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 type | Target 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
- Treating "executive" as "formal". Executives skim; formality slows them down. Direct language wins.
- Padding to hit a length target. A 400-word brief that says everything is better than a 600-word one that repeats.
- Burying the lead. The most important fact goes in the first 50 words.
Reference
opening-line-discipline— outreach openingstabular-summary-discipline— when tables win