May 17th, 2012
Are you someone who any mention of speaking in public brings you out in a cold sweat wanting to hide in the furthest corner of the room? If so, don’t worry! You are not alone. It’s very common. So common in fact there’s a word for it; Glossophobia. (The word Glossophobia comes from the Greek glōssa, meaning tongue and phobos, fear or dread.) And you are one of millions of people who suffer from it
Symptoms of Glossophobia prior to delivering a speech or simply at the thought of having to verbally communicate with any group vary. Symptoms can be mild anxiety, slightly sweaty palms through to severe physical symptoms with people experiencing nausea or feelings of panic.
For most individuals speaking in public is not a natural talent and nerves before a speech are experienced by many people. We’ve worked with many very senior, even public figures that experience significant issues in dealing with their nerves. Indeed the Duchess of Cambridge was reported to be racked with nerves before her first public speech last month. (Sadly she’s not one of our clients!!)
One of the things we encounter that is sad and frustrating is to see, is people who don’t get the credit for their ideas, acknowledgement of their expertise, or don’t persuade and influence on the things they want to change because they always back out of actually presenting their expertise and speaking about those ideas. All is not lost however. Like many phobias there are things you can do to alleviate your anxieties. There is support out there to help you to manage your fears so that you can step up to the stage when the occasion demands it.
There are 2 ways of looking at handling nerves physical and psychological. In a physical sense it’s about using relaxation techniques and releasing tension to rid your body of the tension it’s holding and to make you feel physically better. Breathing is critical, slow deep breaths from the stomach (not just from the upper chest) are crucial both for their calming effect and for good quality vocal projection.
From a psychological perspective it’s about taking control of the negative self talk in your head and replacing it with more positive and confident messages to yourself. People achieve this by using things like visualisation techniques, repeated positive affirmations and using upbeat or calming music to affect their thoughts, feeling and state of mind.
Whilst presenting may not come naturally to an individual, anyone with the correct help and support can acquire the skills needed to present in public. Presenting, like all skills in life needs to be taught and practiced. While some people have natural ability and others find Glossophobia dogging their presentations, everyone benefits from developing the key skills so their speeches and presentations are remembered for all the right reasons.
If ‘Glossophobia’ is holding you back from stepping up to the stage and making your voice heard, don’t sit back, go out and find the support that will allow you speak up, speak out and get the credit and influence you deserve.
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May 4th, 2012
I admit I know very little about the game of football, I can’t claim to regularly support a team and my knowledge is limited to when England play on the world stage. Up until yesterday I had very little knowledge about the man who now has the unenviable task of leading England to victory. His new role now means that everyone in the UK will know he is and will have an opinion on his abilities.
The appointment of the Roy Hodgson will be analysed at great length by football pundits. However for people like me our opinions of his abilities will be coloured by how we view his performance in front of the camera.
To bring together the team he will need to be an excellent communicator. Effective communication within the England Camp will impact on their performance on the pitch as much as their skill in passing the ball.
Whilst most people when they get their dream job or receive promotion to a key role at work won’t face the same scrutiny as an England Manager, their colleagues at work and in the industry will be judging their performance. And like the England Manager, their opinion will be based on how they present their message as much as what they do.
Often promotion to a key role may mean that an individual is required to present in front of the boardroom or at a conference for the first time. In the current economic climate people are not given any allowances to being new to the role. Therefore if communication and presentation skills are not natural to you, receiving a few hours coaching in these areas will pay dividends.
I am sure Roy Hodgson is currently receiving a crash course in presenting his message.
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April 16th, 2012
Collective and extensive A.D.D. (attention deficit disorder) is defintely a huge phenomenon in business!
In the fast pace of today’s business world people are finding it increasingly
difficult to focus and concentrate for any length of time. If you need evidence of this, next time you go to a meeting or presentation, time how long it is before somebody gets their phone/ Blackberry/ iphone out and texts/ emails / reads it !
How then do you deal with that when you’re tasked with delivering a 20 minute plus presentation? or you want to explain something in a meeting that takes more than a few minutes?
In the immortal words of Bananarama (the original girl band!)……..
“it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it”.
Holding an audience’s attention (in a meeting or presentation) is not really about WHAT you’re saying, its more about how you say it. This comes as a bit of a blow for many who spend all their time and energy on the 75 slide deck that captures WHAT they want to say.
To hold people’s attention, you need to distil down the content of WHAT you want to communicate until you can capture it’s absolute essence.Then you need to think about HOW you communicate that essence. Can you get your message across in an entertaining and engaging way, rather than just downloading the bare facts onto your audience. For example, can you use relevant stories, jokes or analogies that illustrate and dramatise your key points?
So here’s the essence…
The difference between a sound presenter and a great presenter, is someone who commands attention by giving at least as much attention to the HOW as the WHAT of their message.
