Show Notes
Welcome to the remarkability Institute. This is Bart Queen, your host. I am especially excited for the four-part series that I will run over the next couple of weeks on virtual communication guys. I think we're in the absolute perfect storm. So let's take a look at what's happening right now.
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00:01:27] Number one technology is constantly improving, and the competitive advantage is to have the right technology in the right situation. Number two, where we're working really hard, no matter what industry you're in, whether you're with a big company or an entrepreneur, to somehow have that cutting edge, that one thing that inches you above everybody else.
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00:01:57] And then, of course, we are currently facing world challenges, both from a health perspective and from other political and business perspectives. When all of those come together in my mind, we're facing really the perfect storm. I believe that you and I have the ability to overcome that perfect storm.
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00:02:22] And I believe one of the things that we can do to do that is to be able to master the way we communicate from a virtual perspective. Most of us, especially if you're in sales, especially if you do any type of customer-facing situation, face the importance of being face to face and having a conversation.
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00:02:43] But if we look at the challenge that the world is throwing us right now, some of that opportunity is taken from us. So how do we find a place? How do we take what we've normally done face to face, where you feel comfortable, take all that strength. And now somehow put it in this virtual format into this black box into technology, into a computer screen and take your personality and make it come forward through that in this four-part series, I'm going to cover two major buckets bucket.
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00:03:24] Number one, I'm going to spend a fair amount of time. On the actual overall look at what this virtual communication should be, meaning that I believe that there are three key pieces. There is pre your virtual meeting. There's the actual meeting, and there's a post virtual meeting. That's the first two segments.
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00:03:46] So really looking at what your meeting should look like. And the second piece, two parts. Again, I'm going to break that up into the structure that I believe will help you communicate the most effectively. What I want you to do is not only become virtually literate. I want you to become virtually fluent in how you communicate with your -clients, with your customers, with the people you need to interface with.
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00:04:20] What I want you to do today is began to learn at a higher level. Some of the aspects that you need to build awareness around and begin to incorporate them into the way you're communicating virtually. I want to make sure that in these next four sessions, you come across as confident you come across as conversational, no different than if you were having a coffee cup at Starbucks.
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00:04:49] And I want to make sure that you have the ability to just connect with the people that you're communicating virtually. Yes. So let's really begin to dive into this, and what it looks like from my perspective, we've got some virtual challenges that we've gotta be able to take a look at and begin to figure out how we're going to handle.
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00:05:14] Most people, if you look at the virtual world, are going to say that the biggest challenge is the actual meeting. The biggest challenge is right now; I'm using zoom. I'm using a webcast. I'm using Microsoft teams. I'm using some flop platform to communicate with my customer, my listeners right now; this moment is the biggest challenge.
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00:05:39] I don't believe that's true. Correct. The biggest challenge you and I face is getting people to schedule commit to coming to your meeting to your virtual situation, to your virtual training class, to your virtual sales call. I think that's one of the bigger challenges. And the second one is then once you've got them to commit,
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Bart: do you move them to action?
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00:06:05] Really, the actual meeting is really 10%. That is 10% of your challenge, 90% getting them to commit and then getting them to move to action.
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00:06:16]Now, once you've got them there, that third real big challenge is how do I create interaction? You and I have sat in enough webcasts in enough virtual meetings, where you're just looking at a slide, and it is all one way coming at you. There's no interaction. So the challenge for you and I, how do we build interaction into what we're doing?
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00:06:45] Okay, a bigger challenge, especially if you're more of a global company. If you're a global entrepreneur and reach all parts of the world, you've got cultural and language issues that offer a challenge. And then you add on top of that time zones, I was doing some virtual training for several of my clients, and one of my clients was in Singapore, and she said, Bart, this won't work for us.
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00:07:11] And I said, what's the biggest challenge. He goes, it's the wrong time. Even though I've scheduled it for most of the East coast and most of Western Europe, what I failed in my thinking was to realize that the Asia pack part of the world has a 12-hour difference. So if I'm doing something at noon, it is midnight, their time.
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00:07:31] That doesn't work. So how do I need to do to PA? Do I need to do two virtual meetings? One at 6:00 AM, which is 6:00 PM in Asia pack and parts of Asia pack, and then one at noon hitting more of the United States and Western Europe challenges. And then what platform am I going to use? What technology is best?
