Dynamic Communication

27 Strategies to Grow, Lead, and Manage Your Business

Jill Schiefelbein

• Publisher: Entrepreneur Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781613083659
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

When Good Communication Skills Aren't Enough Telling the story of your business is about more than writing grammatically correct proposals and emails or speaking to investors without using "ums" and "uhs." To get your message across, you have to fi nd a dynamic way to reach your vast audience of stakeholders, consumers, and competitors. Business communication expert Jill Schiefelbein shows you how, delivering an education on how to build a communication-savvy business that retains employees, secures investors, and increases your bottom line.Taking a page from the playbooks of 27 successful companies, entrepreneurs, and brands like Southwest Airlines, the Truth Initiative, Avocados from Mexico, Convince & Convert's Jay Baer, and primetime television host and speaker Jeffrey Hayzlett, you'll learn how to:

• Apply the four-stage listening matrix to drive your audience to action
• Use sales call outlines that facilitate buy-in to avoid death by sales script
• Create value-filled, magnetic marketing that educates and attracts buyers
• Add value to your products and services with videos and webinars
• Develop persuasive presentations with the TEMPTaction modelSo grab a highlighter, get a pen, or sharpen a pencil and start crafting your communication strategy today.

PART

I

The Bare Basics

Things You Need to Understand About Communication

CHAPTER

1

What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You

Perceptions and Reality

Before you even think about selling, you need to know what your potential clients and customers know, or think they know.

If you read the introduction, you understand where noise fits into the communication landscape and how damaging it can be to your strategic efforts. In the current economy, we are inundated with information (and misinformation). This is noise that can impact your communication strategy.

There is more information accessible today than at any point in recorded history. I, personally, think that is a good thing. I’m a fan of being able to access information. But with great power comes great responsibility. The problem with the amount of available information is that people are conflating information with knowledge. I call this the knowledge gap, and it’s bigger now than ever. Acknowledging that this gap exists, though, is the first step to understanding how to communicate through the noise.

Let’s take a deeper look at the knowledge gap and how it presents both challenges and opportunities to entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial thinkers.

The Knowledge Gap

With the number of websites nearing a billion, and search volume reaching more than 50,000 searches per second, the world is inundated with information and the ability to access it.

The phrase “information at your fingertips” is even outdated, as voice searching and commands increase our ability to search and retrieve information on any subject.

What this presents to our society, and to your business economy, is an employee, public, and consumer base that can view as much information about you and your company as you can. But, as we are aware, not all information published is accurate. And simply reading something does not mean that you know something.

There is a widening gap between information and knowledge. The gap itself isn’t the problem; it’s that people confuse information for knowledge. When people mistake information for knowledge, they often make decisions based on misreported or misrepresented data, or from only a small spectrum of information that they’ve retrieved. A key example of how this often plays out? Media.

The media perpetuates the information and knowledge gap when it reports only part of the information picture. This is common practice and is not likely to change. But the reporting of information is not the real problem. Again, the problem comes when viewers or readers mistake the information for a complete picture or for knowledge.

Information is data—facts, figures, statistics, anecdotes, testimonials, etc.—that is used to inform decisions. Knowledge is verified information placed into a context, which can be applied to make decisions.

Knowledge Is Information, Applied

The difference between being informed and being able to apply that information lies in one’s ability to put theory into practice. Many college students can pass a multiple choice test on game theory from reading a textbook, but ask those same students to use game theory to help foreign policy officials solve a conflict between two feuding nations, and you’re likely to get a lot of stumped looks.

That’s the difference between information and knowledge.

Helping people bridge that gap can help you win friends and influence people (a nod to Mr. Carnegie there). Not to mention it can bring you more business. But how do you know if the gap exists, and, if it does, how do you need to address it? Moreover, how do we bridge that gap without offending or patronizing someone by telling them they don’t really know what they’re talking about (although in many cases you want to)? The answer: education and empowerment. By empowering consumers to educate themselves, we all win. We bridge that gap. We rise above the noise.

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REAL PEOPLE, REAL STORIES, REAL RESULTS

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Jay Baer

CEO and Founder, Convince & Convert, Author of Youtility and Hug Your Haters

Every Instance of Communication Does Not Equal a Sales Opportunity

The biggest communication mistake that business owners make is the belief that every piece of communication is a sales opportunity. Stop trying to be amazing, and start being useful. Stop trying to create something that magically creates virality. Start trying to be useful, creating things that add real value. That’s Youtility.

Youtility Equals Useful, Valuable Marketing

Youtility is marketing so useful, people would pay for it. It’s marketing with so much intrinsic and inherent value that people would kick in a few bucks to support it. It’s marketing that people actually want instead of marketing that people simply tolerate. There’s an enormous difference between marketing people want and marketing people don’t hate.

It’s Not About Speed and Virality

People think the secret to marketing is to be faster, but the reality is the relationships that we build with prospective clients develop more slowly in a series of micro-interactions that take place consistently over time. You have to embrace the power of eventually. Youtility is about help, not hype. It’s giving information snacks to sell knowledge meals. Take everything you know, and give it away in small pieces.

Give Everything You Know Away

Many people worry that if they give away all this they won’t get hired. That’s just not true. A list of ingredients doesn’t make someone a chef. Holding on to your knowledge and putting gates in front of it is a self-defeating proposition. It’s self-defeating to hold your cards that close to the vest. Give away information snacks to sell knowledge meals.

There’s Power In Giving, and In Educating

Relationships are built with information first, and people second. If your information is good enough, you’ll be allowed to graduate to a telephonic relationship, not before. This is the exact opposite of how business used to be done. There is a lot of power in self-serve information. There’s power in giving information away and allowing people to access it. The more you teach, the more audience you’ll attract. If people have to call you to buy from you, you’re doing it wrong in the knowledge age.

When You Focus on Youtility, Competition Doesn’t Exist

There is no such thing as competition—there are just partners you haven’t done a deal with yet.

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SPOILER ALERT

In Chapter 4 we’ll talk about how you can better understand the knowledge gap and how it impacts your sales conversations by looking at how others are listening to you. And in Chapters 7 and 8 we’ll look at some different education and empowerment strategies that you can use to rise above the noise.

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To rise above the noise, you need to first know what noise exists. To do that, you...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction: Why “Good Communication Skills” Aren’t Enough
• Part I: The Bare Basics: Things You Need to Understand About Communication
• Part II: Sales Machine/Ninja/Badass: Providing Service and Growing Sales
• Part III: Marketing That Educates: Creating Value-Filled, Magnetic Marketing
• Part IV: Oh, the Humanity!: Public Communication Strategies That Help You Connect
• Part V: Speak Out, Speak Up: Giving Presentations That Inspire Action
• Part VI: Inner Workings: How to Manage Teams and Meetings and Get Buy-In
• Part VII: Like a Boss: Leading and Managing So People Want to Work For and With You
• Part VIII: Retain, Innovate, or Die: Strategies for Employee Retention and Development
• Conclusion: Slapping a Bandage on It Doesn’t Work
• Index