How not to ruin your business conversations!

Most salespeople ruin their business conversations because they just don't shut up!

How to improve your business conversations

In business conversations, try to pause occasionally at the right time to give your listener the opportunity to think about what you have said. Thinking is the most under-utilised human resource which can totally change the outcome of your business conversations.

So what does pause mean? A temporary stop: a period of time in which something is stopped before it is started again.

Pausing is one of the most overlooked delivery techniques which can be used in all types of business conversations. There are many benefits of using pauses effectively.

Pauses do the following:

Help your audience understand you, allows them to keep up with you.
Your audience doesn’t have the benefit of punctuation, bolding, italics, bullets, and formatting as in written material. You’ve got to provide that, and pauses are a central way to do it.
Help convey emotion.
Control the overall pace of your delivery.
Your audience has cognitive limitations, and cannot absorb information beyond a certain rate. Pauses allow you to slow your speech to match the listening capacity of your audience.
Gives you time to think especially when asked a question. Therefore, pause... repeat the question out loud ... then answer.
Helps avoid the overuse of words that are fillers like ‘um’.

Sometimes, people in their desire to win their point of view, their goals become completely perverted. We talk over others and move so far away from adding value to the business conversation, no business can be done! Speaking too much doesn’t fix problems it can often create them. It almost becomes punishment, to the listener making waves along the way. We’re so uncomfortable with silence the thought of pausing and giving time for the listener to reflect is way too hard. This is a big mistake in business conversations and when preparing to speak to someone you need to ask yourself some questions.

Clearer clarity will allow the business conversation to have much more focus. Let me know how you go!

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About Odile Faludi

Odile Faludi says, "I help professionals open the door of their prospects and their mind resulting in more happy customers."

"Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work." ~ Aristotle

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Caitlin Young
Agile Reasoning Account Executive, Indianapolis program via SKYPE

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