You Can't Sell Your Audience Unless You Do This One Thing

Most people think that just because they are speaking to a larger group of people when they are “on stage” both literally and figuratively that the audience will be sold when they are finished giving their presentation or speech. This type of thinking will definitely prove to be the fallacy that will kill any chance of you being an effective and persuasive speaker, but truly this is how most people think! For example once every quarter my church is looking to solicit members on their capitol campaign contributions so what they do is to have a representative or board member of the campaign come up to the podium during mass and make their plea to members to give. So all I see that they are doing here is making their presence in front of a captive audience with a little plea to contribute to fund that’s it! No hook, no story, no close! Now of course they will get a god bit of donations by default but there was no selling whatsoever. Similarly I know that you have sat through many company presentations as have I where someone will come up to the front of the room with their power point, give their title and regurgitate their presentation to the audience thinking that just because they were captive in front of an audience for 10 to15 minutes that they sold the audience, NO this does not happen! The whole idea to pitching a presentation to a large group is to sell your idea, plan or cause right?

This failure of not being effective when you only have one shot is due to not having a well constructed presentation. So how can you be sure to make yourself an effective speaker in front of an audience? There is a very simple formula that if used properly will be able to capture then sell your audience successfully, notice I said CAPTURE then sell. Capture is the first step and this is the ability to be able to “hook” your audience at the beginning of the presentation of speech. A hook is what initially draws or baits the audience to listen for more to come or a hook is designed as a mechanism for a solution that the audience came to remedy or improve an issue they came to resolve. A good example would be a first line manager giving a presentation to upper management on productivity improvement. A insufficient hook would be “How we will Improve Productivity in 2018” Good hook or title that would definitely get attention would be “How improving communication within your company will lead to Increased Productivity and decreased waste” I think that you would agree the latter opening of a presentation would get attention and have the audience “waiting for more”. The second thing is to make sure that you have three point of interest as an outline that you will be covering – once again these three points should be additional hooks with explanations of pure examples that will back up of substantiate your original title or hook. After you have sold the audience with your three points you will close and I mean close your audience by simply reiterating your three points and tying them back to the title for example you will say something like this “ so by Creating winning strategies among different management styles , Improving communication between teams to streamline your processes and , properly utilizing each individuals team members strengths will lead for efficient production you will be able Improve Communication Within Your Company that will Lead to Increased Productivity and Decreased Waste.

If you want to be successful the next time you deliver your next presentation use this simple formula in order to actually “Sell not Tell” your audience for the outcome that you want.