Beyond the Tech: Why Communication Is Your Most Valuable Consulting Skill

Here’s the thing: in IT consulting, being technically sharp is just the starting point. Everyone at the table knows their stuff. What actually sets people apart is being able to explain it in a way that clicks for whoever is listening.

Many people might think “I’ve been talking since I was a kid; I know how to communicate with people.” It’s important to remember that talking and communicating while not mutually exclusive are separate skills. Taking one’s gift of gab and turning it into something productive in a professional setting requires some conscious changes but will become second nature in no time.

Listen to and Learn Your Audience

Effective communication starts before you say a word. The first thing for anyone who wants to improve their communication skills should do is improve the way they listen. Communication is very rarely a one-way street and is almost always a conversation. In such conversations, you want to be sure you communicate in a style that matches the audience you’re engaging with.

Some clients have a loose culture that includes humor and casual remarks. Others value getting down to business and focused conversation. If you bring either of those energies to the other group, there might be a barrier of communication that causes you to be unsuccessful. This sort of adjustment is not always something that happens at the first meeting. Sometimes that first meeting is about learning this communication style but once you know it, it’s easy to adjust your own style for that continued professional partnership.

Understand Level of Expertise

As well as understanding a group’s style of communication, it’s important to understand their level of technical ability. Certain groups get really excited about details and specifics while others care more about the larger picture and how the details come together into a broader result. Understanding who your audience is and what they care about is key to helping you tailor your message.

For instance, if you need to talk to a group of executives about the benefits of switching a key aspect of the business to a new technology platform, it’s best to tailor your information to the aspects of that platform that relate to their daily lives. If this new platform supports a wider variety of coding languages and deployment pipeline options, going into the details of what those are likely won’t engage the audience. However, if you talk about how the platform creates development flexibility and a faster deployment pipeline so features can be more extensive and deployed faster, that will likely excite them as it relates to their goals. Then if you take the same material and try to adapt it to an audience of engineers and developers, they likely would be interested in the details of the platform and specifically what is supported.

There’s often a third audience worth preparing for: the end users or business stakeholders who aren’t technical and aren’t in the C-suite. For them, the framing is practical – “Here’s what changes from you day-to-day, and here’s why it’s better.”

Knowing your audience, how they communicate and what they care about is the foundation everything else is built on.

Create a Narrative

One of human’s oldest communication traditions is storytelling. A linear flow of information with sequiturs that connect one topic to another is a concept that is effectively hardwired into people from an early age. It’s a universal language that always engages, and while it might seem at first like it’s out of place in the world of business or technology, it’s a highly effective tool for ensuring any audience can engage with a topic.

The key is cause and effect. Your narrative doesn’t have to include made-up characters and backstories, but it should have a flow to it. Ideas should lead into one another. A common bit of storytelling advice is that a story should never have the structure of, “This happens and then this happens.” It should be more in line of, “This happens therefore this happens.” The “therefore” is the connective tissue that ensures your presentation isn’t just an assortment of ideas but rather a natural linear progression gracefully moving from one topic to another.

Take a common consulting scenario: “Our current systems are creating bottlenecks that slow down deployment – therefore developer hours are being lost to workarounds – therefore we’re falling behind on product velocity – therefore here’s what we’re proposing and why it solves the root problem.”

Use Examples and Visuals

Inside of that narrative, it’s also important to provide examples. The ideas we talk about in presentations can be either abstract or complex, often both. A way to ground a group is with concrete examples. Find ways to look at the current situation and how a topic relates to it. This is useful in meetings that involve two groups trying to understand an idea that maybe the other is unfamiliar with. Finding real world ways to relate that idea to what people already do creates that bridge of understanding that allows people to easily cross between reality and abstraction.

Visuals serve a similar function. Many people are visual learners meaning their minds remember and connect to images far easier than they do to words alone. It’s important to keep those visuals simple as a busy image can often distract more than it helps. Including those sorts of cues when presenting or communicating an idea can be the difference between understanding and miscommunication for many participants.

Varying communication tools – words, examples, visuals – widens the net that captures attention.

Open the Conversational Floor

Communication should always be a conversation. In day-to-day professional interactions and regular meetings, this is relatively easy to do. Groups are smaller which tends to facilitate easier back and forth when there’s only a few voices. The spotlight is shared between all participants, so the onus of communicating doesn’t rest on a sole presenter. But even in these smaller, more intimate groups, there is still room for improvement in allowing for conversation.

Don’t overlook the quieter voices in the room. Not every person within a conversation has equal confidence in sharing their perspective. To account for this, it’s important to engage that person and open the door for them to share when maybe they feel uncomfortable doing so themselves. Additionally, don’t just ask “Does everyone agree?” Ask if anyone sees it differently. Being the lone dissenting voice can be challenging in a group that otherwise is on the same page so encourage the thoughts that might challenge the consensus. This will often lead to alleviating someone’s concern or give an otherwise unthought of perspective that will lead to a strengthened core idea or concept.

Talk With, Not At

While intimate groups where conversation is the natural mode of communication are ideal, occasionally communication does require a spotlight. When presenting in an environment where all of the attention and responsibility of communication feels as if its on you, remember this can still be a conversation. Talk with your audience, not at them. Find ways for them to contribute to the topic and not just be passive listeners.

Interactive elements like polls and quizzes are a quick way to physically engage the audience in a topic. People love to share their opinions and to show their knowledge and learn new things. Leveraging the fact almost everyone always has a computer with them, whether that be laptop or just their phone, allows you to include digital engagement easily and seamlessly into any presentation. Opening the floor for questions, especially during a presentation, can also be a way to allow people to actively engage with the material and let them drive the direction of the conversation to the places that actively excited or interest them.

Always make it a conversation. Engagement isn’t a nice-to-have – it’s how trust gets built.

Conclusion

Talking is easy. Communicating – in a way that moves people, earns trust, and drives decision – is a skill.

Knowing one’s audience, their style of communication, and the level of detail that engages them is key. Varying your tools between speaking, examples and visuals will guarantee that all audience members feel like they are being catered to. And always keeping in mind communication should always be a conversation that will ensure engagement is your top priority.

Using these tools and tips will not just improve your effectiveness as a communicator but also make your audience feel more engaged and communicative, creating more opportunities for growth and understanding.

Thanks for reading!

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Tyler Shobe
Salesforce Certified Administrator
Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder
Account Engagement Specialist
BillingPlatform Partner Pro Certification
RadixBay Salesforce Consultant