Is there a job in the world in which you are not helped by having good communication skills? I can’t think of one. Whether the communication is with clients, prospective clients, bosses, colleagues or partners, being able to communicate well will benefit us and others. Taking it away from the workplace, our personal lives are also improved through better communication with siblings, partners, parents, children and friends. Every one of us benefits from improved communication skills yet how many of us have engaged with any formal training in this skill? A very low percentage, I’m sure.
Can anyone become a great communicator?
An interesting question but the wrong one when considering training. As you ponder whether to take some training yourself or book training for your teams, the better question is: “Can anyone become a better communicator?” The answer to that is clearly “Yes!”
Who should do communication skills training?
Some people are good communicators, and the temptation is to leave them alone as they’re good enough; other people have problems in communicating well and the temptation with them is to think that communication is something with which they’ll always struggle and, again, we think they’re best left alone. Whether good or bad or somewhere in between, we leave them to their own devices! Yet, this contradicts what we know about skills: whether piano, tennis, crosswords or sewing, we can learn skills to become better at anything. The point is not whether we become great but whether we become better.
Who provides communication skills training?
Management consultants, training companies, universities, life coaches and a whole range of other professional services companies offer courses or programmes of some kind. In many cases, it’s worth breaking communication skills down into subsets as they are so many functions of communication: presentation, negotiation, conflict management, persuasion etc and each one may further split to cover verbal, non-verbal and written content. What are the particular skills you want to improve and in what setting? Generic, over-arching courses can help initially but, as you develop, the content will need to be more tailored with specialist delivery.
Communication Skills Training: Content
As specialists in sales, our training is focused on how to sell ethically, consultatively and successfully. This means that we specialise in persuasion: the art of moving people to action and this encompasses a much wider range of training courses, all with persuasion at their heart. Below is a selection of the different types of persuasion-led training courses we’ve run recently in addition to our core sales training work.
- Delivering Bad News and Managing Difficult Conversations
- Key Account Management Skills
- Annual Sales Academy: Consistent, Consultative and Confident Client Communication
- Investment Consultancy Skills for Professional Advisers
- Selling Internationally to British Buyers: Culture, Perception and Persuasion
- Ethical and Influential Account Management
- Helping Non-Salespeople to Use Sales Skills in Business and Life
- Presentation Skills for Networking Events
- Helping Franchise Owners to Sell Direct
- Delivering Outstanding Customer Service through C.A.R.E.
Improved communication skills deliver better work results and improved personal relations too. Whether you’re good and want to be great, or whether you’re poor and want to be reasonable (then great later!), the right training can help you. It’s a skill and that means we can all improve. The first step is, quite simply, to decide you want to be better. Lots of us do this but then stop. So make sure you take the second step and book yourself some training!
