Tags |
|
|
Links |
|
|
Digg it UP - The Seven Essentials of Business Communication
Switching from petroleum to synthetic industrial lubricants is one of the most effective ways to cut manufacturing and production costs. Synthetic industrial lubricants have a proven track record of lowering energy costs as well as enhancing and prolonging equipment life. According to some studies, switching from petroleum to synthetic lubricants can cut production costs by 2%-8%, and there are some companies that are getting even better results.The benefits of using synthetics as industrial lubricants include:- lower operating temperatures for machinery- longer equipment life- lower energy costs- reduced waste- higher lubricant purityIn one specific case study, a cements manufacturer switched one air compressor from the mineral oil that they usually used for lubricating its parts to a synthetic industrial lubricant. The results were monitored by an independent monitoring agency in order to get a totally unbiased reading of the test. In the end, the company found that the use of the right lubricant reduced energy costs by 16%. As a result, the company decided to switch all of its air compressors over to using synthetic lubricants. The additional benefits included:- reduced energy consumption- annual energy savings of ?33,500- longer running times between oil drains, saving more money by reducing lubricant costs- reduced waste oil amountsBased on those figures, the study suggests that using the right industrial lubricants can help reduce energy inefficiency by about 33%. In other words, if a machine is operating at 85% efficiency, its inefficiency rating is 15%. Switching the lubricant used in the machine can raise its efficiency level to 90% efficiency – a 1/3 decrease in the inefficiency rating, from
Body
Here's where you get to the 'heart' of your message.
It is in the body of the message that you communicate all of your facts and figures relative to the action you want your communication's audience to take after attending to your message.
Keep your facts, figures and any graphs or charts you might present to the p
If you're old enough and were living in America about 30 years ago, you may remember the scandal in the motion picture industry known as "the Begelman affair" or "Hollywoodgate."A skillful analysis of the crisis that rocked Columbia Pictures, a leading company in its field, is presented by Steven Fink in his book, "Crisis Management: Planning for theInevitable." I am telling the tale over, but not for the sake of relating a "juicy" story (such pastimes being hardly something I care for).Rather, I believe there's a message for us here, primarily for business and professional people maybe, but also for husbands, wives, parents, educators - or mere "social animals". To paraphrase a popular saying, one real life case is worth a thousand sermons.At the time our story opens, Columbia Pictures was riding the crest of the wave. Just about everything - profits, stock prices, reputation - was moving in one direction: UP.For its president and CEO, Alan Hirschfield, things were looking pretty good, to say the least. He was loved by his family, admired by his peers, and respected by the thousands of employees under his command. He was very highly regarded in Wall Street. As for his material situation - well, comment is hardly necessary.His right-hand man, David Begelman, head of the Columbia studio, wasn't doing too badly either. As one of Hirschfields most trusted and highly compensated employees, he was said to bethe man who actually ran the company in many ways. And as subsequent events indicated, many of his colleagues and associates thought the world of him.Then the trouble started.In e
Structure
Clarity
Consistency
Medium
Relevancy
Primacy/Recency
Psychological Rule of 7±2
If you are going to communicate effectively in business it is essential that you have a solid grasp of these seven elements.
So let's look at each in turn...
1. STRUCTURE
How you structure your communication is fundamental to how easily it is absorbed and understood by your audience.
Every good communication should have these three structural elements:
an opening
a body
a close
This structural rule holds true no matter what your communication is -- a memo, a phone call, a voice mail message, a personal presentation, a speech, an email, a webpage, or a multi-media presentation.
Remember - your communication's audience can be just one person, a small team, an auditorium full of people or a national, even global, group of millions.
In this instance size doesn't matter -- the rules remain the same.
Opening
An opening allows your communication's audience to quickly understand what the communication is about.
Short, sharp and to the point, a good opening lets your audience quickly reach a decision of whether or not to pay attention to your message.
Time is a precious resource, after all, and the quicker you can 'get to the point' and the faster your audience can make that 'disregard/pay attention' decision the more positively they will view you --- which can be VERY important if you need or want to communicate with them in the future.
Body
Here's where you get to the 'heart' of your message.
It is in the body of the message that you communicate all of your facts and figures relative to the action you want your communication's audience to take after attending to your message.