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March 15th, 2012
Have you ever wondered what would be the best three things that you could do to make your presentation even better? Watch the first of a series of short videos on how to avoid some of the most common pitfalls when public speaking
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vl7Q4ruRnzY
Watch this space for more videos, including How to Handle Nerves and Creating Impact.
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March 6th, 2012
With all the bad press about young people, dysfunctional hoodies and disruptive “youffs”, what a joy it was to be the chair of the judges at the Rotary “Youth Speaks” district finals in Wheathampstead last week.
The young people were self possessed confident, passionate and sincere. They spoke about a range of thoughtful, even philosophical topics such as “The image of young people”, “Wishes” and “Olympic spirit”. … Oh that the Daily Mail would come and make headlines out of that !!
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January 27th, 2012
I’m old enough to remember the spitting image character of John Major as a terminally dull, grey bureaucrat whose peak of dinner party conversational sparkle was a commentary on the nature of peas.
I went to a conference this week with a number of speakers from Government and various quango’s and frankly I have to say their speaking skills did nothing to dispel the image of the grey bureaucrat!
Where shall I start? There was so much! But as an advocate of the less is more approach and the rule of three, here goes:~
Volume;
Despite microphone support and not a vast auditorium I could barely hear some of the speakers. Their lack of volume made for very apologetic tones that lacked energy and authority. I don’t encourage people to shout at their audiences but on a scale of 1-10, where audible is at about 5-6 is most of these speakers were at 5. This is not where you want to be if you want to sound confident and authoritative. A presentation is not a conversation. To come across well, even with a microphone you need to project and fill the room with a pleasant, “easy listening sound”. It’s the only way to grab and retain audience engagement.
Unbelievably dull slides!
Text,text,text,text and more text . Typically people presented 10-15 slides for a 20 minute slot, of which 90% were text, of which over half had 90 or more words on the slide. Power Point is NOT YOUR SCRIPT! In this multi media age surely people know this by now..? Which part of “VISUAL aid” are they not getting? FYI… slapping a logo in the corner does not count! And if you’re just going to write your script up on a slide, why not just send it to your audience to read and save all the time and effort of being there?
Poor use of data
The guys from the DfE (Department for Education) and DWP (Department of Works and Pensions) were on mission to feed us facts. So many facts that a minute or two into their presentations I felt the “drinking from a fire hose “sensation, overwhelming me. I’m quite sure there must have been a costly Royal commission that took 3 years to deliver its report and cost £3 million that definitively proved the inverse relationship between facts and audience interest, i.e. the more you bombard people with facts the faster they lose the will to live! A few, well chosen facts that are highly relevant to a cogent argument.. Great … but slide after slide of impenetrable graphs that they didn’t have time or inclination to explain and you didn’t have time to work out, was indeed death by PowerPoint .
So if you don’t want to seem like the dullest of dull, grey, governmental speakers then at least avoid theses 3 presentation pitfalls!
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November 23rd, 2011
In business nothing happens until or unless a customer buys something. So in the most successful organisations everyone is focused on sales (or put another way, on satisfying the needs of the customer)
Each year Miller Heiman, a global sales effectiveness consultancy carry out a worldwide survey of what the most effective sales and commercial organisations do and how that differs from what “The Rest” do!
Three of the areas they cover are:
- Customer knowledge
- Flexibility
- Discipline
Customer Knowledge and Understanding
Successful selling is critical because customers don’t buy products or services, they buy what the products and services can do for them. They buy solutions to their problems or answers to their needs. You don’t own a hammer because it’s an aesthetically pleasing, rather that it will enable you to fix and build things. Deep customer understanding is essential because then you’ll know their needs and work out which of your products / services you can use to solve their problems. You don’t know how to sell to your customers until you fully understand them.
Deep understanding enables you to anticipate customer needs and potentially gain competitive advantage. Henry Ford once said “If I had asked people what they wanted they would have said faster horses”. Fortunately for us and the automotive industry Ford thought a bit more broadly about how he could satisfy his customer’s need for speed!
What do world class sales organisations do? Miller Heiman looks at a number of metrics on business results to determine who are the best performing sales organizations, like client retention, volume and profitability, growth. They then compare the answers that people from those organizations give to everyone else in the survey. So 97% of world class organisations know definitively why their customers buy from them vs. only 65% of the rest and 90% of the top organisations say their sales people have a solid understanding of customer vs. 46% of the rest.
Understanding customer needs and framing your “pitch” around it is critical to success.
Flexibility
It’s not always easy to meet or exceed customer needs – you have to be prepared to be flexible. Not just sales people; potentially your whole organisation.
