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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