How to get audience attention every time you pitch!
Grabbing Audience Attention is Step 1
How do you get your audience’s attention? Next, how do you engage your audience? Finally, how do you get them to want to hear more? The rules apply if you’re selling, pitching, or speaking regardless of the situation.
The most common opening used by over 80% of people pitching starts with “my name is, my company’s name is and this is what we do”. B O R I N G — a complete waste of valuable time.
The standard rule of thumb is you only have 8 to 10 seconds to capture the audience’s attention. In today’s high paced digital world you’re lucky if you have eight seconds.
Your opening depends on the strength of your voice and the message you could send in a tweet. That’s right, a 140 character message. A memorable 140 character message that makes an emotional connection with the audience. So, how do you craft a succinct 140 character message?
Steve Jobs was a master that. He didn’t focus on what Apple did or how Apple did it. Job’s focus was on WHY Apple did what they did — the value and benefits to others — in the form of an emotional story targeted to a specific audience. Such as this quote from Steve Jobs, “The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh.My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay.”
As Simon Sinek explains, If you don’t know your why, how can you convince people to do what you want them to do?
Here’s a couple steps to help you build your WHY story.
- Passionately frame and present the most important thing (keywords/benefits) you want your audience to remember in 140 characters.
- Add 3 key succinct benefit points to back up the important thing you want your audience to remember.
- Build on each of the three key points.Yes, you can do that and deliver it in 60 seconds. Practice practice practice.
Once you accomplish the above, continually add substantive information specific to your audiences needs to keep them engaged and them wanting to hear more.
Practice practice practice.
As a coach, trainer and consultant, Larry Blumsack partners with people and organizations on the move and those already there to accelerate their communication, presentation and speaking skills to be on par with their ambition. Through one-on-one coaching and group training Larry helps leaders and aspiring leaders elevate their presence and communication skills to influence more people, sell more products-services-ideas and inspire others more successfully than they ever imagined.
Larry is the bestselling author of Face-to-Face is The Ultimate Social Media and founder of Zoka Institute and Zoka Training®. Zoka Training® — Mind/Voice/Body/Mindfulness in sync — is the result of Larry’s 45 years as a coach, acting teacher, actor, voice-over artist, theater and TV director/producer, radio & TV commentator and show host, speaker, trainer, serial entrepreneur, and syndicated columnist. Larry was a founding member of the theater department at Northeastern University.
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