Communication is one of the fundamental factors that ensure the success of one’s business. It allows us to get our message across to our clients, team, and other business partners in a clear, rational, and most importantly, professional way.
However, we all know that this skill is easier said than done. It requires experience, practice, and certain techniques for mastery.
What You Need to Know About Business Communication
Don’t worry, we are definitely going to share with you the techniques that you can start putting into action in a bit. Let’s just take a moment, though, to gain some understanding of what business communication is and its importance.
What Is Business Communication?
In a nutshell, business communication can be defined as the method of sharing information related to your company. It can be internal such as when you’re talking to your team, or it can be external like when you’re reaching out to potential clients and partners.
Why Is It Essential?
Effective business communication ensures clarity and professionalism, no relevant and valuable information gets left out, and puts the company at risk of suffering a huge loss.
The Impact It Has on Business Growth
We cannot stress the impact of effective business communication enough on your business’ growth and development. It increases employee productivity, through clear instructions on what is required of them and the steps that they need to do to accomplish their tasks. It boosts sales when it efficiently highlights the strength of your product, service, or brand. It can even help expand your business by engaging with potential business partners and investors.
Advantages of Clear Business Communication
In this light, here are more advantages of clear business communication to further prove our point:
Positive Changes in Customers’ Attitude
Poor communication can lead to negative customer reception. No one wants to receive inaccurate business details, confusing and/or misleading product or service description, get spam-like emails that present them with no value, or even be bathed in jargon. So if you want to improve your client’s perception of you, business communication is a good point to start.
Stronger Customer Relationship
Excellent communication doesn’t just start and end with how you get your message across. It’s not a one-way deal. It also includes how you respond and engage with other people, like your customers. It even has the potential of strengthening the relationship that you share with them.
Productive and Motivated Workplace
Say goodbye to repetitive memos, email overload, demotivated employees, and just poor company culture by shifting the voice of your business communication approach.
Easy-to-Follow Tips to Advance Business Communication
We can now move on to the techniques. Let’s start with the following four:
Learn About Your Audience
Improve your business communication by learning about the people who are going to receive your message. This will give them a more personal yet professional experience. It gives your brand a little bit more heart and prevents you from communicating as a cold and heartless robot would.
Concentrate on the Message You Deliver
No one has the time to read through an email with a painfully long and winding body only to learn that all the sender wants to say can be summarized in one sentence. Just focus on the message and determine the best words to get it across.
Don’t Use Jargon
Speaking of the best words, we know what the worst words are: jargon. It instantly sets you up as someone who thinks too highly of himself and doesn’t care about how other people may feel or even if they can understand your message or not. So please, just don’t.
Form Clear and Concise Sentences
What you want, instead, is to use clear and concise sentences with words that are easy to relate to and understand.
Successful Business Communication with 7 Cs
Here’s the fifth technique: learn the 7 Cs of communication. Here they are:
Clear
Be sure about the goals of your message and state it plain and clear, because if you’re not sure about anything then your recipient won’t be either.
Complete
Make sure to not leave out any detail that may be relevant to your message. Not only will it leave people in the dark, but it can also confusion and worse, misunderstandings.
Concise
Again, no one wants to read an entire paragraph only to find out that its message can be summed up in one sentence. Not even you.
Concrete
Don’t be too concise, though, up to the point that your recipient won’t be able to get the complete picture of what you’re saying anymore. Give details, present facts, and make your message as solid as possible.
Considerate
Always start with the assumption that your recipient doesn’t know anything about what you’re about to say, because most of the time, they really don’t. It wouldn’t hurt to always show consideration.
Correct
Sharing false, inaccurate, and erroneous information is a big no-no in business communication. Don’t forget to check for any grammatical, spelling, and typographical errors as well.
Courteous
Finally, it wouldn’t hurt to show some kindness, respect, and courtesy in your business communications. Again, no one wants to talk to a cold, heartless, robot.
Establishing Clear Communication with StoryBrand
Lastly, here’s our sixth technique: the StoryBrand Framework.
StoryBrand
StoryBrand is a company that offers business communication consultancy, workshops, and other related products and services to help both individuals and brands to boost their communication (and marketing) game.
How It Ensures Clear Messaging
They have two main products: live workshops and private workshops. Both seek to teach their clients the StoryBrand Framework that they have formulated that provide concrete methods for creating websites, emails, and other forms of business communication that actually work.
We personally prefer their private workshop since it allows you and your team to work with a StoryBrand Consultant at your own pace and space. In the end, it will all boil down to what your brand specifically needs at the moment.
Conclusion
Here are the seven techniques again to sum up what we have talked about in this article:
- Learn about your audience.
- Concentrate on the message that you want to deliver.
- Avoid using jargon.
- Form clear and concise sentences.
- Keep the 7 Cs of communication in mind and put them into practice.
- Finally, learn the StoryBrand Framework.
Of all the techniques, though, we will always prefer the sixth one over the others. Why? Because you’ll be working with an actual expert that can help you master and refine all the other communication techniques and then some. Not to mention that it is also one of the easiest and most effective techniques to adopt.
