We live and work in the age of the internet. Unfortunately it's now less 'surfing the web' and playing quirky flash games. It's more having to decipher another person's cryptic paragraphs which weirdly end with an ellipsis - which isn't supposed to be passive aggressive - and reflecting upon what it's taught you about B2B sales.

Being understood is crucial.

Remote working or at least using a messaging service (like Slack, Teams, etc) for work requires your communication to be easily understood, have clear intention and, ideally, brevity. There is nothing worse than being forced to read paragraphs where a single sentence would have sufficed. No doubt this is probably the most ethical use case of AI.

The two things that have helped me in our digital environment are

Assuming positive intent

Don't waste your time obsessing over the awkward, or potentially subtly inflammatory way you've read a sentence. It was probably written with the best of intent, but the with the worst of what an English class has on offer. Not all denizens of the digital age are so careful with how they phrase and use language. Sometimes people are just simply unaware of how they come across. What might read as directness, could instead be a message sent in a rush. Assuming positive intent smoothes over all awkward messages. At the very least if it was meant to be mean-spirited, what's more annoying than a well-intentioned and kind response?

Emojis and gifs are your friend

We've come a long way from :3 , >:) , and . Nowadays we 😙, 😏, and 😐. But to be fair, we were always on the right track. Emojis are here to paint sentences with emotional colour. They can be the clarification to a message that could otherwise be read as cold. How much nicer a sentence like "hope you had a good weekend.." becomes when you add a smile instead (and drop the psychopathic ellipsis) "hope you had a good weekend 😁". You don't need to drown in emojis, every sentence doesn't need to become a new exploration into what unicode has to offer. Although sometimes it can keep things fresh 🤠👊💯

Gifs are even better. Have a long paragraph which documents all of the nasty bugs you've encountered testing someone's pull request? What about a ~5s gif which shows the behaviour instead? What if product is asking you to commit horrible UX sins because they've decided it would be "kind of cool, actually"? What about a gif showing exactly how far we've strayed from God's good intentions?

The clarity of an easily understood video will work wonders in getting a point across. Introducing gifs as a way to describe behaviour, especially in the engineering world has been a game changer for me. A personal favourite of mine is a before/after gif for a pull request. As in, here is how this UI looked before changes were made, and here it is after. Simple, to the point, and clear as day.

☝️💯 and that brings me 🤩 to what this 💪 has taught 🎓 me about B2B sales 💸🤝 ..