The document provides tips for five essential business communication skills: using direct and indirect approaches in negative messages, developing marketing and sales messages, writing email messages, adapting a three-step writing process for instant messages, and planning research. Key recommendations include opening directly or with a buffer for bad news, understanding audience needs and competitors for marketing, making the subject line informative for emails, using a formal style for business IMs, and developing a problem statement and research questions to guide planning.

1. Five Essential
Business
Communication Skills
Rudy Guerrero

2. Using the Direct and Indirect
Approach in a negative
message
•
When using the direct approach in a negative message, it is crucial to open
with a clear statement of the bad news, while also providing reasoning and
closing in a respectful note.
•
Some advantages of the direct approach are:
• Makes a shorter message possible
• Allows audience to reach the main idea in less time
•
When using the indirect approach it is crucial to open with a buffer, while
providing reasoning and continuing with a clear statement of the bad news;
lastly, closing on a respectful note.
•
Some advantages of the indirect approach are:
• It eases the blow and helps readers accept the news
• Good example of audience-oriented communication

3. Developing Marketing and
Sales Messages
•
Assessing the Audience Needs:
• A successful marketing and sales message starts off with an understanding of
audience needs.
•
Analyzing Your Competition:
• This is important because marketing and sales messages always compete
with other companies messages trying to reach the same audience.
•
Determining Key Selling Points and Benefits:
• Selling points are the most attractive features of a product
• Benefits are the particular advantages purchasers can realize from those
features.
•
Anticipating Purchase Objections
• By identifying potential objections up front, you can craft your promotional
messages in ways that address those concerns.

4. Writing E-Mail Messages
• When approaching e-mail on the job, recognize that
business e-mail is a more formal medium.
• Subject line is one of the most important parts of an email:
• To capture your audience’s attention, make sure it is
informative and compelling
• Another good tip is to “tweetify” your opening lines to
the message to make them stand out.
• Grabbing the readers attention
• Lastly, avoid all types of emoticons for internal and
external communication when e-mailing.

5. Adapting Three-Step Process
for Successful IM
•
It is important to adapt the the three-step writing process when using
IM in a business setting.
•
When planning IM:
• An IM can be planned in much the same way you would plan for an oral
conversation.
• Planning can help deliver information in a coherent, complete way that
minimizes the number of individual messages required.
•
When writing an IM:
• As with e-mail, the appropriate writing style for business IM is more formal
than the style you would be accustomed to.
• Acronyms are also not a good idea
•
Lastly, completing IM:
• Only task when completing the message is to just scan the message to make
sure it is clear and complete with no errors.

6. Planning Your Research
•
Start by developing a problem statement that defines the
purpose for your research.
• The decision you need to make or the conclusion you need to reach
at the end
•
Next, is to identify the the information you need to make that
decision or reach that conclusion
•
Then, you can generate questions that will constitute your
research.
•
Some tips to avoid ethical lapses:
• Keep an open mind, document sources and give appropriate credit,
don’t distort information from your sources, and don’t misinterpret
who you are or what you intend to do with the research results