Want to impress and persuade when your speaking skills can be everything? Here are four easy ways to improve your phone voice.
Ever made a business connection, spoke to someone important, or made a sale in a phone call?Sure you have.
Have you ever wondered how much your voice was responsible for that positive outcome? If you haven't, you're ignoring a central aspect of business success.
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For many years now, communication experts have argued about whether visual, vocal, or verbal content is the most important element in listeners' perceptions. In other words: is your body language, vocal qualities, or what you actually say the biggest factor in speaking success?
Whatever the percentages are (and people argue about this), you should bear in mind one important fact: if you're speaking for business, your voice carries more weight than you think it does when it comes to influencing customers and stakeholders.
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What's More Important: Body Language or Voice?
You should always keep in mind that the richest environment for persuading someone is in-person conversation. That's because it contains all the elements necessary for deciding whether to trust someone and believe that they're authentic. It's also a clear path for you in determining whether a speaker knows how to achieve presence and charisma.
Why wouldn't this be so, since a person talking to you in person is tipping off all of your senses: sight, sound, touch (as in shaking hands), and even smell? Even taste comes into play if you're talking with this person in an eating or drinking environment. Of all these senses, vision is most dominant for your audience. That's because it's the sense most often activated when safety and survival are in play. But in public speaking, other factors such as trust, likability, confidence, dynamism, attractiveness, and even entertainment are all at work.
Is Your Voice Giving People the Wrong Impression?
But what about when all the visual clues are removed? I mean in telephone calls and phone conferences. Suddenly, there's nothing to look at where you as the speaker is concerned. When this happens, your voice becomes enormously more important. You are basically just a vocal persona in those calls. And that means your vocal qualities have much more power in terms of stakeholder perceptions and judgments about you.
What about this experience: you speak to someone first on the phone and automatically make decisions about how old they are, what they look like, their level of experience, and lots of other things. Then you meet them in person, and your entire mental picture gets turned upside down. You might even struggle for a while trying to reconcile the two extremes!
Four Easy Ways to Improve Your Phone Voice
By now, you should be asking yourself: "Is my phone voice helping or hurting my career?" Listen to your outgoing message, as well as messages you've left on the phones of colleagues or family members. Pay attention to your own response if you were listening to this person's (i.e. your) voice, and start to make some changes where necessary.
Whatever your overall opinion is of your phone voice, here are four easy steps you can take to improve others' response to you. And that includes getting them to retain and take to heart what you're telling them.
1. Breathe. The more support you have for your speaking voice, the better it will sound. That includes characteristics such as pleasantness, authority, wisdom, experience, and the sound of leadership. Many business people today breathe shallowly, because phone calls bring us so close to others that we don't have to take deep breaths to support our sound across any distance. Bear in mind that your breath is the raw material for activating your vocal cords and projecting power, however near or far you are from someone. Get your belly into the act to help release a strong column of air by breathing diaphragmatically.
2. Smile. People involved in sales are sometimes advised to keep a mirror by their phone, and to smile before they pick up the receiver. The reason? The person on the other end can hear your smile. Not only are your thoughts and the body language you therefore display intertwined, but it works in the opposite direction as well. Assume good posture, look pleasant, and learn the rules of effective body language, and your phone manner will benefit!
3. Gesture. Whenever I'm being interviewed by a news outlet or giving a webinar, I use a headphone-and-mic setup. The reason doesn't have anything to do with sound quality. It's so that I can free myself from holding the phone, and move around and gesture! Gestures in speaking exist to strengthen, amplify, support, or explain what you're saying. As with smiling, some of that physical expression comes through in your voice. If you gesture when you make a critical point while speaking on the phone, the people on the other end will understand that what you just said is important.
4. Speak S-L-O-W-L-Y. As a speech coach and actor, I'm always amazed at how fast some people speak on the phone, particularly when it comes to leaving their phone number and other vital information in voicemail messages. Yes, I'm talking about their OWN NAMES, among other things! Once again, without any helpful visual clues, we as listeners will get all of our information from what your voice is doing. Few things are as annoying as having to play a message back three or four times to try to understand a person's phone number. Why do that to someone you're hoping to make eager to talk to you?
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Gary Genard is an actor, author, and expert in public speaking and overcoming speaking fear. His company, The Genard Method offers live 1:1 Zoom executive coaching and corporate group training worldwide. He is the author of the Amazon Best-Seller How to Give a Speech. His second book, Fearless Speaking, was named in 2019 as “One of the 100 Best Confidence Books of All Time.” For nine consecutive years, he was ranked by Global Gurus as one of The World’s Top 30 Communication Professionals, and he has been named as one of America's Top 5 Speech Coaches. His handbook for presenting in videoconferences, Speaking Virtually offers techniques for developing virtual presence. He is also the author of Speak for Leadership: An Executive Speech Coach's Secrets for Developing Leadership Presence. His latest book is The Confidence Book: 75 Ways to Reduce Your Anxiety, Let Go of Your Fears, Change Your Negative Thinking, and Perform At Your Professional Best. He is also the creator of The Dr. William Scarlet supernatural thrillers. Contact Gary here.
