Part of being a successful Conversational Marketing Expert (CME) at Incept is the ability to effectively create imagery and successful calls to action with voice inflection. Voice inflection serves as the brush that paints the conversational picture with vocally emphasized words or phrases. It is a technique, which, if mastered, allows one to say much more with less! In the world of tele-recruitment (recruiting blood donors over the phone), such a technique is also reliable to indicate call-to-action items within a call.
What are the keys to good voice inflection, though?
Recently, I was trained to become a Program Results Coach at Incept. It is a position in which I help my fellow Conversational Marketing™ Experts (CMEs) become better at their jobs, and keep them on the path to success. Part of that success is being able to recognize good voice inflection techniques. The coaching class at Incept is led by our Vice President of Employee Results, Dave Walter. He is one of the company’s most recognizable faces and is an advocate of making employees better.
He challenged us to take apart this sentence and see how it changes by emphasizing different words within it. That sentence was the following:
“I said I didn’t take the money.”
My other colleagues and I sat around the conference room table and thought about the metamorphosis of the sentence. We would say it out loud and stress different parts of its structure. Lo and behold, it would change in emphasis.
An example of this is to simply stress with voice inflection the “I said” of the sentence structure.
“I said, I didn’t take the money.”
Do you see how the tone changes just by implying emphasis elsewhere? Can you feel how it now implies directly that the subject of this sentence did not take the money? It’s fascinating how you can stress the meaning of such a small group of words by using different vocal techniques.
Without voice inflection, or even practices like these to help us distinguish good voice inflection and how to easily build it up, our jobs would be considerably harder. For as much as the average Conversational Marketing™ Expert (CME) speaks, good voice inflection techniques cannot only help them sound more interesting to donors, but also express call-to-action items in the script before even asking the donor!
What are some other ways you can practice voice inflection techniques?