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Best Practices Management Marketing Personal Development Women In Business

Is Your Voice Camera-Ready?

Raise your hand if you hate the sound of your voice when you hear it on a video… I bet if we were in a room asking that question everyone would have their hand raised. But here’s the thing: It’s not actually your voice that’s the problem: it’s what you do with your voice that makes it hard to listen to, and undermines your authority and charisma.

Now that we’ve acknowledged the elephant in the room, let’s look at why it happens, and what you can do about it.

One common goal of any appearance on camera is to come across as a confident and charismatic leader, representing your organization, company, or industry. You want to draw people in and connect with the audience… all of which is much easier said than done.

With all that pressure, knowing your performance will be immortalized on video, most people get nervous on camera; that’s totally normal, even when you’re comfortable with your content. And we all know about putting on a “poker face,” i.e. not letting your facial expressions show your true feelings to the world. But your face isn’t the only thing that can put our feelings on display.

Your voice will tattle on you faster than a kindergartener.

So let’s look at some ways to project a strong, clear, compelling vocal delivery. (You can jump to the end and click the photo with the video link if you want to hear demonstrations of these concepts.)

Sounding Confident

You know how they say dogs can smell fear? Well, people can hear fear. So what does fear sound like?

There are two key factors that will either create or destroy a confident voice.

The first is breath support. When you’re nervous, you subconsciously tense up and breathe shallowly from your shoulders. This pinches your voice, and makes you run out of air too fast, resulting in what’s referred to as “vocal fry.”

Vocal fry also happens when you’re hesitant, maybe because you’re afraid of making a mistake, or just feeling self-conscious. When your brain is holding back, your voice will too.

Of course, if you truly admire the way the Kardashians speak (read: irony) and want to emulate them as modern-day leaders, then keep doing what you’re doing, and fry-away.

But when you take a nice deep breath from your belly and open your throat to let your voice flow freely, it resonates in your chest cavity and head and takes on a full, rich sound.

The second is tonality, or intonation patterns, where you put your high and low pitches in your speech.

On the one hand, there are those of you who are so focused on your getting your content right and sounding smart, that there’s very little tonal variation in your voice, so you come across as robotic. That stiffness comes across as awkward and uncomfortable. It can also make you sound more like the teacher from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off than someone who is really passionate about her topic.

On the other hand, another common pattern is referred to as “up-speak” or “up-talk,” which is that lilting pattern that sounds like you’re constantly inflecting “Right?” “Okay?” and “You know?” at every turn, and asking questions rather than making statements. This also sounds insecure, as those implied questions are persistently begging for validation: You’re right! Yes! Okay! I hear you – now stop asking questions!

And contrary to the examples in that last video link and popular stereotypes, men do this just as much as women, older and younger. There are other reasons and patterns for when this happens which I’ll have to detail in another post, or drop me a line if you’re dying for more info. But don’t assume that you’re innocent just because you’re not a recent college grad.

Strong, confident, positive intonation puts the highest pitch on the most important words for emphasis, and drops the pitch at the end of sentences, just like a “vocal period.” This declarative tone sounds confident and trustworthy.

The most engaging voice incorporates good breath support for a full, resonant voice, as well as strategically varied intonation, with the ups and downs in all the right places. Want a demo? Click on the picture below and see what you think!

Once you put all this together, you’ll realize that all those annoying habits that made you think you hate your voice have disappeared, and what you’re left with is your very best “camera-ready voice.”

Of course, it’s a lot easier to hear about different voice qualities and habits than it is to read about the sound of your voice. So if you really want to wrap your head – and your ears – around some of these ideas, here’s a quick three-minute video that demonstrates some of the major vocal pitfalls to avoid, and on the flip-side, strategies to help you sound like the confident, charismatic, persuasive leader you want to be.

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Entrepreneurship Leadership Marketing Operations Personal Development

A Billion Reasons Why Providing Great Customer Service Can Pay Off

For a company that provides a great product at a great price, and builds the value of that product with great customer service that inspires confidence among its members, look no further than The Dollar Shave Club.

Dollar Shave Club, in case you are not familiar, was started by Michael Dubin and Mark Levine in 2011. In 2012, they recorded a promotional video and posted it on YouTube. The video is so hilarious that it now has more than 24 million views! In the process, as you can imagine, Dollar Shave Club picked up members, thousands of them. This drove them from a start-up business to a success that would eventually attract the attention of long-established competitors. But sales alone couldn’t make them the success that they are today; they needed to have that good product supported by good service.

