CUSTOMERS & BUSINESS
Marketing & communication
10 practices · 5 case practices · 1 free
Explain how your offer could help with a problem someone has.
Finish every practice on this route to earn the “Human skills for marketing and communication” completion certificate. It records that you completed the practices; it is not a professional credential.
The conversations on this route
Each step names the skill it rehearses and why it matters in this kind of work.
A customer’s team left your task board for a spreadsheet
Listen before positioning
Understand a real experience instead of confirming your favorite message.
You have 15 minutes with Sam. Use your notes to choose questions about what happened, and leave out the ones your notes answer or that pitch your fixes.
12 minFoundationsCase practiceSoulful
Selling booking software to an instructor swamped by messages
Find the human benefit
Describe what becomes easier in someone’s life.
Noor described her evenings in an interview. Connect your scheduling software to that part of her day without claiming hours saved.
8 minFoundationsFree starter
Writing a budgeting app headline without unproven savings claims
Make a credible promise
Write a clear claim you can actually support.
Sort your team’s suggested lines against what has actually been tested, then write the headline from what the file supports, not from hoped-for savings.
12 minStretchCase practiceSoulful
Testing one headline before redesigning a newsletter signup page
Learn from a test
Decide which wording to compare and which outcome to measure before starting the test.
Ari wants to change the headline, image and form at once. Plan one fair test from the traffic and your analyst’s note, with a long enough run and a fixed end.
15 minDeep practiceCase practiceSoulful
Selling the last places without false urgency
Keep persuasion honest
Communicate a genuine constraint without inventing pressure.
The organizer wants “last chance” and a countdown. Check each line against the booking sheet, then write a promotion from the real deadline and places.
12 minStretchCase practiceSoulful
A first message to a café owner who dislikes sales pitches
Make an invitation relevant
Respect the reader’s attention and give them an easy next step.
Ask Lea for a 10-minute research interview. Say why you’re writing, what you want to learn, and that you have nothing to sell.
7 minFoundationsSoulful
Posting about an order form you built for a home bakery
Share your work honestly
Describe what you made and what went wrong without claiming results you haven’t measured.
Say what you built for Dalia and one thing that went wrong at first, without claiming time savings you haven’t measured.
8 minFoundationsSoulful
Deciding which kind of post to keep after four weeks of posting
Judge content by buyers
Keep the posts that bring people who can buy, and say how small the sample is.
Compare four weeks of posts by the buyers they brought, not likes, then tell your cofounder what to keep, what small numbers can’t show and what’s next.
13 minStretchCase practiceSoulful
Writing an honest listing for a cheap refurbished laptop
Disclose what a buyer should know
Say what you checked, name the one thing a buyer should know and what you will do if it fails.
Say what you checked and fixed, name the remaining risk plainly without hiding or exaggerating it, and say what happens if something goes wrong early.
13 minDeep practiceSoulful
A seller says another shop offered more for the same laptop
Answer a competing offer honestly
Describe your own offer and leave the customer free to choose, without pressure or disparagement.
Answer with what your shop really offers, without running down the other shop or pressing for a yes, and let the seller choose.
12 minStretchSoulful
Related reading
How to tell a customer your product is not the right fitWhen a buyer’s need goes beyond what your product does, say so early, name what it does well, and point to a way to check before they pay.How to write urgency without fake scarcityA small nursery has limited delivery places and a real cutoff. How to say so without implying the plants are running out, and keep the number true.What to say when a client asks for one more revisionA reply for when a client wants changes beyond the agreed rounds: sort what is covered, state the price for the rest, and leave a free option.How to quote your price without apologizing for itPut the figure in the first lines of a quote, then say what it covers, what it leaves out and how to accept, with no apology or defensive build-up.The research behind these practices
Each practice cites the studies that informed its design and says where they may not apply. These are the sources cited most across the 10 practices on this page; they inform the practices and are not proof that the practices work.
- Simulation-based learning in higher education: a meta-analysis (Meta-analysis · 145 studies, 2020). Cited by 4 practices here.
Chernikova and colleagues pooled 145 studies of simulation-based learning in higher education and found a large overall effect on complex skills, with scaffolding a positive moderator. Learners with little prior knowledge gained more from worked examples and those with more gained more from reflection. Most studies came from medical and teacher education, so applying the results to adult people skills or to this product is an inference.
- Practicing versus inventing with contrasting cases (Experiments · Journal of Educational Psychology, 2011). Cited by 3 practices here.
Schwartz, Chase, Oppezzo and Chin taught adolescents physics ideas with a ratio structure, such as density, using sets of cases that differed in the feature that matters. Students who tried to work out the principle from the cases before being told transferred it better than students told first and then practicing on the same cases. Leetsoul gives the guide first and one case per attempt, closer to the told-first group, so this supports building cases that differ in what matters, not the order; applying it to sorting statements against a case file is an inference.
- An integrative model of organizational trust (Academy of Management Review · conceptual model, 1995). Cited by 2 practices here.
Mayer, Davis and Schoorman define trust as willingness to be vulnerable and propose that perceived trustworthiness rests on ability, benevolence and integrity. It is a conceptual model rather than an experiment, and it does not say that any sequence of messages creates trust.
- Dark patterns at scale: findings from a crawl of 11K shopping websites (Measurement study · ACM CSCW, 2019). Cited by 2 practices here.
Mathur and colleagues crawled about 11,000 shopping sites and found dark patterns on about one in ten, with outright deceptive ones, such as countdown timers that reset and low-stock messages that were not true, on 183 sites. It documents how common these designs are, not their effect on buyers.
- The Power of Feedback Revisited (Meta-analysis · educational feedback, 2020). Cited by 2 practices here.
This synthesis examines educational feedback across studies and outcomes. Feedback content and context matter; generic praise and feedback on specific work should not be treated as equivalent.
- A consumer-side experimental examination of signaling theory: do consumers perceive warranties as signals of quality? (Experiment · Journal of Consumer Research, 1993). Cited by 1 practice here.
Boulding and Kirmani varied warranty length and scope in an experiment and found that consumer responses were generally consistent with signaling theory: a seller’s willingness to stand behind a product can be read as a sign of its quality, under certain conditions. It tested hypothetical purchases, not a small shop’s return promise.
18 more sources are listed on the research page.
Limits
Role descriptions draw on public occupational sources. Practicing these conversations is not a qualification, and a Leetsoul completion certificate is not a professional credential or a hiring signal.
Leetsoul has not shown that these practices improve skill in real life, and the original scenarios have not been independently tested. The sources inform the design of the exercises.
Role descriptions
Try one in your own words
Write your response to a fictional conversation, read the guidance, then decide what you would change. Three starter practices are free; Soulful opens the full library.
Written by Leetsoul. Updated . Scenarios are fictional.