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The expressions we use add a touch of sparkle to everyday existence. I use them liberally and recommend you do as well. There’s nothing quite like a slightly eccentric turn of phrase to make a girl (or guy) seem funnier, smarter, and more approachable.

Even if you haven’t seen the legendary video, hearing someone say “Confound it, this entire project has been like herding cats” calls up a delicious image of cats running everywhere—hissing, spitting, scratching, and refusing to be corralled. Applied to the work world, the expression suggests rampant disorganization, poor communication, egos unchained, and milestones blasted to smithereens.

When you think about it, expressions create neat little videos all ready to run whenever you close your eyes and say the words. Picture, for example, “as independent as a hog on ice.” According to Evan Morris, The Word Detective,  this lovely phrase expresses the hog’s predicament perfectly. “While he’s technically free, his trotters can get no traction on the ice…and he’s more than likely to end up splayed helplessly on his belly, easily recaptured and returned to his pen.” What a picture.

One last example before I let you go: “Couldn’t find their butt with two hands and a flashlight.” Now, I’m aware there’s a cruder version out there, but this one suffices. I don’t know about you, but I see a confederacy of bumblers who don’t necessarily realize that they’re clueless.

So, expressions are wonderful because they add some fun to language, and they’re marvels of efficiency. The words serve the visuals, and the visuals return the favor.

One of my hobbies is thinking. No, this is not the type of self-promoting statement we are daily exhorted to put out there. It’s a statement of fact. I like to think. It keeps me off the streets and out of pool halls. I sometimes do it well and, just as often, poorly.

Ace marketing strategist Shareef Mahdavi explores the power of ideas in a recent post. He believes that coming up with good ideas is a learned behavior as much as it is “an innate gift.” To generate ideas, or at least to participate in the process of generating them, you need to give and take.

You give by proposing ideas that make products or services (or life in general) better. You take by listening to an idea instead of rejecting it. Drawing from the book What a Great Idea! 2.0 by Chic Thompson, Mahdavi suggests giving a new idea 30 seconds’ consideration, rather than the usual eight. Hard to believe, but most of us reject a new idea in eight seconds or less—about the same amount of time we spend on an uninteresting home page.

Receptivity, curiosity (of course), and the ability to open up in good old-fashioned brainstorming sessions all make it easier to be an idea generator. Mahdavi makes a special point about curiosity: every evening at the dinner table, he asks his kids about the questions they asked that day. How cool is that?

Priming your brain is a great practice. Allow yourself to be surprised by ideas whenever and wherever they land. I’ve gotten my best ideas and had the most fun with them when they caught me completely unawares.

At the risk of bringing up a topic that’s been discussed ad nauseum, I want to meditate a bit about personal branding.

According to Patty Azzarello, who recently spoke at a professional woman’s group I belong to, it’s about two things: behavior and consistency. Showing your best self at all times and being mindful of how you say what you say are clearly part of that mix.

Recently, we’ve seen an example of these elements of personal branding in the behavior of Maria Shriver, the former first lady of California. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, it has been impossible to mistake her dignity and, for lack of a better word, “class” during a personal crisis.

Of course, some folks have commented on her pain, but more, probably, have spoken of her ability to rise from the ashes, a phoenix of calm and self-possession. Ms. Shriver’s triumph under difficult circumstances has, I think, everything to do with the personal brand she’s established over the years. Yep, she’s got a great professional brand that will stand her in good stead as she figures out her next big thing. But she’s also got what so many of us need to work on—identity that emanates from her core and manifests itself in her public behavior every day. That’s rooted in self-discipline and, I think, bona fide self-esteem. Would that we could all model it.

“Argh,” a colleague recently sighed. “Someone just gave me a hard time about not reading an email she sent a couple of days ago. She doesn’t realize that I get at least 100 new messages every day. Staying on top of it all is almost impossible. It’s not that I intend to be disrespectful, but…”

Communication overload, whether by voice mail or email, is a big deal. A recent newsletter from High Tech Connect notes that this high octane provider of marcom and PR talent has discovered that its clients often don’t respond to either. Voicemail and email, “the lifelines for PR pros and marketers,” have become a nuisance. The remedy? To meet clients where they are. These days, that can be via Facebook Chat or texting. Of course, High Tech Connect also makes liberal use of cell phones, because clients are rarely at their desks and are typically not checking landline voicemail.

