Kyle Onstott
January 2020
Communication is a key component of every category in life. Between building relationships, selling your product or service, or creating friendship you are required to partake in some form of communication. 85% of your life’s success with business and with other will include communication.
How much time have you invested in perfecting your communication skills?
Communication is a skill that can be learned. Through consistent practice and repetition you can perfect the way you communicate with clients, prospects, family, & anyone else.
In sales & business specifically the way you communicate can either help you close more sales or help you lose more deals.
The are 4 categories of communication:
Verbal - speaking
Non-verbal - body language, facial expressions, or gestures.
Written - writing, typing, or printing letters or numbers to convey information.
Visual - photographs, art, drawing, info-graphs or chart.
If you want to perfect your craft, close more sales, & create a larger network of individuals to refer you, then these are 4 areas of your life you are going to want to practice and improve upon.
I’m going to give you a few different tools & tips you can implement today and start practicing.
#1. Verbal. When you speak you must be strong and confident in your words. Avoid filler words like “uh” “like” “so” and anything else you catch yourself saying. To help find areas of improvement record the next presentation you go on, then go back through & critique yourself. Tonality is critical. Learn how to perfect your voice inflections. (Whisper) When you start to change the way you speak, especially when you go softer and slower, people tend to lean in and pay more attention. Listen to understand, not to reply. Learn it !!
#2. Non-verbal. Emotions are attached to your physiology. What that means is if you’re nervous chances are your shoulders will be slouched, voice will be soft, & your head will be tilted down. When you are confident your shoulders will be up with chest out, voice will be strong, & your head will be up. Use your body to connect with people. Hand gestures, leg movement or crossing, eye placement, head nods, eyebrows, you get the point- just pay attention and utilize your body to get the emotional connection across.
#3. Written. Be simple, clear, & detailed oriented. Make sure to make sense and always ensure the client or prospect is following along, not falling asleep. If you are writing and email or letter be sure to review and pay attention to the potential interpretation of your tone. They can not see or hear you so they may take the message out of context- just double check. Reference other letters, pamphlets, or marketing material you come across and customize it to your own resource.
#4. Visual. Consider your audience. Figure out their personality types and try to identify whether or not visualization will help them in the decision making process or bore them and cause you to lose their focus. In most instances people like visualizations because it is more memorable. Use pie charts to show statistics, show them a demo of the product/service you are selling, give them some sort of visual that they can store in their mind. Without visuals, the prospect will create their own within their mind that may be a horrible comparison to what you are offering.
Communication can be 100% effective or ineffective. If you start investing time into learning these skills and perfecting this craft I can guarantee you will see a spike in your closing percentages.
To make improvements to your communication skills, set personal goals to work through the things you want to accomplish step by step. It might be helpful to consult with trusted colleagues, managers or mentors to identify which areas would be best to focus on first.