Keep your facts, figures and any graphs or charts you might present to the po
Everyone wants to make a lot of money and help people. Many also do not want to be stuck inside the same office environment every working day. A sales career will be one of the best occupations to achieve all this. So it sometimes amazes me on the high number of people, especially recent university or college graduates, who never think about pursuing sales careers.Now, I’m not talking about your average shopping mall sales clerk job or door to door brush salesperson here. I’m referring to much higher level corporate sales positions that require extensive training and specific personal attributes. Many such corporate sales careers will involve mid to large sized companies that deal with business to business selling, i.e., sales to other companies rather than individual consumers.Pretty well all high ticket value items such as specialized machinery or equipment, business services or supplies and any products that require a long term selling process are corporate sales. This includes business done on an international basis as well. Rather than casual dress as seen with most typical retail sales staff, corporate sales usually require business attire and proper business communications. This is a level of sales job that your average teen or student will not be qualified for. In fact, many types of corporate selling positions such as those in pharmaceutical sales actually require university or college degrees as prerequisites.Some selling to retailers would also be considered corporate sales. There are high level sales in some select environments involving the individual consumer market such as with high end fashion and specialized services like insurance or real estate. People who work in high level sales whether business to business or business to consumer,
So let's look at each in turn...
1. STRUCTURE
How you structure your communication is fundamental to how easily it is absorbed and understood by your audience.
Every good communication should have these three structural elements:
an opening
a body
a close
This structural rule holds true no matter what your communication is -- a memo, a phone call, a voice mail message, a personal presentation, a speech, an email, a webpage, or a multi-media presentation.
Remember - your communication's audience can be just one person, a small team, an auditorium full of people or a national, even global, group of millions.
In this instance size doesn't matter -- the rules remain the same.
Opening
An opening allows your communication's audience to quickly understand what the communication is about.
Short, sharp and to the point, a good opening lets your audience quickly reach a decision of whether or not to pay attention to your message.
Time is a precious resource, after all, and the quicker you can 'get to the point' and the faster your audience can make that 'disregard/pay attention' decision the more positively they will view you --- which can be VERY important if you need or want to communicate with them in the future.
Body
Here's where you get to the 'heart' of your message.
It is in the body of the message that you communicate all of your facts and figures relative to the action you want your communication's audience to take after attending to your message.
Keep your facts, figures and any graphs or charts you might present to the p
In addition to knowing the difference between a lan and a laptop, to be a successful IT consultant, you need to have the personality traits that will permit you to work well with your clients, employees and vendors. Read on to evaluate if you have what it takes to be a successful IT consultant.IT Consultant Traits: Can You Exhibit Candor?You can’t be afraid to tell people the truth - even if it hurts. Be very confident, because if you aren’t, people are going to see right through it.You are going to need to come across as very confident when going out to networking, sales calls and even service calls. If you don't, people will sense fear and take advantage of it. It is very important that you work on displaying confidence.IT Consultant Traits: Can You Work With Uncertainty?You should be able to work with uncertainty; as a business owner, there really is no sure thing, ever. You can do some things to lessen the risk, but is impossible to eliminate all of the risk so you need to be able to cope with that and cope with a certain degree of uncertainty.IT Consultant Traits: Are You Decisive?You need to be able to know which battles are worth fighting. There is a lot of things that are going to come up with clients, especially long time clients, that will get on your nerves. You are going to have to take a couple steps back in your mind and figure out is this something worth fighting for or if you should just let it roll off your back.At the other extreme, you are going to have to figure which prospects, are completely wasting your time and which clients have gone bad. Which are becoming time vampires and sucking all your blood, your energy? You need to be decisive enough to recognize that and take action. You also need to be abl
This structural rule holds true no matter what your communication is -- a memo, a phone call, a voice mail message, a personal presentation, a speech, an email, a webpage, or a multi-media presentation.
Remember - your communication's audience can be just one person, a small team, an auditorium full of people or a national, even global, group of millions.
In this instance size doesn't matter -- the rules remain the same.
Opening
An opening allows your communication's audience to quickly understand what the communication is about.
Short, sharp and to the point, a good opening lets your audience quickly reach a decision of whether or not to pay attention to your message.
Time is a precious resource, after all, and the quicker you can 'get to the point' and the faster your audience can make that 'disregard/pay attention' decision the more positively they will view you --- which can be VERY important if you need or want to communicate with them in the future.
Body
Here's where you get to the 'heart' of your message.
It is in the body of the message that you communicate all of your facts and figures relative to the action you want your communication's audience to take after attending to your message.
