Most conference calls last about an hour. That’s one hour to make our case, engage our participants, get our message across, and deal with any questions. So it’s good to find anything to make that hour more effective… which I did.
In Speaking About Presenting, I read fifteen ways to
improve our presentations and make our conference calls better. Some of them are obvious, some are not, and a lot of them we’ve covered before in this blog. Here are two that really stood out for me.
- “Switch the focus from yourself to your audience.” As a speaker, we feel we need to tell people why they should listen to us, what we can do, and good things about our company. The point here is we should shift from all that to find out what our participants are interested in, what their needs are. If we figure that out and tailor our conference calls accordingly, they will all be a success.
- “Incorporate dialogue into your stories.” Nothing puts a message into context better than when we tell a story about it. Adding dialogue helps our participants visualize the scenario and identify with the characters. I think we should also go a step further and use dialogue as titles of some of our main points as well. A good turn of phrase makes things easier to understand… and remember.
Check out the other thirteen improvements, but come back here and tell us a way to improve that wasn’t on the list.
