The Underrated Sales Skill: Writing Clearly
- No invented stats
- Written for UK readers
- 3 min read
- Published 6 November 2026
A large part of a modern sales job happens in writing. Emails, LinkedIn messages, follow-up summaries, proposals, internal notes, the one-paragraph recap your champion forwards to their boss. Yet sales training still pours almost all its effort into what happens on calls, and treats writing as admin. That's backwards.
Here's the argument in one line: clear writing wins deals because it moves work off the buyer's desk and onto yours. Every sentence a buyer has to read twice is a small tax. Enough small taxes and they stop reading, or they forward your email to a colleague who reads even less carefully and makes a decision based on the bit they skimmed.
What unclear writing actually costs you
The damage isn't aesthetic. It's structural. Consider the difference between these two follow-ups after a discovery call.
Hi Sarah, great to speak earlier — really enjoyed learning more about your business and the challenges you're currently facing around your reporting processes. As discussed, I think there could be a really strong fit here and I'd love to explore how we might be able to support you going forward. Let me know your thoughts and if you'd like me to send over some more information.
Against:
Hi Sarah — three things from our call:
1. Your month-end reporting takes your team about a week, and most of that is manual reconciliation.
2. You want that down to two days before the new financial year.
3. Any change needs sign-off from Dan in finance.Have I got that right? If so, the next useful step is a 30-minute session with you and Dan so he can see the reconciliation piece himself. Does Thursday or Friday work?
The second one is shorter and does more. It proves you listened, gives Sarah something she can forward to Dan without rewriting it, and asks one question with two answers. The first one asks Sarah to do the thinking about what happens next, which is a task she will not do today.
Clarity is mostly subtraction
You don't need to become a stylist. You need to delete. A few habits that do almost all the work:
- Put the point in the first sentence. If someone read only that line, they should know what you want.
- Cut the throat-clearing. "I hope this email finds you well", "I just wanted to reach out", "As discussed". Nobody has ever replied because of these.
- One ask per message. Two asks often means neither gets answered.
- Use their words, not yours. If they said "chasing invoices", don't write "accounts receivable optimisation".
- Read it out loud. Anywhere you stumble, a buyer stumbles too.
The same discipline applies internally. Deal notes that nobody can parse are notes nobody uses, which is why most CRM notes are too long to be worth writing. And it's the single biggest difference between cold outreach that gets read and cold outreach that gets deleted — see how to write a cold email that gets replies.
The fair counter-argument
Plenty of people close a great deal of business while writing badly. Relationships, timing, a genuinely superior product and sheer persistence all beat prose. If you had to choose between a rep who writes beautifully and one who picks up the phone forty times a day, take the phone.
But that's a false choice, and it gets less true as deals get bigger. In a committee purchase, most of the people deciding will never meet you. They'll meet your writing — a proposal, a forwarded email, a summary someone pastes into Slack. When you're not in the room, your sentences are doing the selling. It's worth making them good ones. A proposal that gets signed is usually just a clear one.
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