Be a Powerful Communicator

By Glenn Michael Milliet, Glenn Michael Salons

I am often amazed that highly intelligent, highly motivated and highly skilled professionals will spend enormous amounts of time, energy and money in an effort to attract new business. Yet they will miss the one key element that will virtually guarantee sales success. It's their ability to communicate, connect, and close consultations, both live and virtually, that provide value to their client while providing profits to their business.

Understand that one’s ability to communicate, connect, and close conversations effectively and efficiently are among the most influential, persuasive, and powerful skills in one’s business, sales, financial, and personal life.

These skills supersede the quality of one’s products and services, for without them, products and services remain sitting on a shelf. They can be the differentiator between growing one’s business versus going out of business. Often times these skills are what separate the winners from those who have not yet learned how to win.

Like most stylists, I began my career focused heavily on refining my technical skills. Yet I realized early on that it was my ability to communicate effectively that would put my hands to work, build a profitable business, and provide the opportunity for a better quality of life.

Becoming an effective communicator is no different than becoming a highly-skilled services professional. It requires systems that are predictable, measurable, and of course highly profitable.

Consider my "Five Pillars of Communication Success" as you transform your consultations into positive results-driven success and build your communication skills.

1) You must have a burning desire to be a powerful communicator.

Simply stated, “You gotta’ want it” for it is your want power that will fuel your will power. Without the desire to change nothing will happen.

2) You must understand the process of successful communication.

Using sentence structure and emotionally based verbiage creates the proper image in the mind of your listener. Selling is the transfer of emotion. Your client transfers the payment to purchase the emotion of happiness in order to replace their emotion of unhappiness. Consider the client visiting your salon with fine thinning hair who leaves with a confidence restoring new hair system. Did they purchase hair or the emotion of confidence and happiness their new hair provided?

3) Schedule a specific time to study and practice the techniques and how-tos of effective communication.

Consider:

■ Going online to learn from communication skills tutorials.

■ Studying in detail the recommended techniques.

■ Practicing these techniques as you roll-play your consultations.

■ Recording, evaluating, and correcting your efforts.

■ Listening as if you were the client.

■ Securing professional coaching and critiques.

As Newton's third law states, “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Simply stated, you will get out of it, what you put into it.

4) Be patient yet persistent.

Neither Rome nor your communication skills will be built in a day. Small actions done repeatedly over a specific period of time will create a compound effect of powerful results. Create a practice schedule, stick with the program, stay the course, be accountable, and soon the momentum of consistency will take over.

5) Lastly, never lose your coach's phone number.

Seek and secure a professional skills coach, preferably someone in your industry. Professional athletes, musicians and top business MVPs never go it alone and welcome the value of professional coaching.