An effective communication is a matter of economy on words. Don’t do it for your audience, do it for you: if your message is clear, you can expect people to act exactly the way you expect them to act, following your words, with no mistakes or misunderstanding.Between 3 trees nobody will get lost, but anybody will get lost between 3,000 trees. The same happens with our words and our communication. When we write a speech, we should always remember a classic communication exercise: write a message, then divide by two the number of words, and once again divide it by two. The result is the number of words adequate to express the same concept in a more concise and effective way. This works with speeches, and for any communication, we should not kill our people with a torrent of adjectives, repetitions and endless parentheses. If we strive to ensure every word counts, we will be more convincing, appealing and our message will be clearer... and more important, we will prove we have respect for our interlocutor’s time, he will appreciate it!
If you fail to describe in 25 words what makes it different and excellent your company, you must not work on the phrase... you must work on your company. The clearness of your message shows the clarity of your thinking. If you have to describe the characteristics or benefits of a product with a slide full of words and points, you will not achieve your goal. Faced with an overabundance of data our mind gives up, gets distracted, because he is conscious that he cannot remember all, so often, does not remember anything.
The perfect alchemy for a memorable presentation is “3 points with 3 words”: this is the amount of information you are allowed to wish will be kept in mind by those who attend your presentation.
Think: anybody remember the 3 Musketeers’ name... And what about the formula the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit? Then, which are the names of the 12 apostles? The names of the 7 dwarfs from Snow White? Sleepy and Grumpy I remember, only 2 out of 7! Probably my brain is convinced of not being able to store all their names so it did not even try to store at least 3.
Just talk less, communicate more.
Posts
3 comments:
"you must not work on the phrase... you must work on your company." There's a lot to what you write. It's probably a combination of both, but unless your company is focused, there's no way to create a meaningful description in only a few words for your customers!
I love the title of your blog! Aren't you worried about mom finding it on the Internet? :-)
Yes Peter actually that was not the best way to hide my secret!
Post a Comment