It is a few minutes before your conference call. You are prepared, have your notes and agenda in front of you, and are dialing into the call early. Things are going smoothly and it looks like it is going to be an effective and productive call. Two people dial into the call at the same time and you politely welcome them to the call by asking, “How are you?” After seven minutes of a runaway tangential discussion, you finally get the call back under control. Sound familiar? This is a common problem with an easy fix! Are you interested in learning how to jump-start the productivity on your conference call with a simple process to welcome your participants?
People generally enter onto a conference call mentally engaged in the meeting or discussion immediately preceding your conference call. This is your moment of opportunity to quickly get each person 100% focused on your call. How? Thought you’d never ask!
Ask ONE simple, open-ended question that pertains directly to your agenda. By simple, I mean 7 – 10 words. An open-ended question starts with “what” or “how” (avoid “why” questions – we’ll deal with this in a later post). An example could be: What is one thing you need from our call today?” Ok, you can cheat a little bit on the word count yet brevity is one key to productivity when leading conference calls. Keep it short!
NOTE: you will repeat the exact same question for each person as they enter onto the call. Write this question down, before the call, so you do not have to remember it. Asking a slightly different question over time (verbal iteration) will ruin this process!
Here is the process. Warmly welcome each person first by saying his or her name and then immediately follow with your single question. As people join the call, keep your focus 100% on the person answering the question and politely stop anyone from interrupting them. Once the person is done speaking, thank them and then welcome others to the call and say, the question I’m asking everyone is “What is one thing you need from our call today?” Tom said he needs (x), Bridgette said she needs (y), and Gunter needs (z). Maria and John, great to have here today, “What is one thing you need from our call today?”
As people share, you are connecting everyone to some aspect of the call agenda AND you are finding out crucial information as to what will make this call worthwhile to each person. Building based on this connection immediately gets everyone mentally focused on the call.
HINT: Now all you have to do is make sure each person gets what he or she wanted from the call!
Contrast this approach with the more common welcome of “how are you?” or “how is your day going?” These two questions can and do lead you in a variety of ways that has nothing to do with the focus of your call.
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Shameless Plug: Check out my audio CD training sets and you’ll find lots of simple and easy to apply tips like this to help you dramatically boost the effectiveness and productivity of your conference calls.
Posted by Byron Van Arsdale
Creator of Executive Conference Call Leadership
ConferenceCallTraining.com