I finally got a phone that lets me text and am surprised at how much I love it. (Texting argot is half the fun.) Still, I tend to rely on the old familiar channels to get, and stay, in touch. And when someone doesn’t get back to me, I tend to chalk it up to “Bay Area Communication Syndrome.”

I’m curious about how you communicate. What truly works, and what adds an unlovable layer of complication to your life?

Copywriters, perhaps more than others, have a deep appreciation for words and their power to create unforgettable images.

The other evening I was grooving on an episode of the florid and wonderful costume drama, The Tudors. I sat enthralled as the reptilian Thomas Boleyn plotted with his henchmen, and Henry VIII, played by the yummy Jonathan Rhys Meyers, stomped around bellowing orders and acting like a frat boy with a bad hangover.  All of a sudden, it struck me that Henry, at that stage of his life, was a skinny, sexy guy. He was not, as we usually picture him, a corpulent, richly dressed redhead with a bland stare.

I started meditating on the word “corpulent” and its origins. Dictionary.com notes that “corpulent” springs from late 14^th century Old French and, of course, Latin. Made up of “corpus” (body) and “ulentus” (full of), it’s a perfectly lovely word—full of body! It even sounds weighty.

Just think of how many words we use every day that are derived similarly. There’s “fraudulent,” or full of deceit and trickery. “Succulent,” or full of juice. And “belligerent,” or full of combativeness, contentiousness, and antagonism.

You’re bound to have a favorite “ulent” word?  What is it?

Why do people buy our products and services?

C.J. Hayden, a contributing editor to Rain Today and the author of Get Clients Now! offers four reasons in a recent article. (By the way, her contributions are great, and Rain Today in general has excellent content about sales and marketing.) Even if you’re not sure you’re in sales—and ultimately, we all are—I think you may find her thoughts helpful:

1. They like you – Trust is a big factor, too. And it helps if potential customers know you or know of you. So network a lot and ask for referrals from satisfied customers. Hayden also mentions public speaking, but many of us are not quite there yet. In building my copywriting business, I’ve found networking invaluable and referrals to be like platinum.

2. You have what they need – Do they understand what you’re offering? “Do they grasp the benefits of working with you?” Hayden suggests that you ask prospects a lot of questions. The rationale being that the more you know about them, the more easily you can explain how you can help.

3.  You help them justify purchasing your products or services – Everyone must justify a potential purchase to someone, whether husband, wife, or manager. Give prospects the information and language they need to persuade others.

4. Your price is right – If you’ve done steps 1 through 3 well, then, according to Hayden, “the only significant issues about the price is whether they can find the money.” You can suggest that prospects compare the cost of hiring you to the cost of doing nothing, or you might mention how using your services might reduce other expenses. You might offer a payment plan or suggest that your prospect identify a budget category with unused funds.

I like the idea of viewing sales as a series of orderly steps. Demystifying the process can make it a lot less scary and may even have the potential to add enjoyment we hadn’t expected to our business-building interactions.

A million years ago, I was a salesperson for Dictaphone. Somehow I managed to sell myself well enough so that the company hired me to be the first female rep in Washington, D.C. (Perhaps the interviewer mistook my general feistiness during the interview as real sales courage, but that’s another story.) I was, in fact, probably the worst salesperson in the history of the company, but I learned despite myself, and the experience has left me with a keen interest in the sales process.

