By Jason Stewart - January 10, 2008
Business Communication 101, Circa 1970
We have a definite affinity for vinyl LP’s in our house. We don’t listen to them all that much, but at least once per year nostalgia drives us to dig out some old Christmas records and play them on the phonograph. Over the decade my wife and I have been together we have managed to merge record collections from a few different sources, so there are always a few LP’s with untraceable origins. This year, I uncovered some vinyl gold … “A Nations Business ‘Executive Seminar in Sound’ – How to Get Your Ideas Across.” Circa 1970. I had to give it a listen and see how it holds up after 38 years.
The recording focuses on how to best communicate your ideas at work in order to “win friends and influence people.” In other words, it offers advice on how to market yourself. It features the general bullet-pointed highlights of each “lesson” on the back cover of the record, with the actual recording featuring a narrator hammering the points home in between skits and vignettes demonstrating the theme of the track.
Band One: Getting Across to the Boss
Scene: The CEO’s office, where 4 different employees are all pitching their ideas to the boss at the same time. Ultimately, the worker bee who scores the most points is the one who follows these basic rules (from the back cover):
- Put yourself in the Boss’s shoes to try to understand what might interest him or her the most
- Time your idea to coincide with what is interesting to them right now
- Don’t oversell, let them think about the idea
- Sell the idea, not yourself
- Present options and possible compromises because the boss might like the idea, but has many other things to consider that you might not even be aware of
Good advice, obviously, that still holds up and is very applicable to BtoB marketing. Especially the part about trying to time your pitch to coincide with your audience’s interest. Companies like Manticore, Eloqua, and Market2Lead have built their businesses on this principle…that all leads are not created equal and if you can better coordinate your offerings with a prospect's interests and needs right now, then you can do a better job of passing only the best, most qualified leads to your sales team. It doesn’t matter how great your product or service is if the timing for a purchase is not right. If you can somehow determine when the timing is right and then deliver them to sales then they will close more business with less effort.
Perhaps the best advice from this segment was that if you pay attention to what is important to your audience, they will in turn pay attention to what is important to you.
Band Two: The Management Meeting
Scene: Corporate conference room, management meeting. Each department head gets the floor to update the team on their progress, needs and concerns. One of the speakers begins his presentation with lots of lofty rhetoric that ultimately ends up obscuring a relatively simple point. He actually sounds like the J. Peterman character from “Seinfeld,” couching an ad for a simple walking shoe in 15 pounds of descriptive text pulled from a pulp fiction novel.
The next presenter does much better, of course. The management team was engaged by his straightforward presentation and not bored by repetition or flowery prose. Here are the points from the back cover:
- Keep the forum in mind. It is not public speaking, but it is not a social conversation either. Tailor your presentation to the situation.
- Dos and Don’ts
- Do be concise, make your points in an interesting manner
- Do be aware of repetition, don’t ramble (don’t be afraid of silence, it can be used for emphasis)
- Do write your facts down, edit them as much as possible, rehearse their delivery
- Speak clearly
- Roll with the punches – good natured dialogue or heckling is a natural part of meeting communication
More good advice. How often have you heard a pitch from a salesperson, and it sounds like the first time they ever delivered it? Or they are so focused on following a script that simple questions leave them flustered and lost? Whether it is an internal meeting, a presentation to a prospect, or a webinar touting the new features you have just added to your product you need to sound conversational, concise, and be as brief as possible while still getting your points across.
Band Three: Target Your Communications
Scene: A speaker shares the same basic information about a change in corporate policy with three different groups in the company, but tailors his communications to each group using the terms and context they are familiar with. His masterful communication skills earn him kudos from everyone involved, and his needs are instantly met by all parties involved because he so expertly guided them with his words.
- Be simple and direct with your words
- Speak using your audience’s terminology, be aware of how you look to your audience
- If people understand what you’re saying they’re more likely to do what you ask
- Four steps to insure effective communication
- Illustration (be descriptive)
- Interesting fact (give them some background)
- Indisputable authority (confidently explain exactly what needs to be done)
- Careful explanation (make sure they understand how they need to do it)
- Give reasons to listen and remember
The parallels to BtoB marketing are obvious. Not only do you need to be sure to communicate using terms familiar to your audience, you also need to be able to parse out the proper personnel to hear your pitch in the first place. Targeted marketing is vital to get the most return on your marketing dollars, and you need to understand the demographics of your audience as well as how they talk to each other about the business challenges your product or service will help them to overcome.
Band Four: Make the Right Word Work For You
Slightly different than the first three tracks, and not so much a scene as it is a discussion about word choice and the images your word choices evoke in your audience. They use the rather interesting example of the word “dog.” One person thinks happy thoughts about puppies while another has a nightmarish reaction involving a loud and vicious attack dog. I never knew the word “dog” could conjure up such startlingly vivid yet completely opposite reactions in people.
Here are the points from the back cover:
- A dictionary definition may seem precise but the word itself may conjure up different images for the audience
- “Surrounding Words” also effect the meaning of the word (avoid words that imply chance or risk)
- Positive words spark positive reactions
Those pesky “surrounding words” also play an important role in the fourth track. The narrator actually describes words as “bombs with time fuses.” For example, if you talk about the “little” delay resulting from a snafu at the manufacturing facility, that word may explode in your face when the delay turns out to not be so little. This is when the ticking sound effect on the record intensified, and was followed by the sound of the word exploding. Seriously.
Honesty really is the best policy. Don’t try to downplay an issue if it is important to your prospects or customers. Focus on the positive, but don’t ignore the negative either. I have lost track of how many times Seth Godin has written blog pieces praising honesty in customer support. His marketing blog talks about customer support almost as much as other, more “pure” marketing topics. for a simple reason...word of mouth and happy customers are the best sort of advertising.
I’ll wrap up side two of the record next week…