As their name implies, they sell a membership for one dollar. When you start your membership, you get your choice of one of their two-, four- or six-blade razors for just a dollar! And, that price includes the shipping. Then each month Dollar Shave Club sends you four fresh blades for as little as three dollars. That’s great value for the money. But great value, as in a low price, isn’t always accompanied by great service. Yet that is not the case with Dollar Shave Club.

Recently my Dollar Shave Club razor broke. The blade would no longer stay on the razor. Since they are an online retailer, I went to their website and clicked on “Contact Us.” I filled out the contact form and described my issue. In just a little while they responded.

Hey Shep,

Sorry to hear about the Handle! Thanks for letting us know. We trust you! I’ve got you covered and will send a couple of new Executive Handles on the house right away. Expect them within 3-5 business days and let us know if you need anything else in the meantime.

Shave on,

Wes

It was that easy. It was that fast. Just as easy and fast as when I signed up to be a member. Dollar Shave Club acknowledged my problem and apologized. Then they told me what they were going to do, which was send out new handles right away. And they did it. They didn’t make excuses, try to put the blame me or make it hard on me, such as asking me to return the broken handle. They just took great care of me. That’s what great customer-focused companies do!

So, how easy are you to do business with? When a customer has a problem, do you respond quickly, apologize, accept responsibility and immediately fix the problem, while making the process easy on the customer? Do you handle the issue in such a way that creates even greater confidence in your products and in your business? Everything Dollar Shave Club does creates confidence. Thus, confidence gives them a great reputation and loyal repeat customers – or should I say members.

Dollar Shave Club is the total package. Great value wrapped up with great service. And here’s some proof, they currently have over two million members, and recently, after just five years in business, they sold to Unilever for, are you ready? One billion dollars!

Categories
Human Resources Leadership Marketing Personal Development

The Top Traits an Employee Needs to Deliver Great Customer Service

Everyone needs great customer service skills because every employee deals with internal and external customers, or both.

“But what exactly are the traits an employee needs?” a subscriber asked me recently.
“Are you asking about the traits that a support rep must have?” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “I am hiring to fill an IT position.”

First, I told him, as you think of traits, they come in two categories: skills and attitudes. A skill is self-explanatory. For instance, if you’re hiring someone who will be doing a lot of corresponding with customers, you’ll obviously need someone with good communication skills – a command of the English language, as in punctuation, spelling and grammar. An attitude is the way you would describe someone’s personal characteristics. For example, he or she is optimistic, witty or a team player.

To determine traits, we do an exercise in our customer focus workshops. We set a large whiteboard or flipchart in front of the audience. Then we ask the audience to shout out the traits of someone who would be good at customer service. As you can imagine, we get lots of adjectives. A few of them are:

Confident, empathetic, engaging, friendly, funny, good communicator, good people skills, happy, helpful, honest, kind, knowledgeable, nice, outgoing, passionate, poised, polite, positive, responsive, sympathetic – and the list typically goes on.

As you closely examine the list above, notice how many are skills and how many are attitudes. You’ll find that most of the traits are attitudes while just a few are skills! “Good communicator” and “good people skills” are obviously skills. You can even argue that “knowledgeable” is also a skill. But we find that out of the twenty or so traits that are typically mentioned, only about three of them are skills. Yes, we could add a few more skills to the list to try to balance it out, but for every skill we could add, there are probably three or four more attitudinal traits we could add as well.

By doing this exercise of creating a list, we’re not trying to imply to the audience that skills just aren’t important. They absolutely are. For example, if a medical center needs to hire a skilled nurse, they are going to be looking for more than just somebody with a great attitude or somebody who really wants to be a nurse. Any serious candidate for the job will have gone on for continued schooling, passed exams, got a degree and became licensed. Without those qualifications, all of the attitude in the world won’t land someone a job as a nurse.

And this discussion isn’t meant to support the saying “hire for attitude and train for skill” either. That may work for some jobs, but for many jobs, a person needs certain skills just to get the job, such as that of a nurse.

Another example of a group of employees that needs specialized skills are those whizzes in the IT department. They can understand things the average human can’t easily comprehend. However, regardless of how strong someone’s technical skills are, without the right personality, as exhibited by many of the aforementioned attitudes, a single employee can potentially bring down an entire customer-focused culture.

