Consider Attention Span

Different audiences have different attention spans, depending on a range of factors from passion of speaker and relevance of content to time of day and temperature of room.

All of our presentations at m62 are designed with two versions in mind – one that runs from the beginning to the end of the presentation in 20 minutes, and one that runs from the beginning of the presentation to the end of the Value Proposition in 5 minutes. The two versions are designed to be appropriate for both the CEO who may only have 5 minutes to spare, and for those who have the time to listen to the full presentation.

In the case of being given a longer time slot, it is important to adjust your presentation to audience attention spans. Experienced speakers may be able to tell when an audience’s attention is waning, but the average attention span for middle managers in a sales presentation is twenty minutes. If you’re going to be exceeding this length of time, schedule in a soft break to ensure that your audience stay on track. Watch this short presentation on the influence of attention span on presentation structure for more details.

Start Effectively

Starting a presentation effectively can be a challenge. On the one hand, many audience members will not be fully concentrating when a presentation starts. On the other hand, taking too long to get to the point will encourage the audience to disengage. There are two strategies to counteract this. Chip and Dan Heath think that part of the problem is that presenters have been taught to “Tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em, then tell ‘em, then tell ‘em what you told ‘em”. They recommend starting with a bang- something which can work well, as long as it is a big enough bang to avoid going unnoticed by audience members checking their phones. The danger with this method is that your audience may switch off quicker as you have manipulated attention span, thus meaning that they could miss the end of your presentation.

The other option, and the one we practise at m62, is to recognise that your audience will not be paying full attention at this time, and to use it instead to build credibility. This way, your audience will have made the Initial Purchasing Decision on content designed specifically to influence them positively, and should be in the ‘application hunter’ positive mindset for the rest of the presentation. In the case of the audience including the CEO, you may want to start with the Value Proposition and then present the first five minutes of your presentation. Under these circumstances, your audience are likely to require something different.

Audience Breaks

Kosslyn, in Clear and to the Point, suggests that presentations should be structured to allow for natural breaks. He argues that the audience should be given an overview of the presentation structure during the introduction, and shown where they are within this structure as the presentation progresses; and that topics should be introduced in relation to the audience’s prior knowledge and concerns. Presentations should end with a clear visual summary.

It is important to use attention span to structure the presentation and allow for breaks, so that your audience’s minds do not begin to wander. Asking a question or presenting the audience with a puzzle are good examples of soft breaks. Hard breaks may become necessary as the time spent presenting lengthens; allowing your audience to rise from their seats to get a coffee or take a toilet break will greatly increase attention levels when you return to presenting.

Understand the client’s problem

People can’t make a decision to buy until they think they understand what it is that they’re buying. Your presentation should detail what the audience will be buying, why they should buy it, and how they know you can deliver it.

Structure your presentation by setting out clearly your understanding of your client’s business problem, and then explain how your offering solves the problem that your prospect suffers from. At m62, we have found that positioning your value proposition – your key benefits – between 3-5 minutes is optimum, as that is when audience attention levels are at their highest. The rest of the presentation after this should be focused on justifying – reassuring your audience that what you promise can be delivered.

Position of Value Proposition

When structuring a presentation, be careful not to give the punchline too early. As blogger Jan Schultink points out – “in the first few seconds, people are ‘trying to figure you out’ and are not paying attention to the content”. Use the start of a presentation to build credibility and engage the audience. If you present your value proposition at the very start of a sales presentation, the audience might miss the most important part of your entire talk.

Presenting your value proposition when audience attention levels are at their highest ensures that your audience are more engaged with your most important message, and will be more likely to recall it accurately. The rest of the presentation can then be used to prove these points.

Organise for your Audience, not your Company

When delivering a capabilities presentation, most companies want to give an overview of all the products they offer. But, instead of presenting material in this way, try to see things from the client’s point of view – and organise material in terms of the problems you can solve for them, not your own company’s organisational chart. Start by picking the five benefits that will be most valuable to your prospect, and structure your entire presentation around these. This gives you a logical format to proceed with, and reassures your audience that you are dedicated to delivering what they want.

Closing Line

Close your sales presentation by suggesting the next step in the sales cycle, and asking for action. Don’t worry too much about finding that perfect line – as sales expert Joey Asher writes in How to Win a Pitch, “the fact is that “closing” is overrated. Despite what some sales books say, there are no magic words to convince a person to buy from you.” If you’ve proved that you can meet their needs better than their other options, and they see value, then they will buy from you regardless of how you “close”. If you haven’t, they won’t.