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00:07:57] When I first started doing virtual meetings, I laid it all out, mostly through zoom. Then, one of my clients came to me and said that our department will not let us do zoom due to security issues. You're going to have to do Microsoft teams. So I'd take everything I learned in zoom. Learn Microsoft teams.
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00:08:18] Now, both of them are fairly similar guys. I get that. But there are some nuances and things that just add a degree of difficulty that you have to think through. Those are some of the challenges that you and I are going to face. We've got to be able to overcome them. If we want to come across and connect with our customers, if we want to be able to have a conversation, and we want them to perceive me to be confident,
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00:08:44]But now let's just look at it from a communication perspective. Those were more virtual challenges, but just purely communication. Number one, creating engagement. How many of you have been on some type of virtual meeting webcast? Whatever it may happen to be, let's say your executive team was running some type of kickoff, and you were at your home office.
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00:09:09] You're in your cubicle, and you're paying attention.
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00:09:11]Be honest with me now, what else are you doing? Yeah, if you raised your hand and said, Oh my gosh, I'm doing email. You'd be correct. You're doing something else because you're not engaged. So how do I create that engagement? And I've gotta be able to do that quickly. And then, how do I develop a connection?
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00:09:34] Now, if you're face to face, you're looking people in the eye, there's a greater connection, but how do I connect through this screen? And especially if you've turned the camera off because you've got a large group of people. I know when I do some virtual communication from home guys because my internet is hot, not hardwired.
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00:09:54] It comes in actually through my television. The system isn't that strong. So if I turn off my camera, I get less challenge in my internet. And then there's just as a technology work at times, making it difficult for us to communicate. So we've got a couple of things. We've got virtual challenges, and we've got communication challenges that you've got to be able to deal with.
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00:10:25] So, with those challenges in mind, let me lay out some principles that I think are important to help us overcome those. Now, if you followed me in any of the podcasts, some of this may be a review for you and some of you, if you're just joining me, you may find this to be new information, but these are foundational pieces.
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00:10:50] We've gotta be able to do the ordinary things extraordinarily well. And if we're not, we're missing out on some of these basic communication principles. So let's go with the first one. The first one is this idea. Okay. Here is my choice. Tell them more, or get them to remember more. Most of us are show up and throw up most of us when we do these types of things; you are going so fast through slides.
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00:11:17] I would not call it a PowerPoint presentation. I'd call it a movie. Now you've spent hours and hours crafting those slides, but you barely give me time to absorb them, let alone have a conversation. So if there's one paradigm shift, I would want you to take both faces to face, and virtually it's to go from, tell me more.
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00:11:39] This idea. Pardon me for telling them more about the idea of how do I get them to remember more? How do I get somebody to walk out of this podcast? And remember some of the principles that I've taught you or shared with you? That's my goal. My goal is not to overwhelm you with information in any podcast that I do.
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00:12:00] I want you to walk out with principles that you can use, whether that's with your family, with a business situation, you're an entrepreneur, or you're adding the information and do a Ted type talk or a keynote type of speech. Now with this idea of building the conversation and building connection.
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00:12:21] Everything that I teach and share is based on three major goals. How do I build trust? How do I build a relationship, and how do I build engagement from a hundred thousand foot level? Those three goals should drive everything you do from a communication perspective.
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00:12:37]If I could write the script for you, mom, dads every morning when you wake up. When you put your legs over the edge of the bed, you're wiping up, sleep from your eye before you ever stand up before your feet ever hit the ground. Ask yourself one question. How do I deepen the trust between my spouse and me?
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00:13:02] And how do I deepen the trust between my children and me? How do I deepen my trust between my parents and me? It should be the number one thing you think about. The CEO of Pepsi. I heard her once say that the new global currency will not be money. It's going to be trusted. There's one of my favorite books, called God, is a salesperson.
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00:13:25] And it talks about this idea that people buy trust before they buy a solution tool or product, and that they buy trust before they buy the provider. Meaning you or me? That's gotta be a key ingredient now; virtually, it's even harder. Guys. It's even harder. So now, how do we tighten that up? How do we shorten that process around building trust?
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00:13:51] When it comes to relationships, just remember that people buy from people, and they buy from people that they like. So if I just stopped right there and said, guys, you have two key factors. You have to build your trust factor and your likeability or approachability factor that comes through on your laptop.
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00:14:10] Ask yourself that, okay, next week, when I do this virtual class, how do I get that trust factor to come through? How do I get my approachability and my likeability factor to come through? When all they hear is my voice, they can't see my smiling face. They can't see what I'm doing. Now. We haven't even talked about how do I engage them?
