How to Get Your Ideas Across, Side Two (Part Two)

By Jason Stewart  - March 3, 2008

Finishing Up My Education in Business Communication, Circa 1970

Here are the last two tracks from the album I discovered in my archives, A Nations Business 'Executive Seminar in Sound' -- How to Get Your Ideas Across. You can read about the first side here, and the first part of the second side here.

Band Seven: Operation Communication
Scene - While golfing with a subordinate, super boss complains about  a communication breakdown at the office, and how his 3 iron is suffering as a result. While at home later going over his game, he has an epiphany about how  people are sometimes different from him and do not always  have the same priorities that he does. He immediately begins to open up dialogues with all of his managers about their responsibilities, priorities, hopes, and dreams.  Once he starts communicating with his team, his golf game immediately improves.

Here are the highlights from the back cover:

 
• Recognize when company communicatons are going sour and how it can foul up the lines of authority and responsibility   
 
• Take the corrective measure of listing project priorities, and comparing your list to your boss or your colleagues
 
• Take the corrective measure of reviewing (from top to bottom for bosses and supervisors) responsibilities, authority, accountability and objectives
 
• Compare your priority list to your boss, and don’t be surprised when they are not the same -- as well as your responsibility list

I've talked a bit before about this...the obvious yet hard to grasp notion that other people describe things differently than you do. It is  not limited to your job description, it can apply to your whole marketing strategy.

At my last employer we had an outside consultant do an  unscientific survey of  customers, as well as prospects who went  far in the sales cycle but did not buy. When asked how they would describe our product and the problems we helped them solve, they all had different answers -- and their answers were often very different from the way we ourselves described our product. Sometimes drastically so. Does this make them wrong? Of course not. It meant we were in a rut. 

When the same small group of people are batting around ideas for an extended period, it becomes very easy to lose site of the fact that people outside your group may see things differently than you. Assumptions are made,  like how everyone you are trying to sell to is going to understand all of the acronyms and classifications and shorthand that your team uses. This is never the case. Without fail, they have their own set of terms and descriptions that they use within their group...so while you are technically talking about exactly the same thing, you  not speaking the same language.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in marketing is thinking that if someone doesn't understand your messaging, than they are not a prospect or target for your goods or services.  The truth of the matter is that if you have trouble describing your product to someone outside your industry, you need to go back to the drawing board.

Band Eight:  The Stand-Up Speech
The skits were not as memorable for this part, which offered some very straightforward advice on how to be a more sucessful public speaker. Here are the points from the back cover:

 
• Self confidence is usually a myth, everyone gets nervous so don't feel bad about it
 
• Overcome fear and nervousness with direct action and preparation
 
• Use nervous energy and direct it into enthusiasm and animation
 
• Practice what you have researched, written and rewritten, live with your speech.
 
• The four major steps in preparing a speech are: planning, organizing, developing, practicing
 
• Be colorful, direct and brief in your speech delivery

One of the best tutorials I have seen on public speaking is still available in  ON24's library of archived webcasts. Ken Molay from Webinar Success delivers a webcast called Improving Your Webcasting Presentation Skills and talks about tips and tricks for structuring an effective presentation, common errors that drive your audience crazy, effective audience interaction techniques and more. It is designed for use with webinars and webcasting, but is very applicable to all forms of public speaking. You can access it directly here.

The best piece of advice on public speaking from the album actually comes from Mark Twain. Understand that everyone gets nervous about public speaking, and "...just remember, they don’t expect very much.”