"What's Your Process?"

In a world of "suits," how do you stand apart? One way companies find differentiation -- especially in professional services -- is in their methodology or process. How a company works with you is certainly part of the overall brand experience. Process also has the advantage of being very difficult for competitors to replicate. In the world of instant information transfer, everyone reads the same books and uses the same software. It's very possible that most of what makes you "you" is the experience of working with you.

"We're very pleased with your work. We've received a lot of very good feedback on the paper and I'm confident it will help distinguish us in the marketplace."

Customers ask "What's your process?" because the answer (if there is an answer) indicates you've thought through how you do what you say you do. They can evaluate both your thinking, and your process. And it sounds better than, "Do you know your stuff?"

But how do you answer the question if most of "the process" is what goes on inside your own head? That's how it is in high tech marketing writing. People ask me all the time what my process is and the answer is embarrassingly brief: I read source material; I interview content experts with a recorder going; I write a first draft; It gets reviewed; I make edits; and it's done. Not exactly the stuff of a PowerPoint presentation, is it? And unfortunately (for me) I think one of the ways people assign value is by how complex something is.

Well, trust me, there is a lot of complexity in this very "simple" writing process. But rather than try to explain it -- I think it's to the customer's advantage to keep the process somewhat opaque. It's kind of like object oriented programming. In a complex system, different software processes don't have knowledge of how the other processes work with which they cooperate. If everything needed to know the details of how everything else worked, in order to cooperate, big systems would quickly become overwhelmingly complicated. Instead, one process only needs to know how to hand data and instructions off to another process and get results back -- a two-way interchange called an application programming interface, or API. The key is having clearly defined APIs.

In professional services, the API equivalent would be: "How do I know if I have an effective interchange with you?" And, as with an API, it's a question to which you can apply a set of standards. In high-tech marketing writing, those standards would include: The process is a true collaboration; the result is something people want to read; and that there is an even bigger outcome that flows from both the writing and the collaboration -- which is that there is now a much clearer understanding of how the client is truly exceptional in its marketplace.

Or, as one of my clients said in an email to me yesterday: "We're very pleased with your work. We've received a lot of very good feedback on the paper and I'm confident it will help distinguish us in the marketplace." In other words, the paper works; the positioning works -- and the collaboration was good, which I think you can tell from the tone.

The client was Centage. They make financial management software for small and mid-size companies. They used to make only budgeting software but that changed as a result of the writing process. The functionality didn't get bigger, but the marketing claims did. This wasn't something that was just tacked on because it sounded good. It really is what they do. They needed to try on new words, but they (and I) also needed to collaborate to make the words fit. That's the sign of a good process: a good API. The result is predictable and easily reproducible, even if the underlying process is hard to replicate elsewhere.

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