The importance of communication in business Archives

Sales

The Value of CRM for Small Business Owners

If you’ve ever managed leads in Excel, kept track of follow-ups in your inbox, and saved customer notes on sticky pads, congratulations. You’ve built a CRM ...

Leadership

Why Your Best People Are Quietly Disengaging (And the 3 Conversations That Fix It)

A recent Inc. Magazine article by Bruce Crumley highlights groundbreaking NBER research revealing a surprising truth: minor, unintended slights can significantly impact employee performance, increasing absenteeism ...

Sales

What It Really Takes to Earn the Title “Trusted Advisor”

Everyone Wants the Title — Few Earn It “Trusted Advisor.”You see it everywhere — on websites, LinkedIn headlines, and business cards. But here’s the truth: it’s ...

Leadership

Leverage Your Voice for More Success

Do you want to sell more? Do you want to land the job? Do you want your team to perform better? Then pay attention to ...

Business Culture

Why Stuff Isn’t Getting Done: Or What Does Your Team Need to Know?

If you are the leader, it is incumbent on you to get your message across. You need to own it if it falls on deaf ears. This isn’t very hard. It requires you to slow down just a bit and to think through:

Business Culture

Did You Give Them Permission to Do That Terrible Thing?

This is not always easy, but you can create a culture of candor and accountability. You do it through practice and habit. When you understand the psychology, structure, and cadence of communication, you can leverage this to drive performance.

Business Culture

Burnout is not always a people problem… Sometimes it’s the organization.

Google “burnout” and you will find 85.6 million opinions on it. Most of which will say something like: Take a break Try Yoga Drink less ...

Leadership

Four Things that Hold Emerging Leaders Back

The very thing that gets high performers promoted into leadership can be the limiter in their behavior as a leader. The drive to achieve, to be a pace setter, is what gets producers noticed and considered for promotion. But a constant drive for achievement without the human connection can damage team performance.

Communication

Want Motivated Employees? Here are Five Ideas.

There are things you can do right now that will motivate, inspire, and engage your team. Here are five ideas.

Business Culture

Can You Handle the Truth About Your Business

Almost every leader I speak with says they would like more clarity and candor from their teams. Yet, people resist. Why? Some common concerns are: Candor ...

Communication / Leadership

What Good is an Idea If You Can’t Communicate It?

When we say what we want to say or send the email we want to send without considering its impact on the other party, we can be damaging productivity and/or the performance of the team.

Communication

From Paralyzed to Motivated with Communication

The alternative is to leverage the languages and behaviors of trust to inspire and cultivate teams.

Leadership

Think your organization is on board with you? Think again.

Your ability as a leader to stand in front of the room and articulate with confidence, and transparency you message can determine buy in from the organization.

Leadership

Superior Results With the Alignment Conversation

It takes more than a strategy session to create alignment, it is an ongoing conversation called The Alignment Conversation. Who cares about alignment? You should! 65% ...

Business Culture / Communication

The Role of Communication and Culture

In my corporate career I was with a firm that acquired 22 brands and tried to consolidate them into one. Think about that 22 distinct companies, ...

Communication

Does She Have Stage Fright? – Yes, And It Doesn’t Matter

As a communication and leadership coach, I often work with people of have to give a presentation in front of others and they are afraid. They ...

Management

That Difficult Conversation – How to have a Feedback Conversation

I often hear from client managers that feedback is difficult because employees don’t want to hear it. And I hear from team members that they don’t ...

Leadership

Can Meaning Create Team Engagement?

One of the biggest drivers for employee engagement and performance is that they find meaning in their work. Yet for some jobs it might be hard ...

Leadership

Five Signs You Might Be a Bad Boss

You can’t control your emotions As a leader, your emotional tone sets the tone for your team. If you are frustrated, your team is in all ...

Communication / Sales

But, I hate Small talk

Get over it. Small talk is a way to create social cohesion. Think back to the last time you went into a meeting where the other ...

Communication

Whats the cost of not listening” Trillion$

I had the opportunity to listen to a TED presentation titled “Want to Help Someone: Shut Up and Listen”, by Ernesto Sirolli. He was speaking about the challenges he had when he first started working in developing countries distributing aid and “helping” people develop crops and businesses. He could not understand why; for example, the natives would not plant gardens. His team would demonstrate and the crops would ...

Communication / Sales

It is all in the details

When making a sales call or presentation, how do you respond when people ask you, how you do what you do, or how you help others”? Do you say something like:

We outperform the industry average, OR we average a 16.94% recovery rate and that out performs the industry average as reported by the ACA by almost 70%.

Which response leaves you wanting to know more?

I am ...

Communication / Sales

Can you sell from your cell?

The other day I called a software company to discuss an upgrade to their service offering that I purchase. They passed me though two lead "qualifiers (b"ad move guys) and then told me "a sales person will call you back".

Brooke called me back from her mobile phone in an area that had a poor signal. Literally every other sentence was dropped. I finally told her to call me from a land-line. What did she do? She moved to a new location ...