What I love about Red Pony clients
Image: Andrea Schaffer via Wikimedia Commons
Earlier this month I was in Canberra for an Australian Government trade fair. Red Pony is a member of the government’s communications services panel, so I was there to meet people from the various departments and agencies who might engage our services. As I chatted to attendees, I began to reflect on the sales process for writing and editing services.
In the ten years that I’ve been running Red Pony I’ve had next to no success with a cold call approach. If an organisation doesn’t already engage people to help with writing, editing and proofreading (either internally or externally) then chances are they don’t truly appreciate these skills. No amount of talking is going to convince them otherwise.
Thankfully, we have plenty of great clients who recognise the value a professional, impartial eye can bring to their written communications. In my experience, the best clients are those who understand the importance of quality documentation, and the level of skill and amount of work required to produce it. They appreciate how an experienced writer or editor can improve the structure of an argument, or an attentive proofreader can find that potentially embarrassing error before a high-profile report goes to print.
Happily, the government representatives I met up with in Canberra were generally communications professionals themselves, experienced in engaging external writers, editors and proofreaders on behalf of their departments or agencies. As a result, I found myself being able to focus on how we do things (our methodologies, tools and experience, etc.) rather than why we do them (improve clarity, remove errors, protect reputation, etc.).
I also talked to a number of people about our skills and experience in producing custom Microsoft Word templates. The most frequent question people asked was whether these documents meet accessibility requirements (they do). This suggests to me that government (at a federal level at least) recognises the importance of this issue. After all, if we accept that documents should be written using plain language to make them accessible to a broader audience, then it stands to reason that they should also be in a format that makes them more widely accessible as well.
In my experience, the clients who get the best results when producing a document (and are the most enjoyable to work with) are those who have a clear understanding of:
who it is for
what their needs are
how the document can best serve those needs.
If we can help produce a document that answers those three questions, then I think we can say we have genuinely provided value to our client.