Recently, I read a great article by Catherine Brown, president of Initial Call and one sharp lady. Her thesis is that every great sales person must have three essential traits, apart from the ability to close a sale:

• Candor – This means that you’re honest about the capabilities of your product or service—at the risk of losing the sale. Boy, is it ever easy to stretch the truth, particularly if you’re under quota. I did it once, to my eternal shame. It’s a bad thing to do to your customers, your company, and yourself.
• Anticipation –   You help your prospect foresee, or anticipate, how decisions they make now will impact the business going forward. Anticipate also means really liking what you sell and believing in what you’re doing. No sleepwalkers need apply.
• Openness – You enjoy learning new things. You seek out the opportunity to acquire new knowledge. You’re intellectually curious and are not “a staunch protector of ‘the way we’ve always done it.’”

Funny, isn’t it, how simple this seems and yet how often these traits seem lacking in the salespeople we deal with? The best salesperson I’ve encountered recently was a young guy at Best Buy. He was well informed, pleasant, and suppressed his chuckles when I asked some truly dumb questions. He seemed interested in what he was doing, and it made a difference. I walked out with what I needed, rather than with what I’d planned to buy. It cost a bit more than I had planned to pay, but he took the time to help me see the benefit of making that decision.

What do you think makes a salesperson great?

Boy, is this ironic. My editorial calendar calls for a post about le mot juste—“the right word” in French—and I’m clutching…

I’m a copywriter by trade, and I know that even professionals sometimes struggle to get the right word out of our heads and dancing merrily across the page to join its fellows. Mind maps, brainstorming, and outlines all help, of course, because they allow us to do so much thinking before we put pen to paper. Often the words are right there, leaping like trout. Still, there are days when they don’t come easily at all.

Most of us probably think about writers of literature when we think about the struggle of writing. We visualize endlessly blank white sheets of paper on a desk or crumpled up wads of parchment lying around the base of a wastebasket, tossed there in utter frustration. We imagine the sighs of the tormented creative. At those points, writing seems not to be a very glamorous endeavor.

Yet those who make their living writing for others have some of the same experience. We want what we write to convey the message our clients are too busy to write or feel they are insufficiently skilled to express. If we care about what we do, we never phone it in. Instead, like Jack London, we sit at our desks until the words come. And when we’re done, we arise, stretch, and send our work out to meet the public.

Frankly, it’s been a long time since I’ve looked for a “real” job, as a friend once referred to corporate employment. So I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about cover letters. Actually, now that I think about it, they bear more than a passing resemblance to marketing direct mail and are worthy of any copywriter’s attention. But I digress.

The real story here is that cover letters are still relevant, and some companies insist that you submit one with your resume. The question is how to make your cover letter memorable.

Jimmy Sweeney, president of CareerJimmy and “author of the brand new Amazing Cover Letter Creator,” has one answer. The way to get your cover letter read, he says, is by putting a powerful, attention-grabbing headline at the very beginning. A strong header persuades the poor soul reviewing stacks of missives to read on. If you don’t screw up in the body of the letter, you may actually move ahead in the hiring process.

When you think about it, a headline in a cover letter focuses the reader. Like eyebrows on a face, a headline creates interest and engagement. Done right, it’s a perfect sales tool. Now the question is: Will you do it or will you nod agreeably and consider that it’s just a touch too undignified?

Thanks to Shareef Mahdavi of SM2 Strategic, I’ve just learned about Pecha Kucha (pronounced “pe-chach-ka”), a wonderful new presentation technique born in Japan.

Derived from the Japanese phrase for “chit chat,” Pecha Kucha limits a presentation to 20 slides x 20 seconds of talk per slide. That’s 6 minutes and 40 seconds maximum, folks. And by the way, the slides advance automatically, leaving the verbose scrambling to keep up.

Limiting the amount of time presenters can ramble on forces them to focus on the essentials of their message. Parenthetically, how many copywriters out there have created or edited those 50-slide monsters that are guaranteed soporifics? (“It needs to be that long so we can really tell our story.” Yeah, right.) Technology companies in my part of the world seem sadly enamored of them.

Shareef, by the way, walks the talk. You may not be particularly interested in hearing about cataract surgery and laser, but he demonstrates the power of Pecha Kucha by actually making the topic compelling for lay people. If I were a cataract surgeon, I’d be signing up for a laser unit right now.

Take a little creativity break and learn more about Pecha Kucha.  I can promise you’ll be glad you did.