Usually, something happens before a company starts looking for communication training. A sales team loses a deal they thought they should have won. A manager watches someone give a presentation and realizes it wasn’t nearly as good as it should have been. Or maybe a technically brilliant employee gets in front of senior leadership and suddenly can’t explain what they know.

Whatever it is, at some point someone says, “We need communication training.”

Maybe you do. But that still doesn’t tell you what kind of training you need or even what the actual problem is because saying someone needs to communicate better is a little like saying your car isn’t running right. That’s useful information, but you probably want to know what’s wrong before you start replacing parts. The same thing applies here.

What Happened That Made You Start Looking for Training?

This is probably where I would start. What happened?

Not what class are you looking for or how many hours do you have available. What happened inside the company that made someone decide this had become a problem?

Sometimes the answer is obvious. You watched the team present and it wasn’t very good. Maybe a client chose a competitor and part of the feedback was that their presentation was better. Or your salespeople know the product inside and out, but they aren’t doing a particularly good job explaining why the customer should care.

Other times, it might be managers struggling to get their teams behind decisions or technical people having trouble explaining complicated information to people who don’t share their expertise.

Those may all look like communication problems from the outside, but they aren’t necessarily the same problem. Which is why I wouldn’t start with the training. I’d start with what happened.

Where Is the Communication Actually Breaking Down?

Consider two employees. The first one knows exactly what they want to say. Their recommendation makes sense. They’ve done the research and they know the subject better than anyone else in the room.

Then they have to present it. They start rushing. They stop making eye contact. They talk to the screen. Their voice gets quieter and suddenly someone who sounded completely confident five minutes earlier doesn’t look confident at all.

The second employee has no problem standing in front of the room. They’re comfortable. They make eye contact. They can talk to anyone. The problem is that fifteen minutes into the presentation, nobody knows what their point is.

Both people have communication problems. But they don’t have the same communication problem. The first person probably needs help with delivery. The second person probably needs help deciding what to say, what to leave out and how to organize the message so everyone else can follow it.

If you send both of them to the same training without figuring that out first, you may be solving the wrong problem for one of them.

Is It Really a Presentation Problem?

Sometimes it absolutely is. If someone knows what they want to say but struggles when they have to stand up and say it in front of other people, that’s a pretty good indication that presentation skills are part of the issue. You can usually see it.

They rush. They avoid eye contact. They read the slides. They speak too quietly. They lose their place or look uncomfortable the second everyone’s attention turns toward them.

They know their job. They understand the information. The problem shows up when they have to present what they know to someone else.

That’s where presentation skills training starts to make sense because now we’ve identified the thing that actually needs to improve. But that’s only one possibility.

What If They Can’t Explain What They Know?

This is a completely different problem and one I’ve seen happen with some very smart people. They aren’t nervous. They may be perfectly comfortable presenting. Give them a room full of people and they can talk all day.

Unfortunately, sometimes they do.

They know so much about the subject that everything feels important. So, they give you the background, then they explain the research, then they tell you how they arrived at the recommendation. Then they explain three exceptions just in case one of them becomes important later. By the time they’re finished, everyone knows they’re an expert, but nobody knows what they’re supposed to do.

That’s not necessarily a presentation delivery problem. It’s a message problem. The person needs to get better at figuring out what the audience actually needs to know, what they can leave out and how to make the point easier to understand. That’s a very different kind of training need.

Is It a Sales Problem or a Communication Problem?

This one gets interesting because if a sales team isn’t closing enough business, the natural reaction is that they need sales training and maybe they do. But before I sent them to sales training, I would want to know where they’re losing the sale.

Are they struggling to find opportunities? Are they doing a poor job qualifying them? Do they not know how to ask for the business? Or are they getting the meeting, sitting in front of the customer and then failing to explain why the customer should choose them? Because those aren’t the same thing.

A salesperson can know the product, understand the customer, know the competition and have every closing technique they’ve ever been taught and still lose the deal to someone who does a better job explaining why their solution matters.

At that point, teaching them another closing technique probably isn’t going to solve the problem. They may not have a sales problem. They may have a communication problem that’s costing them sales.

The Same Thing Happens With Managers

A good employee gets promoted because they’re good at their job. They know the operation. They understand the customers. They solve problems. People trust them and management thinks they’re ready for more responsibility. Then we give them more responsibility.

Now they have to lead meetings. They have to explain decisions. They have to give feedback. They have to deal with someone who isn’t performing. They have to get people behind decisions they may not have made themselves.

Six months later, they’re struggling and someone decides they need leadership training. Again, maybe they do, but look at where they’re struggling.

If most of the problems happen when they have to explain something, listen, influence someone, give feedback or have a difficult conversation, you may be looking at a communication problem that happens to be showing up in a leadership position. That distinction matters because now you have a much better idea of what you’re actually trying to develop.

Who Actually Needs to Get Better?

Another thing I would look at is who really needs the training. If you have a team of twenty people, the answer doesn’t automatically have to be all twenty. Maybe five of those people are presenting to customers every week. Maybe three are about to move into management. Maybe you have two technical people who are increasingly being asked to present recommendations to senior leadership.

Or maybe there is someone on the team who doesn’t have a leadership title at all, but everyone already listens to them. Those people may create a much bigger return from development than someone whose job rarely requires them to explain, influence or present anything to anyone else. So instead of starting with, “How do we train twenty people?” I would ask a different question. Who would make the biggest difference if they got better?

What Do You Actually Want Them to Do Differently?

This may be the most important question in the whole process. What should be different when the training is over?

“They need to communicate better” isn’t enough. Do your salespeople need to present recommendations to clients more effectively? Or, do your managers need to handle difficult conversations without avoiding them?

Do your technical people need to explain complicated information to senior leadership without burying everyone in detail? Or ask, do employees need to stop reading their slides and start talking to the people in the room? Now we’re getting somewhere.

Once you can describe what someone should be able to do differently, you have a much better chance of figuring out what kind of development will actually help them do it.

Don’t Start With How Many Hours You Have

This is another place where companies can get ahead of themselves.

“We only have an hour.”

“We can probably give you half a day.”

“We can’t have everyone away from work for two days.”

Those are all legitimate concerns. People have jobs to do, and companies can’t stop operating every time someone needs training. But I still wouldn’t start there.

First figure out what you’re trying to change. If you’re introducing an idea or giving everyone a common framework, an hour may be plenty. But if you’re trying to change the way someone actually communicates, now they probably need to practice. They need feedback. Then they need another opportunity to apply that feedback and try it again. That’s going to take more time. So, the amount of time shouldn’t determine the problem you’re going to solve. The problem should help determine how much time you need.

The Training Should Follow the Problem

At Effective Presentations, we’ve worked with more than 100,000 professionals since 2004, and companies come to us with different versions of basically the same request.

“We need our people to communicate better.”

The problem is that “better” can mean a lot of different things. Sometimes it means presentation delivery. Sometimes people need help figuring out what belongs in the message and how to structure it. Sometimes it’s leadership communication. Sometimes someone needs individual coaching because the problem is very specific to them.

Sometimes the company doesn’t really have a one-workshop problem at all. They have people at different levels of the organization who need different communication skills, which means it makes more sense to think about development over six months or a year.

But you don’t know any of that when the conversation starts. You have to figure out what happened first.

Where is the communication breaking down? Who needs to get better? What are they doing now that’s getting in the way? And what do you want them to be able to do differently when you’re finished?

Once you can answer those questions, then start looking at training. Because the real question isn’t, “what communication training should we buy?” It’s, “what do our people need to be able to do better?” That’s where I would start.