So what are the traits of an employee capable of delivering a great customer service experience? More importantly, how can you determine them for a position that you are trying to fill?

My suggestion is to have a group of employees in your company go through the whiteboard exercise we just mentioned. List all of the traits you can think of that are both attitudes and skills. Hone the list down to the top ten core attitudinal traits needed to be customer-focused in your organization. Then add to the list the specific skills required for the job. An accountant needs accounting skills. A doctor needs medical skills. And, of course the IT department needs people with technical skills. When you add the ten attitudes to the needed skills, you may have found that next AMAZING person to work with!

Categories
Marketing Personal Development Technology

When Your Marketing Needs Machine Learning

Machine learning seems to be the flavor of the week, so I’ve been getting a lot of questions from clients who want to know what they should know. And some requests for some kind of magic that sounds like, “Can you ladle out a dollop of that machine learning on this?”

So, first off, machine learning is a kind of artificial intelligence–that sounds lofty, but what it really means is that it provides a way for computers to solve problems that they weren’t explicitly programmed to solve. Standard software can solve a problem because a programmer researched the problem, talked to experts, and designed a solution to that particular problem. Machine learning allows computers to tackle a range of problems that the programmers and the experts wouldn’t necessarily know how to solve on their own.

Let’s take an example. I’ve designed a machine learning system for a company that performs sentiment analysis for social media conversations–such as whether a tweet is positive or negative. Now, human beings can identify sentiment accurately around 89% of the time (yes, that low), but standard software is much worse–maybe 60%–because it is hard to code a set of rules that cover all the cases. This machine learning solution is actually more accurate than human beings at times.

How does it do that? It collects training data from what the human beings decide and it looks for patterns that help it identify which tweets are more likely to be positive or negative. With enough training data, it can do a better job than a person. And it is certainly much faster and cheaper.

So, of course you’d like such a technology applied to all sorts of marketing problems that you have. But you might not be ready. Recently, a client approached us, asking that we replace their human content approval system with a machine learning system. They explained that their current process takes each new web page and subjects it to the judgement of several human experts (legal, brand, product, and more) before it is approved to be promoted to the production website. The current process is frustrating and time consuming–often two weeks go by before the approvals are in hand. They desperately want to get the approval process to a day–or even minutes.

But they aren’t ready yet. Machine learning requires that you have very tight processes with well-defined tasks and a history of data that shows that human experts generally agree with each other (such as in the 89% sentiment agreement). This client had none of that–no written standards, experts who disagree, no records of prior decisions–so they weren’t ready yet.

That’s OK. We walked through how they can fix all of those problems over the next few months. Just doing those things will make the process more consistent, less frustrating, and a little faster. At that point, we can start thinking about machine learning to gain even more. It’s always important to provide business value at every step–even what seems like the preparation step.

So what are your thoughts on machine learning? Anytime something new comes along, it can be a personality test. Some people say “we don’t need that yet because it isn’t proven” and others say “we need to do that now and get a jump on the competition.” For machine learning, it’s best to analyze the situation and start preparing your processes to take advantage–because the day is coming where no one will say it isn’t proven yet.

Categories
Best Practices Management Marketing Skills Women In Business

The Stage Presence in Executive Presence

As a CEO or other top-ranking executive, you know that a winning leadership “presence” can enhance your professional image and help you achieve the goals that are meaningful to you. It also helps others view you as an authority, problem-solver, and “go-to” person.

“Executive Presence” is much like stage presence, charisma, and star quality. These words mean virtually the same thing: a personal magnetism that makes it impossible for people to take their eyes off you.

Many years ago, when Dick Cavett interviewed Katherine Hepburn on his popular TV show, he asked her, “What is star quality?” Hepburn replied, “I have no idea – but whatever it is, I’ve GOT it!”

The word “charisma” may be the oldest synonym for “star quality”. The Greeks used the word to mean “favor”. Charis was an attendant to Aphrodite, the goddess of love; “Charis” meant beauty and kindness. The word can be found repeatedly in the New Testament and is translated as “grace”. “Charismata” is the word used to refer to gifts from God: knowledge, healing, working miracles, prophecy; qualities that bring benefit to others.

