3 Ingredients: A Recipe For Business Communication Success

Executive Vice President of Sales at NAVCO, leading the company’s strategic sales growth and team for the company in North America.

I work with a wonderful EVP of Operations. This person is strategic, inspirational and culture-driven and has a food idiom or analogy for everything we do. I tease him, “Now, what food does this one apply to?” When discussing our backlog, he will say, “We need to spread it like peanut butter.” Or when something is said so perfectly that there is nothing else to add, he will say, “You can’t put ketchup on a steak!” Laughing, I truly love the comments and would throw in my personal favorite, as said by the late great Erma Bombeck: “Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the ‘Titanic’ who waved off the dessert cart.”

You might now be thinking: So, what does food have to do with business, Angie—and the security business, on top of it?

Well, you see, there was once a man over 2000 years ago, possibly known as the best communicator and influencer of all time, who used parables. He would use them when speaking to a wide variety of people, personalities and incomes while trying to meet them right where they were. It doesn’t really matter if it’s a food-based idiom or parables; it’s just critical you know how to communicate with your audience, team or peers, who might even be executives.

The following three ingredients—audience, illustrations and phrases—can be used in a variety of different ways for communication success.

• Audience: It’s really important to understand your audience before you speak to or create messaging for them. This is just as critical internally when, say, enrolling your team in a shared vision—a vision for your operations, sales or administration. You must know the keywords, ideas and motivators that will help them understand the level of excellence and success you are looking for them to achieve. In my experience, finding common ground through communication will almost always bring your audience along the ride with you.

• Illustrations: Great speakers provide impactful illustrations or examples. Good illustrations might also involve other companies that have been successful on a similar path—consider Starbucks’s vision of what a coffee company should look like, Nike when it developed the swoosh, or the genius at Costco who said, “Let’s serve samples!” These types of illustrations—rooted in brands and companies that your audience recognizes and is familiar with—can lead to a better, simpler understanding of what you’re trying to communicate.

• Phrases and sayings: I have to admit, it will be hard to beat my insightful operations leader and his food idioms. Like him, the key is to make it your own and be authentic, and also know the timing to use it. If you use them all the time, they will lose their impact on why you are using them in the first place. When I am trying to talk to my sales team, I will say, “We need to push that rock up the hill together.” For strategy, I’ll use, “Strategy is like a game with winners and losers.” Or, if I’m trying to paint a vision, it might be something like, “It’s not a sprint; it’s a marathon”—this is especially useful when trying to keep my team engaged on the end goal when impatience may have set in.

There are a lot of different ways to communicate to successfully motivate and encourage your audience. As Peter F. Drucker once said, “The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.” If you can do that by using some of these ideas in your communication, you will find that your audience will be more engaged and, like my EVP of Operations, maybe even a little bit hungry.

Forbes Business Development Council is an invitation-only community for sales and biz dev executives. Do I qualify?