We recently connected with Kristin N. Spencer and have shared our conversation below.

Kristin N., thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Have you ever experienced an industry-wide U-Turn? Tell us about it?

When you’ve been a professional in an industry for long enough, you’ll experience an industry-wide U-Turn, an instance where the consensus completely flips upside down or where the “best practices” completely change. If you’ve experienced such a U-Turn over the course of your professional career, we’d love to hear about it.

After a decade working in the nonprofit sector as a humanitarian worker, I decided to build my own business around something I absolutely loved: books. After I went back to school to become a certified copyeditor (someone who edits manuscripts), I worked with clients in an editing co-op I founded, mainly with first-time authors.

When the pandemic happened, all of my clients suddenly wanted out of their contracts, and I understood. Writing your dream book doesn’t really make sense to spend money on when life feels so uncertain.

But I still need to be able to pay my bills and give my team work. Knowing that winter was coming and our home’s pipes could burst gave me the extra shove I needed to lean into a new direction. So, I decided to shift gears to a business that was more antifragile: copywriting. I can still remember the knot in my stomach I felt as I started my first-ever sales call.

The best part was that I was able to use the skills I had learned in copyediting school about clear, concise, and correct communication to write copy that got amazing results for my clients.

I took the extra money I had from my sudden pivot, and hired the best copywriting coach out there.

A lot of people told me that I couldn’t create a career in marketing using the skills I picked up in the publishing world, but my mentor believed I could. And now, I use the power of strategic storytelling combined with sales psychology to get my clients amazing results through my special brand of literature combined with sales: value-based marketing.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

When I first started copywriting for my amazing clients, I noticed that not all of them had offers that I could help them sell. That’s when I decided I needed to gather one more type of knowledge before I could truly get my clients better results when choosing the words they used to sell their products or services. It was time to go all in on offer creation.

In the industry of business storytelling, there is a huge gap that most marketing firms don’t address: there isn’t a clear way to connect the story they want their clients to tell with an offer that actually gets money for their client’s business. I wanted to change that, so I came up with a more holistic method for approaching marketing and business writing.

Then, I was able to take those same concepts and introduce them to my nonfiction business book clients as well.

By taking my love for precise language, 16 years of experience as a professional writer, and over 1 million words I’ve written that have been published worldwide, I now create words that work toward a specific goal my clients have. At the same time, I help them build a robust purchaser journey so that they know where to plug each potential buyer into their system to build trust and nurture sales relationships.

Also, because of my background in humanitarian work as a trainer for women who had been rescued out of human trafficking, I know how to understand the parts the professionals I work with have a hard time saying out loud. This means that I don’t make any recommendations to them that I know they won’t be comfortable fulfilling. And we don’t write any words for them that point to an offer that they wouldn’t want to complete.

It is my joy and honor to help businesses build better marketing based on a customized approach, sales psychology, and strategic storytelling. All by using carefully selected words that advocate for the purchaser who needs their specific help most. My favorite thing about taking a more holistic approach is that I can build any specific piece of copy my clients need as we work toward measurable goals.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

One of the biggest obstacles I face is that many professionals have worked with other, underperforming copywriters by the time they get to me. Since I’m already a contrarian at heart (someone who goes against popular opinions), it has benefited me to be the marketing professional who calls out all of the antiquated techniques that marketing firms still use based on making their own jobs easier.

And since I speak like a contrarian, it also makes sense that the way I dress and the big, bold glasses I wear match that way of thinking.

When I was younger, I always felt pressure to turn myself down like a volume knob. But now, my contrary approaches are what get my clients such great results.

As I work with other professionals, I encourage them to embrace their true selves as well. Not only does being yourself save energy in the long run, but when it comes to marketing your products or services, it will create trust because others can’t sense some sort of deception coming from you.

When we show up as our authentic, knowledgeable selves, that’s when we can truly have the biggest impact on the world around us. This includes our marketing efforts.

Any advice for managing a team?

If we can foster curiosity in ourselves and our teams, that’s when we’ll see amazing results.

For example, in the marketing world, we often like to silo the sales departments and marketing departments away from everyone else. But, if we encourage conversations based on curiosity in other departments, that’s when we can uncover amazing added benefits from our organization’s products or services.

In my upcoming book, Alice in Businessland: Where it Pays to be Curious About Which Words Sell, I invite the reader to be curious in an effort to suspend both self-judgment and the judgments of others. At the same time, we talk about reflective autonomy which means we cannot control the way others act, but we can offer the same autonomy we would want to receive from them.

The best way to encourage healthy interactions and create better team dynamics is to use curiosity to help teams engage in wonderment, be creative about problem solving, and feel more connected to each other.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://literarysymmetry.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kristin.n.spencer/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kristin.spencer.754
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristinspencerwriter/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/literarysymmet1
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@kristin.n.spencer
• Other: PODCAST: https://ybspodcast.com

Image Credits

All images taken and owned by me.