests give directional insight.

Below, the spark test reaction to our Who Killed ABM campaign. The client was nervous that marketers wouldn’t take it seriously. The marketers we asked said they were dying to see it and started riffing on the concept. This evidence helped get it approved.

5. Pinpoint the best idea with a quadrant

Ending where we started, constraining a decision to two dimensions can help clarify it—which is why President Eisenhower loved four-quadrant matrices. If you are ever stuck trying to decide which among several ideas is the best, make a list of those ideas and assign them a numeric 1-5 value (5 being “the most”) on:

• How easy is it? (1-5)
• How effective is it? (1-5)

You can do this as a group, and force everyone to agree. Then place all those items on the matrix. Anything in the top-right is a good candidate. The further up and to the right, the better.

However—and this is vital—you'll probably feel it doesn’t look right. That is actually the point. Make your adjustments. This isn’t science. This schematic teases out new information from your team—yes, a newsletter seems difficult, but is it really more difficult than getting this page to rank in search? Keep adjusting until it “feels” good. Then you have your prioritized list.

In the end, there is always a decision

Much of what you have read is adapted from the sales methodologies of David Sandler, who coined “upfront contracts.” One of his most foundational concepts is that you should always agree at the onset  of a conversation that at the end, you will decide. No meeting should ever end in, “We’ll think about it,” because everyone probably already knows. Sandler calls this “mutual mystification.” He wouldn’t stand for these polite deceptions, and as a writer advocating for getting things done, neither should you.

You’re a seller, whether you know it or not—you sell ideas. You help others advance to a decision. You’re a guide. And now you have your kit.