Josh Bernoff is the author of a stellar book called Writing Without Bullshit: Boost Your Career by Saying What You Mean. The book is focused on making everyone a better writer in business. Most importantly, due to Josh’s background in the technology sector, he has a lot of history with an industry that produces arguably the most jargon, poorly written emails, blog posts, and messaging of any business sector. 

This episode centers on different examples of how people can improve their business writing, report writing, and emails, alongside many other great writing topics.

In This Episode

• Josh’s background and his first insights into useful, clear writing.
• On meaningless platitudes.
• The importance of strong titles and file names.
• How to write a strong executive summary.
• How to craft a great email.
• Why paragraphs are the worst.
• How we got to the current standard of communication in our professional lives.
• What the meaning ratio means when writing great content.
• Why shortening the length of your document is a good idea.
• On the passive voice.
• An approach for narrowing down your usage of jargon.

Thomas Steenburgh is a business professor at the Darden School of Business, with a focus on sales management and B2B sales processes.

We discuss the launch of new products by sales teams, as well as some of the challenges that accompany these product launches. In addition, we cover the types of people who do the best at selling new products, the “shiny new thing” problem when selling to customers, and other gems that will make any company better at selling new products.

To cap off the show, we talk about how B2B and sales topics have largely been ignored as a subject within academia. 

In This Episode 

• The research that went into Dr. Steenburgh's analysis of innovation and product launches.
• The different type of salespeople you'll need for product launches.
• Why face-to-face meetings are important for selling new products.
• The characteristics of reps who succeed at selling new products and those who don't.
• The “shiny new thing” problem when prospecting.