Stop Talking About Your Process

I have a dry cleaner. Every Tuesday, I drop off a week's worth of wrinkled disasters. Every Friday, I pick up crisp, pressed perfection hanging in those satisfying plastic sleeves.

I don't need to know what chemicals they use. I don't care about their state-of-the-art pressing equipment or their eco-friendly cleaning process. I couldn't tell you how long they've been in business or whether the owner went to dry cleaning school (do they even have those?).

All I care about is this: I can walk into any meeting looking like I've got my shit together, even when I definitely don't. My shirts don't have mysterious stains from last Friday's lunch disaster. My pants have actual creases instead of looking like I slept in them.

It's one less thing I have to think about in my already overstuffed brain.

Your clients feel exactly the same way about your copy.

When a business owner lands on your website or reads your pitch, they're not hunting for your "proprietary 12-step messaging framework" or your certification from the International Academy of Words That Sell Good.

They don't care that you've been studying consumer psychology since the Clinton administration or that you use a special blend of neuroscience and ancient storytelling techniques passed down through generations of Mad Men.

Here's what they do care about:

• Their sales page converts visitors into buyers while they sleep. Their email campaigns actually get opened instead of banished to the spam folder. Their brand voice finally sounds like them instead of every other beige business in their industry.
  
  
• They want to stop lying awake at 2 AM wondering if their copy is the reason their launch flopped. They want to feel confident hitting "send" on that email campaign. They want their website to work as hard as they do.
  
  
• Most of all, they want to stop being their own copywriter.

See the difference?

One version is about you and your impressive toolkit. The other is about them and their real life getting measurably better.

Your process matters … to you. It should be bulletproof, battle-tested, and refined through years of trial and error. But your process is like the dry cleaner's industrial steamers: essential for getting the job done, invisible to the customer.

What your clients can see, feel, and desperately want is the outcome. The relief. The transformation.

So here's your homework: Go read your About page, your service descriptions, your LinkedIn summary. Count how many times you talk about your method versus how many times you talk about their life after working with you.

If you're like most copywriters, you'll find a lot more "how I work" and not nearly enough "how you'll feel."

Your clients don't want to hire your process.

They want to hire their better future.

Give them that instead.