Keep your facts, figures and any graphs or charts you might present to the p
So it’s been a while since you’ve played house or made art out of macaroni noodles—that doesn’t mean that you aren’t creative! With effort and continued practice, ANYONE can be creative, and ANYONE can use this creativity to set their company and product apart from their competitors.“Why is creativity so important?”Being creative means continually presenting yourself and your company in new and interesting ways, and enticing customers in a way that your competition can’t duplicate (if you’re good, they’ll try).Creativity is one of the strongest and most valuable traits you can have as a salesperson, because it increases your value within your company and among your customers. It is that value that will change you from an average salesperson to a superb salesperson. That distinction will make it easy for customers to choose who to do business with—you!“How can I be creative?”There are countless venues in sales for you to display and expand your creativity:1.) Think of original questions to engage your prospects.2.) Discover innovative marketing strategies like cooperative marketing and guerrilla marketing to boost your sales and increase your source of leads.3.) Develop unique problem solving skills to effectively help your customers with products.4.) Illustrate how valuable you and your company are with attractive presentations.5.) Capture attention with memorable voicemail messages, charming emails and appealing fax cover sheets.“Where do I start?”Start small and remember that it takes continuous practice to be consistently creative in sales.Set a goal to have a daily ‘idea quota’. Begin by aiming for one new idea
An opening allows your communication's audience to quickly understand what the communication is about.
Short, sharp and to the point, a good opening lets your audience quickly reach a decision of whether or not to pay attention to your message.
Time is a precious resource, after all, and the quicker you can 'get to the point' and the faster your audience can make that 'disregard/pay attention' decision the more positively they will view you --- which can be VERY important if you need or want to communicate with them in the future.
Body
Here's where you get to the 'heart' of your message.
It is in the body of the message that you communicate all of your facts and figures relative to the action you want your communication's audience to take after attending to your message.
Keep your facts, figures and any graphs or charts you might present to the p
So often in the cleaning business chemicals are not stored properly and neither are the empty containers which conveniently leak, mix with rain water and tip over and soak into the ground surrounding the building and seep into the ground water causing environmental issues; you know like three legged frogs and such. Now mind you I am not an environmentalist, but I do know a thing or two about environmental pollution and lots about the cleaning industry and business, especially on the service sector side of things.You see for years I ran a mobile pressure washing business, which we built up and franchised into 23 states. One thing I would always do is scout out the competition to see if they posed a threat to our franchisees and our forward progress in the market place. I would often visit their facilities and was usually taken aback at their lack of caring for the environment, plastic drums and steel barrels of containers left littered around the property with weeds growing between them.I will tell you that the problem is about 60% of the operators out there and in all the sub sectors from the 49,000 car washes to the 55,000 small businesses doing pressure washing and the 150,000 doing janitorial businesses; this is a huge thing and a real problems. Imagine the cancer risks to the workers and employees, which is the biggest concern people talk about. Someday someone ought to figure out what to do and organize the abatement of noxious compounds and chemicals in the Cleaning Business to prevent all these mini-eco-disasters. Consider all this in 2006.
Body
Here's where you get to the 'heart' of your message.
It is in the body of the message that you communicate all of your facts and figures relative to the action you want your communication's audience to take after attending to your message.
Keep your facts, figures and any graphs or charts you might present to the point. Don't bog down your audience with irrelevant material, or charts with confusing, illegible numbers and colours.
--SIDE BAR--
There's a key to rapid uptake of your message -- KISS.
Pitch your presentation's graphics at a grade seven child. If THEY can follow and understand them, chances are good that your audience will too.
--END SIDE BAR--
Close
The Close is where you sum up your communication, remind your audience of your key points, and leave them with a clear understanding of what you want them to do next.
The more powerfully you can end your communication, the more easily remembered it will be by your audience.
2. CLARITY
Be clear about the messaqe you want to deliver, as giving a confused message to your audience only ends up with them being confused and your message being ignored.
If you are giving a message about, say, overtime payments don't then add in messages about detailed budget issues or the upcoming staff picnic -- UNLESS they ABSOLUTELY fit in with your original message.
It's far better and clearer for your audience if you create a separate communication about these ancilliary issues.
3. CONSISTENCY
Nothing more upsets a regular reader of, say, your newsletter than inconsistency of your message.
Taking a position on an issue one week, only to overturn it the next, then overturn THAT position the following week, only breeds distrust in your message.
And distrust in you!
People who distrust you are exceedingly unlikely to take the action you wish them to take. They are also highly unlikely to pay any attention to your future messages.
As well as consistency amongst multiple messages, be aware that inconsistency within your
HTTP = HTML link (for blogs, profiles,phorums):
<a href="http://www.diggitup.net/article/24662/diggitup-The-Seven-Essentials-of-Business-Communication.html">The Seven Essentials of Business Communication</a>
BB link (for phorums):
[url=http://www.diggitup.net/article/24662/diggitup-The-Seven-Essentials-of-Business-Communication.html]The Seven Essentials of Business Communication[/url]
Related Articles:
Digital Mass Flow Control Accessories
Corporate Flight Attendant Resource Guide
Recruiting The Best Franchisee Team Member Candidates
Bookmark it:
|