Being able to clearly and concisely communicate your needs and wants to others is an essential part of working in the corporate world. Whether you need to get help from a busy coworker or have to pitch a new project to upper management, understanding and engaging your audience will help maximize the positive response and get you the assistance you need.
Introductions and Benefits
Whether you are talking with a colleague you have known for years, or are striking up conversation with someone you just met at a company meeting, introductions and benefits are incredibly important. You need to be able to answer two questions: what and why.
The “what” is the idea that you are pitching. Create a short, clear and impactful statement to provide context to the discussion. This should be no longer than thirty seconds, and make sure to steer away from jargon or business vernacular that your audience might not be knowledgeable of, especially acronyms. Do not use any cliches and remove extraneous words that clog the message. Short and sweet is best.
The “why” pertains to who you are speaking to. You need to identify what your audience benefits from this and how it helps them. It can be achieved by understanding who you are speaking to, be it an individual, a team, the entire organization, or a third party or customer. Addressing what they will benefit within sixty seconds will help pull them in and want to assist you.
To answer what and why effectively, you can leverage the below tips for pulling your audience in, whether it is a single person or an entire company’s worth of employees within an auditorium.
- Establish accord through eye contact, smiling, and being open with your body language. If you are communicating with them online, make sure your wording is warm and welcoming.
- Know what you are going to say will help pace the conversation properly. You will want to lead with the main point (such as a news headline) and save the history for another conversation.
- Make the message distinct with statistics, humor, and examples to help the message stand out amongst others.
- Be enthusiastic because it is infectious. This will help you appear more credible and authentic, and be more compelling to draw others to listen to you.
- Limit distractions as much as you can. While some distractions are out of your control, make sure to limit any gestures you make while talking that could divert your audience’s attention. Be aware of any speech patterns you have that could also pull away the attention of who you are speaking to.
Provide Supporting Information
While you gather your supporting information, there are some questions you should keep in mind:
- What does your audience already know about the topic?
- What does your audience want/need and what are they trying to achieve?
- What are your audience’s values and passions?
- What concerns might your audience have?
These questions can guide the type of supporting information you provide. For instance, if there are concerns you can quell with showing data, or link how the project identifies with their wants and needs or what they want to achieve in the future. Leverage one of the following strategies to make it easier to structure the information.
Fulfill a Need
Connect to your audience through information that will be the most useful, where there are four strategies for this:
- Reason uses rational arguments, logic and facts, which speaks to critical business outcomes.
- Emotion can help trigger a deep response that inspires and sparks action through others.
- Values can create a strong connection to your proposal and also communicates a genuine understanding of what is important to the audience.
- Social proof appeals to the fact that most people want to be with the in crowd and aligned with success, so reference what others are doing in a way that supports your idea.
Paint a Picture
Images capture attention and help make complicated ideas easier to understand, and they will convey your wish to communicate clearly.
- Icons and symbols can be quick shortcuts to understanding.
- Photos, animations, and videos help tap into your audiences imagination and emotions. Even low quality images and video you take personally can have a greater impact than some stock photos that you find online.
- Visualize data helps make actionable sense from insights within charts, tables and graphs full of data.
Tell a Story
- The hero’s journey is a classic story in three parts: set up, confrontation and resolution. This describes an adventure where a protagonist encounters adversity and learns a lesson through failure or success.
- Cutting to the chase by starting with the problem. This can grab attention, highlight the stakes, and meets the needs of busy people by getting directly to the point.
- Analogies help breakdown a complex situation by comparing it to a similar, but simpler situation.
- Sharing a dialogue of what others have said about the problem that you are addressing with your proposal helps make it vivid.
Explore Responses, Address Worries, And Be Open To Different Approaches
Through exploring reactions, concerns and others ideas you are able to provide a platform for your audience to be heard, participate in your thinking and ultimately the outcome of the project. It can help you learn more and identify any blind spots that you may be missing. This is achieved through two steps: invite participation and acknowledge contributions.
Invite Participation
Getting your audience to participate can feel like pulling teeth, especially if you don’t believe they are engaged. Silence can be important, since it allows for others to sit with the material and fully digest it before making a comment or asking questions. Also be aware of non-verbal signs of uncertainty, confusion, discomfort, disagreement and concern; but don’t make assumptions from what you see. Ask questions to gauge why your audience reacted the way they did.
If you feel like the silence has dragged on for to long and you did not notice any negative reactions, then the best way to pull people back in is to ask open ended questions. Asking your audience directly what their thoughts are will help you understand how they are interpreting the proposal and their reactions.
And do not be resistant to any push backs or negativity from your audience. Resistance to your presentation means that your audience was engaged and felt enough that they are offering their perspective. This provides you an opportunity to understand and respond constructively to concerns, as well as involves your audience in the final solution.
Acknowledge Contribution
Whenever a member of your audience provides feedback, make sure to show that your value any questions, concerns and perspectives by acknowledging what they say. To show that you heard what they said, you can confirm their understanding of any concerns or perspectives by repeating it back to them and asking for confirmation that you understood.
You can also expand by asking for suggestions to address the issues and concerns raised by your audience. Through taking time to explore other ideas and validate the concerns raised, it helps your audience feel appreciated and heard, and helps with your audience to feel invested in the outcomes. And by exploring these ideas, you can find alternatives to your idea that could be more beneficial to all parties and better than the previous one you presented. You won’t know unless your entertain the ideas.
Collaborate On A Plan Of Action
In order for your efforts to be fruitful, collaborating with others is a necessity. But having a plan for moving forward is important for momentum to not be lost. In order to come up with a plan, there are some rules for what you should and shouldn’t do.
Don’t remove responsibility from yourself and expect for others to move your idea forward, or expecting others to know what to do with the information your provided. You need to continue championing your idea and push it forward. Using status or threats of escalation, as well as creating a sense of urgency are two things you should never do. Also, do not stall any action, or exaggerate the consequences of inaction.
Instead, what you should do is restate your objective, after allowing silence for your audience to digest your presentation and respond. You can also request a smaller or alternative commitment from the person. A small step in the right direction or a commitment for one of the alternative solutions found from the audience participation can build commitment and momentum. You can even leverage your relationships, either your long standing ones with coworkers you know, or even with the audience that you just spoke with, which can help overcome barriers and resistance.
Summarize Discussions And Specify Agreements And Next Steps
Summarize the approach that has been discussed and all agreements that have been reached. Make sure to specifically call out each action item and the responsible party overseeing it. Adding a time for when the action items are due, or having progressive follow ups to help busy people stay on track with what is needed to be completed for your proposal. And always express sincere appreciation for your audience, no matter what level of commitment or agreement was made. A simple thank you can go a long way.
Do you have any other tips and tricks that can help influence outcomes through others? Leave them in the comments below!
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