In his August, 2011 article in The New York Times, Zachary Woolfe mentions the perspective offered by Ernest Hemingway:

“In his obsession with the Spanish bullfights, he spoke of the lust of the crowd and its desire to feel something special, a raw authenticity… What he mentions is the hush that would come over the crowd at the entrance of the toreadors. The people could sense the difference between those who did it for the fame, the paycheck, and those who had the old spirit. The crowd can sense the one with the authentic message, the connection to the truth.”

The sociologist, Max Weber, provided some insight with his contemporary use of the word “charisma” to describe a key quality of leadership. He wrote the following:

“Charisma is a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or specifically exceptional powers. These qualities are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader.”

As a business person, you may not need the charisma and star quality of Katherine Hepburn, a bull fighter, or a “divine one”, but you can still cultivate a personal magnetism that will help you achieve your professional goals. Here are characteristics of Executive Presence that you can cultivate for success:

Candor: The appearance of honesty, through the willingness and skill to constructively tell it like it is.

Clarity: The ability to tell your story in an intuitively clear and compelling way.

Openness: The appearance of not prejudging, of being willing to consider another’s point of view.

Passion: The expression of commitment, motivation, and drive that shows people you really believe in what you do.

Poise: The look of sophistication, conveying a background of education and experience.

Self-confidence: The air of assurance, such that others know you have the required strength and resolve.

Sincerity: The conviction of believing in and meaning what you say.

Thoughtfulness: The projection of thinking or having thought through something before responding.

Warmth: The appearance of being accessible to others and of being interested in them.

Each of the characteristics listed above is revealed through your physical presence/body language, as well as your verbal/vocal presence.

Gestures can add warmth and personality to a conversation or presentation and help illustrate a point. If your own personal style includes only small or very few gestures, remember to at least nod your head appropriately. This is an easy way to show that you are listening to, understanding, and connecting with your conversation partners.

Eye Contact occurs when two people look at each other’s eyes at the same time. In human beings, eye contact is a form of nonverbal communication and is thought to have a large influence on social behavior. In the United States, eye contact is often interpreted as a meaningful and important sign of confidence, respect, engagement, and even honesty.

Facial Expression: Smiling is one facial expression that is likely to put other people at ease and help them feel accepted and comfortable. You exude happiness and encouragement when you smile, so try to add it to more of your conversations. Scowling, chewing your lip and raising your eyebrows can all signal different meanings, so it is important to be aware of how your face looks during a conversation. When you speak for business and your topic is not a happy one, remember that you actually do have something to smile about: the fact that your listeners will benefit in some way from understanding the message you are bringing them.

Movement: We use body movement and proximity to send information on attitude toward a person (facing or leaning towards another), and desire to control the environment (moving towards or away from a person). Be aware of how your body movement sends messages. The physical distance between you and others signals your level of intimacy and comfort and is interpreted differently in different cultures.

Posture: “Body orientation” (the way you hold your body) sends strong messages to others. Remember that your posture is revealing and may ‘give you away” at any moment. Letting your body relax appropriately in a given situation (having fluid, smooth movements and facing your conversation partner, etc.) indicates confidence, poise, and engagement.

Appearance: This refers to everything you were not born wearing: all the choices we make in clothing, accessories, hairstyle, and makeup. The choices for a presentation range widely. A good rule of thumb is to dress “one step above” your listeners. See what highly-regarded people in your workplace are wearing during their presentations and emulate them – and/or ask someone in authority.

Speaking Pace (the speed at which you speak): Increase and decrease your pace strategically. A monotone is boring, and so is monopace; it can lull people to sleep! Pace also includes dramatic pauses to communicate many things, including to (1) emphasize a point, (2) give people a moment to think, and (3) surprise your listeners to deepen their level of engagement.

Speaking Pitch (the high and low tones of the speaking voice, altered with jumps and glides): Pitch can be used to convey energy, warmth, and sincerity. In American business, finishing a statement with a downward glide sounds certain and authoritative; ending with an upward glide communicates a yes/no question or uncertainty. To sound confident and authoritative, always end your statements with a pitch glide downward.

Vocal Projection (the energy and commitment in your voice, including volume): Emphasizing certain words by being louder or softer can add to the impact of what you are communicating. It’s important to project you voice so that everyone can hear clearly what you’re saying. Even if your volume bec
omes soft for dramatic effect, your energy level and commitment must successfully project your meaning and your passion.

Cultivate these qualities, and you won’t have to worry about stage presence, charisma, or star quality. You will possess a winning executive presence and enhanced power to influence and persuade your business listeners