On the other hand, you ask the question in order to force the prospect into thinking about an answer. Even if the answer isn’t agreement, the prospect is considering the close. At m62, we actively encourage presenters to ask the question, if the prospect is in a position to answer. Presenters should be careful however not to press the issue if the prospect is unable to make a decision, for example if he has other pitches to see.

Support the Recommendation

Gene Zelazny, author of Say it with Presentations, follows the approach of his McKinsey colleague Barbara Minto’s Pyramid Principle. A presentation (or document) should start with the recommendation, then give an overview of the conclusions supporting that recommendation, and then, in turn, look at each conclusion and the evidence that leads to it. This is the approach advocated by m62 for sales presentations. The recommendation in a sales presentation is to buy, or to move towards the next step of the sales cycle. The conclusions supporting this recommendation are value proposition statements (e.g. ‘reducing costs’, ‘competitive advantage’). Then each statement must be proved, in turn.

Interactive Presentations

In their book Selling Visually with PowerPoint, Robert Lane and Andre Vleck make the case for non-linear, interactive sales presentations. ‘The standard way of using PowerPoint – a strictly linear movement from slide to slide from the beginning of a presentation to its bitter end – forces people to be lecturers rather than conversationalists.’ Better, they argue, to allow the audience to share in setting the agenda, using hyperlinks to move seamlessly between slides as required by the audience. This is a good way of ensuring that the audience feel involved and are only exposed to information that is relevant to them, but it can mean that certain important points are left out. A balance should be found between audience interaction and presenter control.

Audience Attention Levels

It is commonly assumed that audiences pay maximum attention at the start of a presentation, and that attention levels decline steadily until after a certain point most audience members have simply switched off. This isn’t quite true however – which dictates optimal sales presentation structure. At first, audiences are typically focused on what they were doing before the presentation, and only partially engaged. The first few minutes of a presentation are spent considering whether the presenter is worth listening to, or whether the time would be better spent day-dreaming, checking email, or writing a novel. Most audience members have wasted too many days of their lives listening to mindless presentations to simply assume that a presenter deserves attention.

The fact that audience members don’t automatically pay maximum attention at the start of a presentation guides how sales presentation introductions should be approached. Go in assuming that the audience will be paying attention from the start and the audience might miss your key points. Leave your best content until last and the audience might have nodded off to sleep before you get to it.

What to do at the Start of a Presentation

How to start a presentation will depend greatly on what you are trying to achieve with your presentation, and of course on what kind of presentation you are delivering. Even within a single type of presentation – sales presentations – there are a number of different approaches to the start of a presentation.

Build Credibility

Audience members decide early on whether a presenter is worth listening to. Most enlightened presenters understand that boring the audience with dozens of slides about the presenter’s company is inappropriate. Yet, a couple of slides that demonstrate that a company has the right experience can put the audience into a constructive frame of mind – seeking to find ways to use what the presenter is offering, rather than seeking to find holes in your arguments.

Encourage Interaction

If audience attention levels don’t start at their maximum, that isn’t to say that it is impossible to quickly raise them. One way to start a presentation is with a question or challenge for the audience. By presenting a well-judged puzzle and asking the audience to solve it, attention levels can quickly be raised. Anything too hard or too easy and the audience may disengage though, so be careful.

Demonstrate Empathy

Prospects are usually looking for somebody who understands the challenges they face, and who can offer a solution to these problems. So, draw the audience in by presenting an outline of the issues they face to show that you have understood. Then, spend the rest of the presentation – after this introduction – showing how you can solve the problems you understand the audience to have. The key issue here is to make sure that you actually talk to the audience’s challenges; if the audience don’t recognise themselves in your portrayal, then you won’t succeed in displaying empathy.

Force Attention

High impact animation sequences can start presentations with a bang. Add music, video, interesting pictures, and a good script, and the audience are drawn to a presentation like moths to a flame. But, remember; while grabbing the audience’s attention may be easy, keeping it is hard. Shiny animations will draw an audience in, but without relevant content in the rest of the presentation, they are wasted.

Abolish Pre-Conceived Ideas and Reframe Evaluation Criteria

When audience members think they understand an issue, or know what a presenter is going to say, they don’t always bother to listen. Even when they do pay attention, it’s all-too-easy to fall into the trap of hearing what one expects. Abolishing pre-conceived ideas at the start of a presentation isn’t easy – and is often best done in conjunction with techniques that force attention. Try being upfront, and acknowledge that you know what the audience are thinking. Then, give clear examples of facts that clearly contradict the popular misconception. To reframe evaluation criteria, outline what you think the audience are looking for, and then explain why they are looking for the wrong thing, and what they ought to be looking for instead. You don’t have to change audience members’ minds at the start of a presentation – only open them.

