The Forwardable Memo

The best pitch I ever gave, I lost.

Ninety minutes in a conference room in Charlotte. I read the room right, handled every objection, got the head of operations nodding by minute forty. When I walked out he shook my hand and said, and I remember this exactly, “this is a no brainer, I just need to run it up.”

Four weeks later I got an email with the word “unfortunately” in the second sentence.

Took me another year to understand what happened. He did run it up. He walked into a meeting on the eleventh floor and he had about ninety seconds to explain a ninety minute conversation to somebody who had never met me, was already annoyed about something else, and had four other things to approve before lunch.

And I had given him nothing to carry.

He walked in there armed with a feeling. Feelings do not survive an elevator ride.

This is the part of the job nobody teaches, and it becomes the whole job in Q4.

You will never be in the room where the decision actually gets made. Not for anything of consequence. The meeting you attend is the qualifying round. The real one happens later, without you, between people you may never meet, and lasts about four minutes.

In that room, you are not a person. You are a paragraph in somebody else’s memory, competing against three other paragraphs and a general sense that everybody is spending too much.

So the highest-leverage skill in your entire commercial life is not presence in the room. We have talked about the room plenty. It is this instead: making something that goes into the room without you and holds up.

I call it the carry sheet. One page, built to be forwarded. Somebody who likes you should be able to hit forward, type “thoughts?”, and send it to somebody who does not know you, and it should survive that trip completely intact.

Almost nothing you have ever sent a client would survive that trip. Your proposals would not. They are built for the person you know, full of context they already have, and they read like a bill.

Here is how you build one that works. Six parts.

Assume the reader gets exactly one line before deciding whether to keep reading. Because that is what happens.

Your first line has to name the decision, not the topic.

Bad, and this is what almost everybody writes: “Recap of our conversation regarding the Q4 operations initiative.”

That is a filing label. It tells the reader nothing except that reading it is optional.

Better: “Recommendation: extend the ops support through Q1 at the current rate. Here is the case, and the one reason you might not want to.”

Now the reader knows what they are being asked, what it costs, and that you are not hiding anything. That last part buys more goodwill than anything else on the page.

Name the decision in line one. Every time.

Here is the move that separates the memo that works from the memo that gets skimmed.

The document should sound like it came from inside the company, not from a vendor. That means using the exact phrases their people actually use. Their name for the process. Their internal shorthand. The specific way the operations lead described the problem in May.

When a senior person reads a document that uses their own vocabulary, it does not register as a sales document. It registers as an internal document, and internal documents get read differently. That is not a trick. It is just what fluency sounds like.

The problem is you cannot remember the exact phrasing from a call four months ago. Nobody can. You remember the gist, and the gist is generic, and generic is what gets skimmed.

So I record my calls. I run Fathom on everything, and when I sit down to write one of these I go pull the actual language. Not my summary of what they said. What they said, verbatim, in their words. Then I use it.

The difference in how those documents land is not subtle. One reads like an outsider describing a business. The other reads like somebody who works there.

When I am building the first pass and my brain is fried, I will run the raw transcript and my notes through Galaxy.ai to get a structural draft on the page, then rewrite the whole thing in my own voice. It is scaffolding, not the building. Anything that goes out with my name on it, I wrote. But an ugly draft to react to beats a blank page at four in the afternoon.

One number. Not a dashboard. Not six metrics. One.

That number has to be about their business, not your work. This is where almost everybody blows it.

“We delivered forty-two assets and ran eleven workshops” is a number about you. It is a receipt. Receipts justify invoices, and the moment your reader is thinking about your invoice you have lost the frame.

“Average time to first response went from nine hours to under two, and the accounts in that group renewed at ninety-one percent against a book average of seventy-four” is a number about them. Now you are not a cost. You are a variable in something they already care about.

If you genuinely do not have a number about their business, say so plainly and give the closest honest proxy. Do not manufacture one. Senior people have a very well developed sense for a number that has been massaged, and getting caught doing it costs you more than having no number at all.

Your reader is going to think of a reason to say no. You know what it is. You have heard it from every account you have ever had.

Put it in the memo. In writing. Before they get there.

“The obvious question is whether this should be handled internally. Honestly, at this volume it probably should be by next summer. The reason to keep it outside through Q1 is the launch in February, and pulling two people onto this now means the launch slips.”

Three things just happened.

You proved you are not selling, because you named the case against yourself. You controlled how the objection gets framed, which is enormous, because the version in your reader’s head is always worse than the version you write. And you gave your champion a script for the moment somebody in that room raises it, which they will, and now your guy has an answer instead of a shrug.

A document that pretends there is no downside gets read as marketing. A document that names the downside gets read as advice.

One ask. Not a menu. Not “let me know your thoughts.”

“Thoughts” is not an ask. It is an invitation to do nothing, and doing nothing is always the easiest option in a room full of busy people.

“To hold the current rate through Q1, we would need to confirm by October 17. After that the team gets allocated and I would be quoting January differently.”

Specific, dated, and the reason for the date is real. Do not invent urgency. Grown adults can smell a fake deadline from across a building and it costs you every ounce of credibility you built in the first four sections. But if there is a genuine constraint, and there almost always is, say it plainly.

This is the test that kills most memos, so read it twice.

Go through your draft and delete every sentence that only works if you are standing there.

“Happy to walk through this.” “Let me know if you want to discuss.” “I can explain the methodology in more detail.”

Every one of those is a confession that the document does not stand on its own. And your reader is not going to schedule a call with a vendor they have never met to understand a paragraph. They are going to move on.

The document either works alone or it does not work.

While you are cutting: one page. Plain text in the body of the email, not an attachment, because attachments do not get opened on phones and this is going to get read on a phone. No logo. No cover page. No deck.

A deck says you are selling. A memo says you are thinking. In an October budget room, only one of those gets forwarded.

Timing matters almost as much as the writing.

Send it two to three weeks before their budget review, not the day before. The day before, your champion is already in defensive mode and buried in his own numbers. Three weeks out, he is still forming opinions, and your page becomes one of the inputs that forms them.

Send it Tuesday or Wednesday morning. Monday is triage and Friday is a graveyard.

And send it with no meeting request attached. That is the hardest part for most guys, because a document with no ask feels like a wasted send. It is not. A memo that arrives asking for nothing gets read as generous. A memo that arrives with a calendar link gets read as a pitch and filed accordingly. You will get your meeting. You will get it because the page earned it, which is a much better meeting to walk into.

“My clients want decks. That is the culture here.” Send the deck to the person you know. Send the memo to the person you do not. They are different tools for different rooms. The deck is for the meeting you attend. The memo is for the one you do not.

“This takes too long to write.” First one takes ninety minutes. Fourth one takes twenty. And you are going to need six of them in the next eight weeks, so the math resolves itself pretty fast.

“What if my champion never forwards it?” Then you learned something important about your champion in September instead of March. That is not a failure of the memo. That is the memo doing its second job.

You spend enormous energy on how you show up in rooms. Fair enough. It matters.

But every deal of any size gets decided in a room you are not in, by people reading something short, quickly, on a phone, between two other things.

The question is not whether you were impressive in Charlotte. The question is what your guy is holding when he walks into the meeting on the eleventh floor.

Right now, for most of your accounts, he is holding a feeling.

Give him a page.

Pick the one account you identified on Wednesday. The one you would be most damaged to lose.

Write the carry sheet. Six parts. One page. Ninety minutes.

Do not send it yet. Write it, then read it out loud as if you were the person who has never met you. You will hear the three sentences that only work with you in the room. Cut those.

Send it Tuesday.

Refined. Relentless. Unapologetic.

Marcus