Customer expectations have grown and one size no longer fits all. You used to go to a coffee shop and your choice was black or white. In Starbucks now you can get whatever you personally want. If you buy a computer from Dell you get to specify the machine, the RAM, ROM, processor speed, type of motherboard etc. Increasingly customers require this degree of tailoring.
Organisations which succeed in creating cost effective, flexible solutions for their customers are the ones that ensure all functions have a great focus on the customer. To achieve that usually requires some kind of cross functional, virtual account teams or great alignment.
What about the world class sales organisations? 90% of them say that their organisation structure allows them to easily adapt to customers’ needs compared with only 34% of the others.
90% of the world class sales organisations say they are fully aligned with marketing and they are twice as likely to collaborate across departments as “the rest”
Discipline
Although it seems a contradiction in terms to talk about flexibility and discipline in the same breath, in successful sales organisations that’s not true. Managing sales people can be like trying to herd cats, but often characteristics of good sales people are that they are independent, a bit feisty and entrepreneurial in their approach. Do you really want a sales person that would rather sit in the office than hit the road and go see a customer?
But the environment in which most of us work and sell is increasingly a highly dynamic, sophisticated and complex environment and it is not effective to sell in those circumstances with “back of a fag packet” approach to planning. You cannot co-ordinate effectively with cross functional colleagues if you don’t have a degree of structure in place.
So successful selling organisations need to have clearly defined processes and selling methodologies, that facilitate rigorous planning, co-ordination and disciplined execution of core business processes like new business development and account management.
This is not CRM. What sales organisations need is a clear definition of WHAT needs to be done. CRM represents the HOW. Many organisations seem to think that CRM software will improve their sales performance.
76% of World class sales organisations consistently use comprehensive prospecting plans compared to only 19% of the rest. 77% have a formal process for top (executive) selling compared to only 19% of the rest.
So are we taking a disciplined and rigorous approach to our core sales processes? And if not how can we achieve that?
If this best practice research is interesting to you, there’s a copy of the executive summary available to download on our website World Class Sales 2011
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October 15th, 2011
Steve Jobs’ death has certainly caused the world to reflect on his brilliant career as a technology innovator but we should also remember that he was a brilliant communicator.
What lessons can we take from Jobs that can help you as a communicator and speaker?
Jobs had developed his own, very distinctive style that appeared cool, and laid back but at the same time highly polished. He knew how to create impact by keeping it simple. He had an amazing ability to speak with passion and make his ideas understandable and memorable through telling stories and demonstrations.
His Stanford commencement speech in 2005 was a classic and now very poignant example of how he did this.
Jobs Commencement speech
He was quite understated and his speech was simply based on three stories, personal stories from his life, with which he imparted some very powerful messages to the young people he was addressing and indeed to the wider world audience.
He kept it simple with his message and his graphics. He only focused on one idea at a time and did not muddle what he was saying by having busy PowerPoint slides behind him. His slides were simple and elegant .Jobs hardly ever used words on his slides; he let the image paint the picture and reinforced it with stories.
Jobs never let the fact that he was a techie and generally speaking to a tech audience turn his speeches stale with an overload of jargon and unnecessary complexity. In an age of information overload he knew how to create a clear signal that cut straight through all the noise. He knew that he needed to connect on a human level and speak about what a normal person really wanted out of a product rather than just reciting lists of impressive specs and stats.
His stagecraft was also simple. He usually worked with quite a bare, empty stage, not a fancy corporate set. That way he ensured audience focus was fixed on him and his message. The way Jobs walked around the stage freely, comfortably and relaxed is a lesson that everyone should learn and follow. You never saw him stationary, or with a death grip on a lectern like so many other corporate presenters!
Finally, and this is a lesson everyone should follow, Jobs rehearsed his speeches. You may think looking and sounding relaxed may have come naturally for him but he put in days and hours into rehearsing for every major speech and product launch. Simplicity and clarity are a function of hard work, or as Mark Twain put it, “I would have written you a short letter but I didn’t have time”.
So while much of what history will write about Steve Jobs will focus on his technology innovation and business skills let’s not forget that a large part of his legacy is that of a great communicator from whom we can all learn.
Posted in Communication, LESS is MORE, speech | No Comments »
September 8th, 2011
This is probably a familiar refrain to any parent – I found myself saying this to my children this very weekend. Perhaps children have always been poor listeners where their parents are concerned but it’s also an interesting question for managers – how many times should you have to say something to your peers, colleagues and staff so they actually listen, understand and respond in the way you want them to?
In the miasma of modern communication, (email, instant messaging, text, skype, etc, etc.) how do you make your message, your request, your requirement heard ? The answer apparently is repetition, repetition, repetition! Orators and public speakers have long known that subtle repetition of your key message is the way to be memorable and to influence your audience. Advertisers too, know the value of repetition. Their statistics show that we typically need to see or hear an advert 8 times before we remember a brand name, much less what it is or does.
