Vocal Power: Strike the Right Chord for Business Advantage

Programme Director - Poll Moussoulides

What do Whoopi Goldberg, Anna Friel, and Pierce Brosnan all have in common with hundreds of Irish sales and marketing people?

a) they rely heavily on the quality of their voices to make a living and;

b) they have all been voice trained by Poll Moussoulides, the only voice coach on this island dedicated to training the business sector.

Moussoulides began his working life as an actor, and was later appointed voice coach to the Gaiety School of Acting and the Faculty of Theatre and Drama at Trinity College, Dublin. Since then, he’s worked on 35 feature films in Ireland and Britain, and coached hundreds of business people, from CEOs to call centre staff. In 2002 he founded and is Director of Voice Coach, and is also currently Programme Director of Voice and Vocal Communications courses with High Performance.

Poll is constantly amazed at the virtual absence of voice training among Irish executives. This is a rather obvious lacking in areas like sales or call centre staff, but what many people do not realise is that the effect that good vocal communication can have on everyday tasks and, in the longer run, on career success. And that applies regardless of where you work, whether it be general management, human resources, marketing, finance, IT, and so on.

The most obvious example of the need for voice training is where you are regularly asked – or believe you may be expected – to deliver a formal presentation. This can be a PowerPoint slide show or the keynote address at a conference – whether the occasion, it is the clarity and power of your speaking voice that will win the day for your organisation, not the graphics on the screen beside you.

Even in this age of e-mails and texts, we rely on our voices for the bulk of our workplace communication, and the more important the task, the less likely we are to use electronic means. For instance, ask yourself when you last relied on e-mail to communicate information of critical sensitivity, rather than visiting the other person or picking up the telephone.

So why is so little effort or training devoted to this vital executive capability? Poll reckons it is probably due to the fact that we take our vocal communication for granted – after all, it’s something most of us are born with. But what we fail to realise, he says, is that our voices are designed for personal, not professional, use.

“Most of us can run, but we’d be foolish to think we can run a marathon without training for it. Likewise, if we’re meeting an important potential customer, or making a vital presentation, it would be foolish to expect our normal, everyday voice to do the job” says Poll.

“The voice is a series of muscles, and sudden or sustained bursts of vocal energy without preparation, can create serious vocal health issues”, he continues. “This means that, without training, the salesperson’s job becomes more difficult than it should be, and less productive than it ought to be. Ultimately, the lack of voice training impacts on the bottom line, in terms of higher costs and unrealised sales and marketing potential. “

Poll stresses that modern and effective voice training is not about elocution or accent, but maximising your entire communication effectiveness. The research shows that it’s not merely what you say, but how you say it, that determines the impact your message will have on your audience.

If there’s a key difference between ‘traditional’ elocution and contemporary voice coaching, he says, it’s that the former is about the speaker, while the latter is about the audience – and all successful leaders in business and politics know that it’s the audience that comes first!

A good example of this concept is the modern day call centre, where conventional training usually concentrates on the technical knowledge and skills needed to sell the product, or help the customer. This might help keep computers working efficiently, but it totally overlooks that human nature is such that we prefer to be assisted by humans, who sound like humans, and are willing to listen to and understand us. In essence, if the people you have at the customer interface – i.e. the telephone / sales presentation – fail to make full use of the voice medium, then an opportunity to enhance the public’s perception of your organisation is lost.

This is more than mere conjecture. A study conducted in the 1970s by the University of Pennsylvania found that 38% of the total effect on a listener is accounted for by the sound of the speaker’s voice, i.e., tone, pace, pitch and volume. 55% is visual and only 7% is verbal. However is you remove the visual aspect of communication – as in call centres, customer service and tele-sales - the sound of the speaker’s voice becomes a massive 84% and only 16% is comprised of speech, or the actual words and the factual data they convey.

Essentially, Poll says, this means that the voice your audience listens to in the course of a formal address, or which your customer hears at the end of the line, is the ‘window’ you present your public. It’s the aural equivalent of a shop front, and, like the High Street retail outlet, it had better be good if it’s to win the minds, hearts, and custom of the passer-by.

For further information please contact Loretto Mara at 01 853 2215, loretto@highperformance.ie

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