Author: Katie Coalson

Keep Your Audience Engaged With this Simple Trick

It’s hard to communicate what you’re offering if you can’t keep your audience’s attention for more than 10 minutes.  

Imagine you are getting ready to give a presentation. You walk into a conference room with 4-5 people, get out your laptop and begin your talk. You have all of their attention for a few minutes, but then you notice that you are starting to lose them around the 10 minute mark. They start checking their phones, looking out the window, or getting a glazed look in their eyes. What do you do?

In John Medina’s book, Brain Rules, he shares some insight about the attention span of our prospects and customers. After about 10 minutes, your audience’s attention starts plummeting, causing them to use extra effort and energy to stay with you. They desperately need something to be done in order to hook their attention and keep them engaged.

The Hook

The solution is ECS (emotionally competent stimuli), or a hook, which triggers a response towards the speaker and captures their attention again. Hooks can be so compelling that they push you through that 10 minute barrier and keep your audience engaged throughout your whole talk. There are 3 principles that can make a hook successful.

  1. Trigger an emotion. Whether it’s fear, laughter or nostalgia, emotions work well not only to hook attention, but it also helps your audience retain more information. Telling stories is a great way to do this, especially if you share a personal story about yourself and tie it to something that is important for your audience. 
  2. Make it relevant. Audiences can be really good at detecting disorganization, and you don’t want them to think you are trying to just entertain them to keep their attention instead of providing valuable information. If you make your hook relevant to the provided content, your audience will feel engaged rather than entertained. 
  3. Place hooks evenly throughout your presentation. There is flexibility with where you can place your hooks during your talk. It’s best to add one about every 8-10 minutes, but you can also start with a forward thinking hook, or end with a hook that summarizes your material and repeats an important aspect of your talk.

There are several different techniques you can use to hook your audience’s attention. You can tell a story, use props or use number or word plays. When creating your hooks, always start with the end goal in mind. What problem are you trying to solve for your prospect? Think of examples that relate to their problems or goals and tie that in to the hooks that you use.  

Now imagine giving your 60 minute sales presentation, and you’ve been able to keep your audience engaged and attentive the whole time. Did you solve an important problem in your prospect’s world?  Did you communicate value? There are always ways to improve your selling conversations. Now that you know how to keep your audience’s attention, take some time to fine tune your messaging.

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We understand that it can be difficult to know where to start when improving your sales messaging. That’s why we’ve created a Sales Conversation Roadmap “Cheat Sheet” that you can download here.

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Please leave your feedback in the comments section.

5 Techniques to Hook Your Audience’s Attention

Your audience needs your help to keep their attention on you.

There is something interesting about these three numbers:

70

60

20

In the book, Brain Rules, John Medina shares some interesting data about the attention span of our prospects and customers. In the first 3-5 minutes of a sales conversation, your audience retains 70% of the information you share. During the next 60 minutes of the conversation, only 20% of the information is retained. Unfortunately, the last 60 minutes of the conversation is usually the most important content.

Your audience’s attention span is only about 10 minutes long, but there is a way to hook their attention so they remember the important points you are delivering. Here are 5 techniques you can use to hook your prospect’s attention.

1. Storytelling

It’s important to break the ice and build rapport during a sales conversation, and storytelling is a great way to do that. When telling a personal story, you tend to be more animated and relaxed, and this grabs the audience’s attention. There are a few steps on how to build a story that your prospect will remember and relate to.

  1. Start with the end in mind. What’s the problem that you’re going to solve in your prospect’s world?
  2. What is at the root of that problem?
  3. Find a similar problem that shows up in your world.
  4. Tell a story around that and how you were able to resolve it.

Keep your story about 2-3 minutes long and end with a landing statement saying something like, “It’s kind of like the situation you are facing”, then draw a clear parallel to the story and business problem/solution. By doing this, you have spiked their attention and communicated how you can help them in a way they can remember.

2. Number Plays

When giving a presentation, write 3 numbers on the board and say, “There’s an interesting story around these three numbers.” The audience immediately starts to try to figure out what those numbers mean, creating intrigue and grabbing their attention. You can also use number plays while on the phone, or in a blog post as I did at the beginning of this post.

Just like with storytelling, you always start with the end in mind when creating your number play. Identify 3 numbers in your story that relate to the point you are trying to make. You can use number plays in several different scenarios, whether it’s talking about 3 of your company credentials, 3 problems companies experience in your prospect’s industry, or 3 percentages that support a point you are making.

3. Word Plays

Similar to number plays, you can write 3 words down on a board, and it creates the same kind of intrigue for the audience. Ask the audience, “What do these three words have in common?” This is unexpected and makes them try to figure out the riddle.

In creating your word play, think of what the point is you want to make, then find where that shows up in the world. When you tie that in to what you are offering the audience, they will remember that point going forward.

4. Props

A prop is a 3D object that reminds your prospect of a conversation that you’ve had around an important point. This is a great example of how a prop can be used in a sales scenario.

What’s the landing point you want to deliver? Find a prop that tells a story around that. Then when the audience sees that prop after your conversation or presentation, it triggers them to think about your main point.

5. You-Phrasing

In Michael Stanier’s book, The Coaching Habit, he mentions a study done around including the word “you” in math problems. Researchers found that when the word “you” was present, the questions needed to be repeated fewer times, and the problems were solved in a shorter amount of time with higher accuracy.

What does this mean in the sales world? The use of “you” engages the person you’re speaking to within a sales conversation more than “we” or “I” because you’re talking about them. The phrase, “I’m going to show you how to increase your sales” doesn’t have near the same impact as, “What if you could increase your sales?”. Find ways to use the word “you” in describing what their world would look like with your product or service by putting it in the front part of the sentence.

By using these techniques, you will be able to not only hold your audience’s attention longer, but they will also be able to retain more information and remember what you presented. Now the question is, did you communicate value in your messaging? Now that you know how to keep your audience’s attention, take some time to fine tune your messaging.

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We understand that it can be difficult to know where to start when improving your sales messaging. That’s why we’ve created a Sales Conversation Roadmap “Cheat Sheet” that you can download here.

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Please leave your feedback in the comments section.