In a sales meeting, the kind of question least likely to put your listening skills to work is the closed question: “Are you concerned about costs?” That may sound like a substantive question, but when the customer answers “yes” or “no,” the conversation stops. Furthermore, it generates almost no information. That your customer is concerned about costs is meaningless. Who isn’t concerned about costs? “How have you been managing cost ...

The concept of executive presence has captured the imagination of the business press. When I did a Google search on the term, it came back with more than four hundred million hits. One of the search results was an article from Business Insider that suggests that the seven aspects of executive presence all begin with “c”: composure, connection, charisma, confidence, credibility, clarity, and conciseness. This may be a tour de ...

Think about your typical day at work. How much of it do you think is spent communicating in some way? A research study found that many of us actually spend up to 80-percent of our day engaged in some form of communication. Of this time, we spend approximately 9-percent of the day writing, 16-percent reading, 30-percent speaking, and a whopping 45-percent listening. Although listening is actually the most commonly used ...

A friend of mine, who has been collecting Social Security for three years now, says it has been an interesting experience to become part of the senior demographic. The telemarketing calls change, both in terms of the services the telemarketers are trying to sell you and in the assumptions they make about you. Last week, my friend got a call from someone who claimed to be concerned about his health. ...

In the 1970s, Albert Mehrabian, a communications scholar at UCLA, sparked a revolution in our understanding of presentation skills. His experiments showed that a listener's emotional response to a speaker's message had more to do with the speaker's facial expression and tone of voice than the actual words the speaker used. He expressed it as an equation: "Total Liking = 7% Verbal Liking + 38% Vocal Liking + 55% Facial ...

Have you ever attended a presentation and found yourself struggling to hear what the speaker was actually saying? He or she was probably very nervous about their speech. With public speaking skills being a necessary part of nearly all job positions in the world of business, how can you help boost your confidence levels when giving a presentation? Although it may not seem like it, voice projection is actually one ...

We can all recognize a great speech when we witness one, but if we are asked later what made the speech great, we are likely to simply describe our reaction to it or quote one of its catch phrases. Given excellent content, which is a subject for a different posting, there are three measures of a great speech. If you master these three measures, you are well on your way ...

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you have seen me write many times that persuasion is an emotional process. The way to persuade an audience is to find their pain and offer them relief for it. If they don’t feel the pain, it’s up to you to make them feel it. In a sales presentation, for example, if your product can save a customer a million dollars per ...