Sales Communication

If you can persuade others to think or act in a certain way, influence their decisions and behaviors, and build consensus among your colleagues, you have competitive advantage. Period. Full stop. In the 21st century business world, (where information is more available, attention spans have plummeted, organizations are leaner, and everyone is less loyal and […]

Anyone who knows The Latimer Group knows that “Know Your Audience” has been one of our enduring themes since our founding thirteen years ago. We believe it is one of the fundamental rules of great communication. And the concept has lots of implications and manifestations. Knowing your audience means, in its simplest form, understanding what will […]

In the coming weeks, we’ll be doing some work with clients on three continents, and executives from 15 different countries. In planning business travel of this scale, it always gets me thinking about how we communicate in that global environment, and how we have to adapt what we do to an audience that may not have […]

We spend a lot of time with our clients talking about ways to create outstanding business communication. And all great business communication has five common characteristics, or ingredients: clarity, brevity, context, impact and value. Every single time we communicate in the work place, we need to be thinking about all five of these things. We […]

In nearly every one of our communication workshops, we spend significant time discussing the role of detail in 21st century communication. Does detail matter? Of course it does. How much detail is necessary? That depends on many things: who your audience is, how familiar they are with the topic, how senior they are, how mission […]

Have you ever written or sent something to a friend or a colleague, perhaps something important, that you worked hard on, and then been surprised when no prompt response came? It is hard in this situation to know what to think, or how to feel. Did I say something wrong? Did they not like it? […]

It’s a common occurrence in the business world. You prepare a meeting, presentation, or speech for a certain length of time, only to find out that you have a lot less time than you planned for. Sometimes we even learn our fate as we are walking into the presentation. We’ve spoken a lot lately about […]

This is a simple idea, but a very powerful one. We’ve all heard it before, yet so many of us continue to ignore it’s value. Whenever possible, tell your story with pictures and not words. Pictures create images in the mind, and for most of us the mind retains the things it sees much longer […]

The other day I was on a conference call with two good friends. One, Bill, is the CEO of US-based marine industry company. The other, Ron, is an independent marketing consultant. We were catching up on some business issues, and Bill made a comment that stuck with me. His company has had some communication challenges […]

If we look at our communication as if it were a meal that our audience will consume, we’ll of course want to prepare a communication “meal” they will enjoy. And in order to do that, there are 5 ingredients that must be included in our recipe: Clarity, Brevity, Context, Impact, and Value. But how much […]