Aristotle’s Ancient Guide to Compelling Copy

Saturday, April 30, 2011

I have based these ideas on a CopyBlogger article from early March 2011. The entire article is worth reading.

Here is my distillation, bearing in mind I have to make a short telephone presentation this morning, nudging a prospect a little closer to the sale.

1: Ethos (show off those lovely morals of yours)

(Sharing personal experience) This is easy. The initial contact was made because I had a similar software application already in place. My brief personal story will be about how I needed to copy/paste vast amounts of intricate data between word processing documents on a daily basis.

2: Logos (give them proof, not piffle!)

(Back it up with proof) This too is easy. My initial contact in the prospect’s organization witnessed an on-site demo of my original software, and my web site holds two videos of a proof-of-concept model of the proposed software.

3: Pathos (get them feeling something)

(Trigger those emotional points) This is the toughest of the three steps for me.

I have a spreadsheet fired up with some simple data entry (“How many resumes do you think you process per day or per month?) and it spits out an estimated true cost of processing those estimates, company –wide.

But getting the prospect to reveal accurate figures for salaries will be like extracting teeth, I figure.

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