Communication Strategies for Small Businesses

Communication has always been an easy target when it comes to identification of possibilities to explain various problems. This observation seems to apply equally whether we are talking about individuals or businesses, but the discussion here is intended to deal primarily with small businesses. Business communication has a long list of areas which can cause difficulties, and one of them is knowing what everyone is talking about if they refer to communications. Certainly one possibility will always be a reference to email and cell phones, but those should be thought of as tools and not functional communication strategies.

Peter Drucker made the following evaluation of communication, and this comment is certainly supportive of the viewpoint expressed here that communication is essentially a problem waiting to happen:

"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place."

If anyone doubts that business communication is subject to constant difficulties, here are three areas worth examining in detail:

• Business Negotiations
• Teamwork
• Business Proposals

An excellent starting point for evaluating whether business problems exist or not is to ask a series of questions. Ultimately one question will lead to another, and before you know it the proof will often appear in the resulting answers obtained from this Socratic method process.

To illustrate, here are some suggested questions to use as the investigative basis for examining whether the three business communication areas noted above (proposals, teamwork and negotiating) should be a potential cause for concern within a company:

• What is negotiable? Is everything negotiable?
• Do we rely on positive ethics or negative ethics to guide our teams?
• Does our company use business proposal writing effectively?
• Do we have effective and experienced negotiators?
• For our company, what business development strategies are better than business proposals?

One of the communication methods that is relevant to all of the above areas and questions is writing. The increased usage of email and cell phones has seemingly changed how writing is used by both individuals and businesses. One communication area in which writing should not really have been changed or reduced significantly is business proposal writing. Nevertheless there has been a steady downward trend in the use of business proposals by small businesses. Many observers have suggested that this is due in part to changing technology. Perhaps some small business owners do view the proposal process as old-fashioned. But unless a company has an excess of successful and effective business development strategies for producing new sales opportunities, writing business proposals deserves to be reviewed thoroughly.