Clear Hurdles

Some companies are looking for suppliers and partners who see the world in the same way that they do. Others will only work with companies with certain accreditations. If the presenter doesn’t reassure them, they may spend the rest of the presentation trying to guess if the presenter’s company is the right cultural fit, or has the right certificates. Presenting to Starbucks? You’d best talk about environmental policies up front, rather than leaving your audience waiting until you tick the right box.

Delivering the Start of a Presentation

A lot of presenters are nervous of presenting. Nerves can be reduced when the presentation introduction is well-planned, though-out, and rehearsed. If a presentation starts well – most presenters tend to relax. So, work out what you want to achieve with the start of your presentation, and then practice presenting these first few slides, again and again.

Third in the Killer Presentation Series, this edition focuses on how to structure your presentation to maximise your chance of success in a sales presentation.

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1890) The Sign of the Four

In 1887, Conan Doyle’s first Holmes novel, ‘A Study In Scarlet’ introduced us to the ingenious mind of Sherlock Holmes and the idea that criminals can be caught through the application of science and logic.

Immediately, Holmes explains to Watson the difference between synthetic and analytical thinking: a distinction that we find useful when describing our approaches to presenting information.

HOLMES:

In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backwards. That is a very useful accomplishment, and a very easy one, but people do not practice it much. In the everyday affairs of life it is more useful to reason forwards, and so the other comes to be neglected. There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason analytically.

WATSON:

I confess that I do not quite follow you.

HOLMES:

I hardly expected that you would. Let me see if I can make it clearer. Most people, if you describe a train of events to them, will tell you what the result will be. They can put those events together in their minds and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led to that result. This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backwards or analytically.

On the whole, most people think synthetically and therefore it feels logical to present this way. Our experience suggests that this actually works against the presenter. Showing facts and figures to support an eventual conclusion often lowers the concentration levels of the audience prompting a ‘What’s the point of this?’ mind set.

That’s not to say synthetic presenting is all bad, particularly where titles are concerned: a title should contextualise the slide NOT summarise it, which is called a synthetic information flow.

By presenting the main arguments analytically you create intrigue in the audience, increasing your audience’s attention. In sales presentations, we state early on that ‘the benefit to you is X, here’s how we deliver it to you’. This is an analytical information flow.

So the idea is to get the balance right: present analytical information flows for the main arguments to keep your audience’s attention, while using synthetic information flows for your smaller supporting arguments.

To this, Holmes would inevitably say, ‘Elementary my dear Watson’.

This article originally appeared in article62, the killer presentations e-magazine from m62.

Most presenters give little thought to the way in which audience attention levels change over the course of a presentation. This means that important sales messages can be lost when the audience is not paying attention.

Sales presentations should be structured to take advantage of what we know about audience attention levels. Audience attention levels are not constant throughout a presentation. As expected, audiences pay less attention as a presentation goes on. For this reason, it makes little sense to present benefits for the first time at the end of a presentation.

Not everything we know about how to structure a sales presentation is immediately intuitive.

This short online presentation tells you how to structure your sales presentation. The presentation will launch in full screen mode.

How long should a presentation be? The answer, of course, depends on the audience, the context, and the presenter’s objectives. Presentation quality also makes a difference – presentations can run for longer if the audience enjoy the material, and if the material is presented effectively.

For a typical sales presentation, research shows that there is a clear limit to how long an audience can pay attention for. Misjudging presentation length can mean important messages are lost as the audience switch off.

Using soft-breaks, such as a change of presenter, a short interactive break, or even some inserted video, can revive audiences and improve attention levels. This can be necessary for longer presentations.

Don’t save key messages until the end. This can work in some media, but not in presentations. Audience attention levels decline towards the end of a long presentation. Instead, deliver the punch-line when the audience are paying maximum attention, and then spend the rest of your time justifying and explaining your conclusions.

This short online presentation gives more details. We use PowerPoint slides and video to explain theory around presentation length in a bit more detail. The presentation will launch in full screen mode.

The key to training presentation structure is to build from the start of a topic, from the fundamentals. Don’t assume that the audience understand why the material you are training on is important; don’t assume that the audience share the language and jargon you use in your presentation.

Effective training presentations build upon shared objectives, shared language, a common understanding of basic ideas, and so on.

This short online presentation – PowerPoint and video – delivers further details. The presentation will launch in full screen mode.