Business Speaking Is Unlike Any Other Speaking

When You Speak In A Business Environment, You Need Special Skills
When You Speak In A Business Environment, You Need Special Skills

Welcome to the world of business: do you know how to give a speech here? All too often speakers spend their time studying how to connect with customers and community members. That’s all well and good; however, that style of speaking is completely different from the style that you need to use when you are giving a presentation within the company. Do you have the right stuff?

The Four Skills That You Need To Know

When you are giving a speech or presentation within your company, you need to take the time to do it in a business manner – there’s a whole bunch of rules that you need to know about. A business audience has an expectation of how you are going to talk to them and what you’re going to say. If you don’t do this right, then they are going to tune you out very quickly.

There are four specific skills that you need to have mastered in order to make your next business presentation go well. Here they are:

  1. Make Your Brain Big: business is all about what is happening right now. This means that any time that you are giving a business presentation you need to make sure that your presentation is packed with current events. World events, industry changes, etc. are what your business audience wants to know about.
  2. Practice Verbal Dancing: Business speeches rarely go as you had planned them. What this means is that you’ve got to be ready for interruptions, questions, and redirection by senior management at any time during your speech. The key skill that you need to have is the ability to remain calm as your carefully planned speech does a 180-degree turn and heads off into a direction that you had never planned on going.
  3. Become a Tailor: In business, there is no such thing as a “canned speech”. You may have a basic set of points that you want to communicate to several different audiences, but you’ll need to change the words that you use and how you deliver the speech to meet the needs of each audience that you give it to.
  4. Use The Power Of Words: Ultimately all we have to work with is words. A business audience is like any other audience and it’s the words that you use that will determine if your speech ends up having any impact on them. Picking the right words to use for the right speech can make all of the difference in the world.

What All Of This Means For You

There are many different types of speeches that we may be called on to give, but a business speech to the members of our own company can be one of the toughest speeches to give.

These types of speeches require a special set of skills. We need to take the time to make sure that our speech will meet the business need of our audience. Sorry, there is no generic speech that will work here.

The real power comes from delivering this type of speech correctly. It’s a skill that too few speakers have. If you can develop the skills that are needed to do this well, then you will have made yourself irreplaceable.

– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills

Question For You: do you think adding stories to your business presentation will help you to connect with your audience or is this the wrong venue for that kind of speech tool?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If you’ve ever wished that there was a formula for giving the perfect speech, are you in luck! Chris Matthews is the host of a couple of TV shows including Hardball with Chris Matthews. He gets paid handsomely for the work that he does now, but he got his start as a humble political speechwriter. Based on all of that experience, he’s come up with a way to give the perfect speech…