The evidence isn’t the argument.

Bidders, and those charged with creating their output, absolutely Geoffing love evidence. Nutritious, provable, stable, wouldn’t blow-over-in-a-named-storm proof of something actually happening. Phwoar. Give them a blank page and, sooner or later, someone will wheel out A Venerable Statistic.

Carefully maneuvered into position like a siege engine or Big Dan Burn at an England corner, it will be deployed with devastating effectiveness, nodding away objections like an absolute legend.

Ninety-three per cent satisfaction. Boom.

Twenty-seven per cent reduction. Boom.

Four hundred thousand users. Boom.

Seven million octopi saved from the skillet. Boom.

Whatever the stat in question is, it’s all lovely, especially if you’re the invertebrate in question. Then everyone stands back admiring the evidence as though the job’s done. But oh, no. Things have only just started. Things, from here, need to get properly interesting.

Evidence is not an argument.

Evidence is material - the pure molecules themselves - from which a rare and unstable element called Argument can be made. The job of the writer presented with these fragile ingredients is to make the cake, if we can haul in another leaden metaphor. Here at AAT Towers, we’ve read/been subjected to thousands of pages of business writing where somebody has dropped a proper lead-lined clanger of a stat into a paragraph and apparently expected it to positively radiate pure buyer-agreement.

“We achieved 98.7% KPI compliance.”

Fine. Cool. Good for you, our guy. Have a Jaffa Cake. We’ve got a book at home about fishing. What difference does it make? What happened because of it? Who benefited? Was 98.7% difficult, or expected? Is 98.7% fireworks and champagne on the beach or a round of sandwiches on a park bench in Runcorn? Is everyone else getting 99.2%? Did the remaining 1.3% involve an orphanage catching fire?

Evidence without interpretation is useless.

The writer’s job, as ever, is to connect it to consequence. What does this mean to the buyer? It is our job to make them give a Geoff. This matters particularly in organisations full of experts because expertise changes the way people see information.

If you have dedicated ten years of your life working on youth exclusion, energy efficiency or homelessness, a particular statistic may immediately tell you something important. The reader may not know that.

They aren’t stupid, even though, they can occasionally look it. They simply haven’t spent ten years thinking about your subject, whereas you of course have. So, explain it, quickly and well. Go on, Timmy, run along with the bigger boys - we know you can do it.

Before you start, keys hovering millimeters above faintly greasy qwerty, remember that good, super-persuasive, sticky writing does something deceptively simple:

It does pure, accurate fact. Then it ties fact to outcome for your client, and then it delivers a consequence they can feel in an appropriate area. Usually, one would hope, their pocket.

Don’t you sit there, smothered in useful evidence, and merely tell us that absenteeism dropped by 12%. No, no, Timbo: before we believe in you and start thinking you’re the person we’re going to buy from, tell us what that attendance improved. Tell us why that matters. Tell us what became possible as a result of our decision to choose your thing over everyone else’s things. Make us excited, Tim. Excited.

Don’t merely tell us a retrofit reduced energy consumption by 31%. We need to know what it means.

Tell us what that meant for bills, comfort, carbon and the likelihood that the building, cagoul or hat we’re purchasing will still be keeping the rain out in two decades’ time.

This is where organisations sometimes become strangely coy. They fear that interpretation looks like spin, but it needn’t. See, there is a difference between manipulating evidence and explaining it.

In fact, refusing to explain evidence can be its own form of intellectual laziness. You don’t buy a recipe book, turn to page 24 expecting detailed guidance on how to make your own Schwarzwalde Kirschtorte, and find only a picture of said Teutonic gateau, with a little flag stuck in it that reads: ‘Cook this.’

Similarly, throwing big stats about in a document without attaching a reason for the prospect to want to either have your babies or secure your services in some other, more business-focused way is a waste of time, cigarettes and pixels. “Here are the numbers. Draw your own conclusions” doesn’t traditionally win piles of new work. You are the organisation claiming expertise. Make the bloody case.

Good arguments don’t need the data equivalent of a fireworks display. They just need to be true.

The strongest arguments we’ve seen rarely rely on spectacular data. They rely on ordinary evidence being connected intelligently to something the reader, your prospect, already values.

Things prospects value are normally things they don’t have much of, but would like more of (unless they work in HR, but that’s a story for another time).

Time, while we’re on the subject, remains disappointingly finite and tediously linear, and as far as we know, so buyers seldom have enough of it. Finding efficiencies is actually finding money, for they are the same thing.

Money tends to run out faster than expected - we’ve never heard of a business folding because it was doing too well financially. Helping them to hold on to what they’ve got, and proving you can help them to make more usually gets them thinking about you after lights-out.

Risk is more than just a boardgame for boys who’ve not met the right girl yet, either. It’s a real deal-killer, and only piles of rock-solid evidence that you’re not about to plunge the professional worriers into paroxysms of what-iffery will save your proposal from the brazier, you can trust us on that one.

Opportunity has many faces. Lots of prospects embrace it, and love the idea of development and exponential growth, and they should be lionised for doing so. Failure to capitalise on the opportunity to demonstrate that your solution creates growth or market share increase or stability, however, and they will look at you like a vegan in the butcher’s and do one, pronto.

Dignity, safety, guaranteed outcomes, real savings they can demonstrate on day one and day 397, all predictable and accounted for. That’s what the prospect wants. Materially better outcomes they can quantify and believe in. This seems obvious when written down, but it’s astonishing how rarely organisations actually do it. Perhaps this is because gathering evidence feels difficult, sometimes involves actually sitting with real people and discussing real things like a real person, and therefore takes real effort. But it’s worth it.

Since it’s worth it, it is therefore valuable, and good evidence is usually just that because its value is easy for you to explain in the proposal, and for the buyer to see and imagine being brought into their work.

But explanation is where the persuasion happens. Evidence proves to us that something occurred.

An argument tells us why we should care.