Planning for Winning Conference Calls

A great way to connect with team members who live and work in different cities different countries or clients spread out around the world is a conference call.

Here are some tips on how to make the most out of your conference calls.

Now we’ve already covered.

Please don’t use a speaker phone.

You’re going to get tired of me saying that some of you will write in the reviews.

You talked about not using speaker phones and yet people still do it.

I want to give you some other tips.

Realize a conference call is a business meeting and it deserves the same amount of planning and respect of any other meeting.

Too often people just Oh let’s just hop on a conference call and chew it out.

Yet they wouldn’t ask people to drive across town and spend an hour meeting with no agenda.

So the first item on your checklist should be have an agenda know exactly what you want to come across with what you want to accomplish in any conference call.

Have some structure to it.

You’ll come across much more effective.

Also realize if other people are talking to you in other cities they likely are going to be on speaker phone because we can’t control them.

If there are multiple people in the same room because of that it’s going to be harder for you to hear.

Sometimes two people will talk at once.

They’ll be cross talk.

It’ll be much harder.

So you’ve got to actively listen.

And on the one hand you don’t want to interrupt but you do want to interrupt quickly if you did not hear something if you didn’t understand something.

So what I would recommend is relatively loudly saying excuse me I couldn’t hear the last 20 seconds the audio dropped out or I couldn’t hear because of the crosstalk.

Could you please repeat you do it like that.

It’s not going to seem like rude interrupting and people will actually appreciate the fact that you’re trying to get the ideas conveyed and that you’re trying to really understand them.

Now sometimes conference calls can get long and before you know it you’re checking email.

I’ve done it before myself.

You’re checking Facebook.

Don’t do it.

Really focus.

Listen carefully.

Be thinking visualizing what the person is talking about.

Ask questions when there’s a pause when there is a time you don’t want to be interrupting people on the phone whether it’s a conference call or any other call but when they’ve said something and you’re thinking about it it is appropriate to summarize.

To paraphrase to make sure you’re getting it.

Show them you’re listening.

Show them that you’re understanding.

So you do periodically want to paraphrase summarize.

I also highly recommend taking detailed notes.

We talked about that in the previous lecture.

Take notes of any important phone call for business whether it’s a conference call or anything else.

But here’s something most people don’t do but it will make your conference calls much more effective.

Not only take your notes but then summarize the meeting from your perspective.

Summarize what you think everyone is supposed to do after that and email it to all the participants.

Whether that’s your official job whether anyone asked you to do that or not.

Everyone will be impressed bosses colleagues customers clients you know who else this helps you.

We’re all human beings we all forget things so the sheer act of writing it down and then typing it proofing it and then hitting send email will make all the key ideas from that conference call really sink in to you much more firmly.

This will help.

It’s a little extra work but not much.

So please give it a try.