HG Insights|Phoenix

Skill: Executive Prose Conventions

Briefs your CRO reads in 60 seconds — facts in tables, reasoning in bullets, no AI-prose filler.

Overview

Briefs that read like an executive summary, not a research paper. Claude renders facts as tables, reasoning as bullets, and narrative only where a reader needs synthesis — and never opens with filler ('In today's fast-paced market…') that signals AI-generated content.

Use cases

  • Pre-call briefs CROs skim and move on from

    Account profile in 4 lines. Stack signals in a 5-row table. Risk picture in 2 named bullets each with a defensive action. The reader decides whether to take the meeting in 60 seconds — exactly the format senior buyers actually prefer.

  • Outputs that don't tell on themselves as AI-generated

    No 'In today's fast-paced market', no 'leading provider of innovative solutions', no five-paragraph build-up to the actual signal. The brief leads with the most important fact in the first 50 words — same way an analyst would draft it.

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Executive Prose Conventions

When to use

  • Authoring a workflow output template (Markdown one-pager, brief, account plan).
  • Reviewing a workflow's "Output Format" section for style drift.

Phoenix house style

Tables for facts

Anything that's a comparable, structured fact goes in a table. Examples:

  • Technographic stack (product / category / intensity / last-verified)
  • Peer comparison (company / employees / revenue / stack)
  • 90-day plan (action / owner / target date / outcome)

Tables compress more facts per square inch than prose can. The reader skims; they pick up signal in seconds.

Bullets for reasoning

The "why this matters" lines under each header are bullets, not prose. Each bullet is one claim. Two-sentence bullets are fine; full paragraphs in bullet form are a tell that the author should have used prose.

Narrative only in "What this tells you"

A single paragraph of synthesis at the end of a section, prefixed with "What this tells you:" or similar, gives the reader the takeaway. Outside this paragraph, prose is overkill.

Never lead with filler

Do not open with:

  • "In today's fast-paced market..."
  • "As organizations navigate..."
  • "[Company] is a leading provider of..."

Lead with the most important signal. "Siemens is in market for Tableau alternatives" is a better opening than "Siemens is a global leader in industrial technology."

Length budgets

Output typeTarget length
Pre-call brief≤ 500 words
Account plan one-pager≤ 400 words
Outbound email≤ 120 words
Section synthesis≤ 80 words ("What this tells you")

If the output overshoots, cut bullets, not tables. Tables compress; bullets pad.

Common pitfalls

  1. Treating "executive" as "formal". Executives skim; formality slows them down. Direct language wins.
  2. Padding to hit a length target. A 400-word brief that says everything is better than a 600-word one that repeats.
  3. Burying the lead. The most important fact goes in the first 50 words.

Reference