Making a Connection - Effective Business Communications

Many business owners I speak with are frustrated by the lack of return on their marketing effort – “we’ve tried advertising in the past and it was a complete waste of money” or “we sent out 500 letters to prospective clients and didn’t have a single response” are the kind of things they say to me. I’m always interested to discover more about what they were doing and to try and discover whether there marketing communications were ‘making a connection’ with prospective clients.

Are you making a connection through your marketing communications?
Do people respond by saying things like “you really are talking my language” or “that’s just what I need” or do you receive instead a resounding silence?

If you get a good response chances are you’ve either got a fantastic product in a market where there’s very little competition, you’re giving something away to people who want what you have or you’re good at ‘making a connection’.

But for those whose marketing and business communications receive no response – what are the secrets of making a connection?

Well, let’s take a moment to think about who you prefer dealing with in your day to day life and why. We all know certain people we meet - whether it’s over the counter in Tesco’s, in the pub at the weekend or a new contact at a networking event – that we just ‘click with’ and there are other people we build a relationship with over a longer period of time, and likewise there are others we avoid like the plague.

Let’s just think about what makes it easier to make that connection, here are just some of the things that can help:

• Having mutual areas of interest
• Shared humour
• Asking questions
• Listening – they are interested in hearing from you
• Being open and suspending judgement
• Sharing a common language
• A smile – or the fact they are appealing
• An engaging speaker
• They get to the point and tell you things you want or need to hear

Just think about it, how many of these attributes apply to your friends, work colleagues you get along with or long standing customers.

There’s no surprises – it’s because you’ve made a connection.

So how does all of this relate to business I hear you cry.

Well just think about your last business communication – the advert you placed in the local paper, your direct mail shot sent to that prospect list you spent all that money on, or even the main pages on your website. Are you making a connection? And if not – why not review some of the items on the list above only this time think about the business perspective:

Mutual areas of interest – are you demonstrating that you have empathy for the problems or challenges that they face or that you can help them take advantage of a great opportunity?

Humour – not always appropriate in the business environment, but a little bit of in-offensive, gentle humour can help demonstrate the human side of your business and perhaps appeal to your prospective customer on a human level too.

Questions – are you asking questions in your communications which strike a chord with the reader? Perhaps more importantly are you regularly finding ways to speak directly to customers and prospects to find out what they really want? Having done so, it’s so much easier to tailor communications for them.

Listening – do you demonstrate that you are interested in what your clients think, do you provide opportunity for feedback, do you use satisfaction surveys and do you listen to the silence (ie lack of response) as well as the direct response?

“Listening requires more intelligence than speaking”
Turkish Proverb

Sharing a common language – this is where many business communications fall down, because they are simply full of jargon not all of which will be shared with your target audience. An advert trying to sell computer equipment into a school for example would need a very different approach than one trying to sell computer equipment into an engineering company.

A smile – in the business context this means making your business appealing. It means that you treat and greet customers and callers appropriately, that your written communications are attractive and that you make it easy for clients to do business with you.

An engaging speaker – in a social context I am made to think of my brother-in-law who has something of a reputation in our family for telling very long, complicated but quite engaging stories (just think of Ronnie Corbett sat in that big old armchair). He’s great at a party but not so good if you phone him to get a quick yes/no answer. Likewise in business there are people who want to tell you chapter and verse about what they do and how they do it, which is great if you have the time and they engage your interest (make a connection) on some other level. But if you are looking for a piece of factual information or a yes/ no answer and someone goes into, what you consider, unnecessary detail the message won’t get through.

Getting to the point – in a social context people who ramble on have a certain charm and may be great company on a long walk in the country. But in the business context there’s no place for rambling communications. With every piece of business communication you write or deliver you should very clearly be able to see what the main message is and the reader or listener should be in no doubt as to what they should do about it.

As Peter Ustinov would have it “Communication is the art of being understood”, so it doesn’t matter how fancy your brochure is, how much money you’ve spent on your website or how many times you write to customers telling them about your great new product, unless you make a connection you won’t get the response you want.