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00:14:33] How do I can keep that gauge high? We talked about interaction. How do I engage them in the first eight seconds? How do I make that happen? Those three goals to me just naturally blend into what I call the three-levels of selling there's. So what me too. And I need that, or I need you. If somebody opens up and says, hi, my name is Bart Queen.
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00:15:02] This is the company I work for. We've been around for 25 years. Our numbers are X. We've got this number of employees, and we're globally located anywhere in the world. You're going to go. So what, who cares? I don't care. You've heard that a million times from people. If you've listened to a salesperson, come in and present it to your company.
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00:15:23] What I want them to say about you is me too. I'm just like that. Or I've had that similar experience. So think about people that have gone to the same university. They experienced the me-too factor—the same. If you go to the same church, you get to meet your factor. If you've been in an aspect of the military, you have me too factor.
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00:15:47] We can physically look at me to movement with women. We can see that the me-too factor. You can see the me-too factor and people who have gone through a cancer experience, a horrible tragedy, and a hurricane. That's all part of me, too. What you should be driving them to say is I need that. I need that solution.
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00:16:08] I need that product. I need that service. Now, if you think about them saying, I've got to have it, I need that. Is that price or value? That's all value. But if there's, so what, that's all price; you're going to get pushback. It's not what you want. Again, your overall goal with trust, relationship, and engagement is connection conversation in confidence.
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00:16:37] That's what you want to be the outcomes: connection conversation and confidence, connection, conversation, and confidence. Now, within that, in my mind, in any communication situation that you're in, you have three things you've gotta be able to control. Number one, you have to be able to control yourself.
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00:17:01] Number two, you have to be able to control your content. And number three, you gotta be able to control your circumstance or the situation that you're in. let me give a little bit more detail on each one of those. You gotta be able to control yourself. I remember once seeing a politician up on a stage pre-election, and one of the people in this town hall meeting was asking this potential a candidate a couple of questions. They were pushing, and they were pushing, and they were pushing.
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00:17:34] And the candidate finally lost control and got right up in this person's face. What was in the news the next day was not the constituent. It was the candidate having lost control, lost their patience, lost control of the situation that he was in. You've seen that in sales situations where a CEO or an executive comes after-sales for what about this?
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00:18:01] What about this? What about this? And then all of a sudden, the salesperson gets defensive. They start backing up; they fold their arms, their voice goes up, they've lost control. And as soon as you lose control of yourself, you're real, you've lost. The second place you have to be able to control is your content.
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00:18:22] And what I mean by this guy is somebody takes you off track. I am talking about solving compliance and regulatory issues, and some person asks a question about acts and takes me way off track. now you have a choice. Do I go down that rabbit hole, address the comment, and come back. Is this valuable?
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00:18:45] Do I stay there for a while? Or a short amount of time? You've gotta be able to control your content, but I will toss to you if you're not crisp and what your number one message is what your three supporting messages are. And your three key to why's you can't come back on track. Cause you don't have any signposts that you can grab hold of and bring everybody back.
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00:19:14] When I'm helping somebody with a press and media situation, I will ask them, what's the one single message you're trying to drive, and they'll give me a whole bunch of stuff. Now, what's your one single message. They'll give me a whole bunch of stuff, and I'll come back, and I'll say, okay, let me put it to you in this way.
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00:19:30] What do you want the headline in the article to be? And what do you want? The main sentence, the Twitter type message. Do you want them to remember to put in that article? They'll give me a Ph.D. speech. They won't give me a sound bite. So in that press and media situation, you have to have a sound byte.
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00:19:49] Cause that's all that reporter wants. You may get a reporter who says to you I've gotten an article. I just need one, one little sound bite from you and your company. And you're going to give them a 45-minute presentation. That's not what they're looking for. They're looking for that sound bite. You gotta be able to control your content.
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00:20:10] And that last piece is you have to be able to control the circumstance. Now, a lot of this is your facilitation skills or your skills when it comes to answering questions. One of the principles I teach in controlling the circumstances this if someone in your audience asks a question: When you finish the answer to that question, it should drive the next question.
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00:20:39] When you answer that question, the last sentence should cause that audience or that individual to ask you the next question. If you're doing that, you're driving the conversation. They are not that controlling the situation or the circumstance. Those are all skills, and they're just as. Applicable in the virtual world.