Lesson Info
6. Internal vs External
Lessons
Course Introduction
01:34 2Communication in a Business
04:10 34 Communication Tools
06:15 4Developing Your SOP
02:23 5Urgent vs Non Urgent
06:02 6Internal vs External
02:51 7Synchronous vs Asynchronous
11:47 8Communication Cadences
06:03Lesson Info
Internal vs External
Now the second sort of slice of the pie here, is internal versus external communication. Same idea. We're gonna do this as an exercise. We're gonna identify the types of communication that you do that are internal, and the types that are external. And the purpose here, of course the general purpose is to improve both, but a big part of this is identification; tracking, awareness, to see how much time we're really spending on internal versus external. And again, there is no right or wrong answer here. This is not a judgment thing. It depends on your business. You may have a business where you never speak to people outside of the business. You just work internally, and that's totally fine if that's what the business is. But this is, for you personally, to sort of write this down. These are the types of internal versus external. So internal might be sales meetings with the sales team. Maybe we're having a daily standup, a quarterly update meeting. Maybe we are having a end-of-week retrosp...
ective, if you do the scrum method, for example. External is probably gonna be things like customer service issues, sales calls, talks with vendors, whatever those might be. Once we do that, and again, getting these out on paper is really powerful, 'cause now we can start to look at, okay, vendors. How am I communicating with vendors for the most part? Well, a lot of them are just kind of like texting with us. Well, that's a real problem, right? Because what if the person that texts with them regularly is not in? That's not a transferable type of communication. Internally, it's like, well, it looks like I'm spending about half my day sitting in that conference room, having back to back to back meetings. That could be a problem. (laughs) So, by identifying those things, and again looking at the communication SOP and thinking about bridging the internal versus external. So we're having all these communications that we're doing with outside vendors. We're doing that in multiple different platforms. We're also talking to customer service people. Some people are calling, and some people are doing live chat, where is all that going? And then we need to sort of compress all of those, and now bring those to the team internally. How are we doing that? It's extremely powerful to sort of shine that light again on this one, and see where you're spending your time. Because once we break it down that way, now we can start to look at the inherent inefficiencies that exist in those various types of communication. So just as we did before, with urgent versus non-urgent, same idea. Take a piece of paper, two columns or boxes, one is internal versus one is external, and try to write down five to ten different types of communication. Again, it's things like communicating with vendors externally, customer service, sales. Maybe you have a sister company that you work with. That one, right? Internal is gonna be those sales meetings, talking with a bookkeeper, partner, whatever they might be. Brainstorming, quarterly updates, and write those all down. Try to do five to ten to begin the process of that internal audit of your communication.
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Ratings and Reviews
Ahmed Mostafa
I gained a clear understanding of the distinctions between synchronous and asynchronous communication techniques, as well as the best tools to use for each.