Adaptive Listening®
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Uncover a better way to listen that goes beyond active listening and paying attention. Learn about the way you prefer to listen, and adapt to meet the needs of others.
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Why Communication Skills Training is Right for Your Team
Most organizations don’t go looking for communication training on a calm week. Something stalls first: a quarter of deals that won’t close, a leadership change nobody knows how to announce, a team that’s lost the people who used to build the slides and give the talks. It shows up as a sales problem or a staffing problem, and underneath it’s usually a communication problem.
Here are four situations we see across organizations of every size, what’s driving each one, and what to build so it doesn’t happen twice.
Jump to section:
- Deals are stalling before they close
- Your organization hit a fork in the road
- Too much work runs through too few people
- Teams aren’t aligned on what matters most
- How Duarte can help
1. Deals are stalling before they close
Your sales team has ambitious goals for the coming fiscal year, and it’s falling behind. Pipeline is moving into drought conditions, and existing clients seem allergic to expanding their commitments. One rep finally landed a meeting after months of building the relationship, and the client walked away uninterested even though the rep stuck to the script. Another pair ran an on-site negotiation that stayed on-brand the whole way and still fizzled before a contract was signed. Meanwhile, the team keeps hitting the phones and sending emails that list every feature in your product suite.
With all this effort, why isn’t anything closing?
How communication skills training can help close deals
Look at what the team is leading with. Every call and email is some version of here’s why our product is great, and none of them start with the customer’s problem. A script feels safe, but it can’t hear what a particular buyer is worried about. The fix has two parts: listen better, then tell the story back.
Adapt your listening
Putting the customer first starts with the listening skills that surface their actual pain points. Adaptive Listening™ moves a team past active listening toward meeting what each speaker needs, and it starts with the S.A.I.D. Listening Style Finder™, which shows each rep the style they default to. From there, reps learn when to Support, Advance, Immerse, or Discern, so they ask the follow-up question that brings the real problem to the surface. That’s the heart of active listening training for sales teams.
For sales teams, that means noticing cues, catching frustration, and drilling down tactfully until it’s clear how the product could help. These five listening habits to improve your sales show what that looks like in practice. Trust built this way brings repeat business and good-faith negotiations, the two areas this team needs most. Once the team understands the customer’s problem, the next step is telling a story that solves it.
Tell compelling data stories
A data story is exactly what it sounds like: a story told with data. The hard part is choosing which threads to pull and how to frame them, so the numbers show a buyer the risk of standing still and the opportunity in moving. Reflecting the customer’s pain points back as a story, with the product inside it, helps the buyer make the decision. According to a working paper by Harvard Business School, “[t]he average impact of stories on beliefs fades by 33% over the course of a day, but by 73% for statistics.” For buyers who take a pitch back to their leadership for approval, the story is what resurfaces in that conversation.
In short, stories linger.
Together, listening and data storytelling put the sales team on a better path, and the habits keep paying off as they spread to the rest of the organization.
2. Your organization hit a fork in the road
Your leadership team had a falling out with a key executive, and major changes are coming. This leader is foundational, and often responsible for many of the big picture visions that, for decades, inspired confidence in the brand. However, their grasp on current market conditions was slipping and confidence in their guidance waning. After prolonged talks, a decision was reached to part ways. But the kicker is: This leader was also the voice of the organization. In their absence, it’s unclear who will assume the mantle of speaking to customers, clients, stakeholders, and employees. Thankfully, the news is still contained within the C-suite, but it’s time to make an announcement.
What’s your next move?
How communication training helps leaders handle a turning point
Turning points are stressful. But they also provide opportunities for reinvention or to reaffirm core values. Think Bob Dylan plugging in at the Newport Folk Festival or Apple choosing to sunset the iPhone’s headphone jack. Such moments can signal the end of an era while paving the way for the start of something new. In the above scenario, there’s nothing to warrant crisis communications since the leader in question isn’t exiting under poor circumstances. Rather, this is an opportunity to shine a light on a new path the company is taking as they look toward the future. To make the transition land, the remaining leaders need to tell the story of where the company is going, which is the work of Change Communication Training for Leaders.
Choose the right speeches, stories, ceremonies, and symbols
In Illuminate, Nancy Duarte and Patti Sanchez show how leaders use speeches, stories, ceremonies, and symbols to move people through change, with examples from corporate and non-profit settings.