In business however I frequently hear managers saying in an exasperated voice, ”I don’t understand why it hasn’t happened; I told them to do it”. Many seem to think that telling people, issuing an instruction or request ought to be enough to get things done. “Why don’t people just do as they are asked, it’s so tiring and wasteful to have to repeat yourself all the time”. Well perhaps it is, perhaps people should respond first time but the reality is, they don’t. People in business are drowning in data, information, demands, requests and instructions. The few I come across that are not working 60 + hour weeks and handling 100+ emails a day and constant phone calls are the lucky few, the exception to the rule. Most people I encounter are, to a greater or lesser extent, swamped. Against this backdrop it’s not really surprising that people often don’t respond to requests and instructions as well or as promptly as would be ideal.
SO, if you want to be effective you need to work with this reality rather than fight it or rail against it not being “right”. Some interesting research has recently shown that often managers who work with a virtual team, i.e. with people who don’t actually report to them but work in some form of matrix structure are frequently more effective than line managers at getting things done. The reason? because whereas line managers have an expectation that when they ask for something it will be done by their subordinates, managers working in a matrix structure don’t have these expectations and hence they make a much greater effort when it comes to communication. They proactively plan to communicate a message several times in several different ways. They recognise that to get things done it’s not just about clarity of message but also about making your presence felt. They know that one request won’t be enough so typically they might send an email and follow it up by a call or meeting and then follow it up again. Although line managers, especially senior managers can command more attention from their subordinates, the truth is that even they need to “over communicate”. The research suggests that this multiple communication approach is the way to be effective in 21st century business.
So how do you communicate for maximum effectiveness?
You might not like it, it might seem counter intuitive but the research suggests you need to expect to have to communicate one message / communication several times using different channels and different media if you want to guarantee an effective response.
For further insights, click here to read an article from Harvard Business Review.
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August 4th, 2011
In the late sixth century, Pope Gregory described the seven deadly sins from the least serious to the most; they are pride, envy, anger, avarice, sadness, gluttony, and lust.
What do you think are the seven deadly sins of salespeople? Here’s my list, in order of least to most severe.
Ego centricity. Sales people are often too focused on themselves, their bonus, their company, and their products. True success in sales is actually about deep knowledge of the customer, their company, their products their issue sand opportunities. Customer centricity. When you really know that, then it’s about finding a good fit between what you have to offer and what the customer needs.
Chattering. Salespeople talk too much. They do this for a variety of reasons. Some are nervous chatterers who just can’t keep their mouths shut. Others think they know more than the customer so they lecture the customer to death. Many salespeople feel compelled to recite their canned pitch regardless of the customer’s actual interest. Successful selling is more about listening than talking.
Shortsightedness. Salespeople must be short-term thinkers and long-term planners. A short-sighted sales person neglects the future and does not spend time on activities that build his future pipeline. Short sightedness is not to be confused with laziness. Many hardworking salespeople are completely focused on the here and now. Unfortunately, they forget about next quarter and next year. Other salespeople never really think about what will happen if their big deal collapses. They have been lulled into a state of inactivity and could be jolted into reality at any moment.
Tunnel Vision. Many salespeople don’t take the time to understand how customers wider business and business structure. I am continually amazed at the narrow approach many salespeople have about understanding the organisational structure of the companies they call on. When they are asked what a person’s title is, they will answer, “manager,” or something equally nebulous, when they should answer, “manager of application security who reports to the director of application development, who, in turn, reports to the CIO.”
Shallowness. Salespeople who don’t know their product or their market well enough to build customer credibility cannot be expected to drive account strategy. How can you determine your next course of action if you don’t understand the customer’s needs and questions? Worse, in this situation you are completely at the mercy of someone else because another member of your company has to explain how your product works.
Presumptuousness. Assuming information you really don’t know is one of the worst sins for a salesperson. Salespeople who are not certain but make their best guess about who the ultimate and final decision maker is within an account are more than halfway to losing the deal. In the style of Donald Rumsfeld, known unknowns are a good thing! The best people always work on fact and where they don’t know they make hypothesis and verify them.
Ignorance. In sales, ignorance is not bliss. It is the deadliest sin. It’s challenging to be deeply knowledgeable if you’re on the outside looking in. To be truly expert you need a “coach” You need a contact within an account who is telling you what is happening in closed-door meetings, defending you when you are not around, and disseminating propaganda on your behalf. Without this you will most certainly lose.
Your success is your responsibility. The salesperson who avoids committing these seven deadly sins is well on his or her way to becoming a truly great salesperson.
Patricia Seabright consults and teaches on sales effectiveness for clients across the world. Her success is based on her successful 20 year track record in sales and selling. She is a Miller Heiman consultant.
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