For the example above, our fictional C-suite could take this moment to reassert the company’s pledge to customers and external stakeholders, while announcing the soft launch of a new campaign or initiative. As the book outlines, this can be a symbolic gesture that’s meant to signal a turning of the page, or a celebration of the exiting leader’s time spent with the organization. How the situation is handled remains an open-ended question. However, there’s ample precedent to choose from regarding how prior leaders rose to similar occasions.
3. Too much work runs through too few people
After a round of layoffs, your organization has several major projects moving through development, but day-to-day operations are grinding to a halt. After running some quick internal diagnostics, you find that multiple workflows now converge on the same people. This is creating bottlenecks in revisions and approval. Digging deeper, the reasoning becomes clear: Only a few colleagues remain who command exceptional presentation and design skills. Beyond serving as brand representatives, they’re also responsible for knowing how those guidelines should appear visually and in front of a live audience. In short, greenlighting the work of others and getting the word out about your organizational accomplishments is at risk of coming to a standstill.
How can you remove the bottleneck and get productivity back up and running?
How Team and Departmental Skills Training Can Help
When only a few people can design the deck or give the talk, every approval runs through them. The way out is to spread those skills across teams. Nothing replaces a lifelong designer’s or a gifted speaker’s experience overnight, and design and delivery are still skills people can learn and keep. That’s why communication training for whole teams removes the chokepoint.
Put design within reach of every team
Start with brand. Setting the right colors, fonts, layouts, and templates takes real expertise. Once they’re set, staying inside them comes down to an eye for design. Teams can learn to think like a designer and apply visual best practices to decks and Slidedocs®. When design sense is standard across the organization, more people can review and approve work, and production keeps moving with fewer hands. Work gets better across the board as more teams know what effective design looks like.
Give more people the confidence to speak for the brand
The same goes for delivery. Everyone at an organization should know its values and goals, and saying them well in front of an audience is a separate skill. Presentation delivery training teaches speakers to set a clear goal for a talk, connect with any audience, and leave the impression they intended, so more people can represent the company at trade shows, conferences, and company gatherings.
Spreading design and delivery skills keeps talent from getting siloed and productivity from stalling. It also builds the habits that keep teams aligned, which is where the last situation comes in.
4. Teams aren’t aligned on what matters most
Your organization has several major projects heading to market. Each has moving parts attached to each rollout that must be coordinated and approved. However, as due dates approach, consensus around how key tasks should be prioritized, or who’s responsible for what, is muddied. Some teams are even misaligned on specifics within tasks, creating even more confusion. As a remote-first company, you’re already shelling out cash for several project management tools. Plus, your tech stack is fully integrated across departments. And yet, there’s still a wide disconnect between teams around both content and execution.
How can you ensure your next project rollout goes smoother? What needs to change?
Why project tools can’t keep teams aligned on their own
Project tools track who owns what. They can’t make sure every team understands the same goal the same way. When each team describes the launch a little differently, priorities drift, approvals stall, and details slip between channels.
Give every team the same story
Alignment starts with a Duarte Big Idea™: one sentence that states what the project is for and what’s at stake if it slips. When every team plans from that same big idea, prioritization gets simpler, because there’s a clear test for what matters. Listening keeps the story honest as it moves between teams, design makes it easy to share, and leaders who repeat it consistently give everyone the same reason to act.
With coordinated training, design gets crisper, recommendations come backed by data, and audiences stay with you. Details are less likely to slip through the cracks, and major projects stay on track.
How Duarte can help
Now for the tough question: Does any of this sound familiar?
If it does, start by finding out where your organization stands. Our Storytelling Maturity Scale scores your organization’s communication from 1 to 5 in about three minutes and points to the specific steps to take next.
Little about these situations is unique to one organization. Most teams could listen more closely, design more clearly, and tell a more compelling story, and customers feel the difference when they do.
Duarte has spent nearly 40 years in the rooms where leaders get tested: the keynote, the board update, the reorg announcement, the first all-teams meeting in a new role. We work alongside your leaders on the moments in front of them, so they get sharper each time and build the capability to handle the next one without us.
You don’t need to sort out what kind of help you need before you reach out. Talk with a Duarte specialist about your leaders and your goals, and we’ll help you figure out where to start.
