Recent brain research has begun to prove what clever salespeople have known all along:
The brain tunes out after 10 minutes. Your audience might be with you at "hello," but in most cases, listeners stop paying attention within 10 minutes. According to research, studies confirm that "…before the first quarter-hour is over in a typical presentation, people usually have checked out."
The 10-minute rule is an important finding for anyone who makes presentations or does public speaking…no matter who the audience is. To hold the people's attention, I recommend you introduce a “device to engage the audience” sometime in the first five to seven minutes of your presentation. It doesn’t have to be complicated. A simple, relatable, story can be an effective tool. A short video clip can serve that purpose as well. Technology now allows you to embed a video clip directly into your PowerPoint deck. Changing the pace of your presentation is the key objective.
The brain doesn't pay attention to "boring" subjects. Your audience craves the meaning behind your ideas before learning about the details. Make sure you help them by explaining the “arc” of your presentation, using a demonstration if possible.
For example, if you were discussing how an eLearning system worked, you might describe a story demonstrating how many reps need to be trained each year by not only outlining the basic numbers (“you have 50 sales agencies, each with ten sales people on average. That’s over 500 reps.” By also introducing the effect of turnover, you create a larger impact: “Since rep turnover is approximately 20% or more per year, you have an additional 100 reps each year that need to be trained.” Once you deliver the meaning, you can introduce your solution to this challenge, now that the audience has been given a reason to care about the details.
The brain craves pictures. Conventional, text-heavy PowerPoint decks should be thrown out and replaced with image-rich slides. According to studies, the brain doesn't see letters. It sees only pictures. That means your brain sees even a tiny letter as a picture and can choke on massive amounts of text. The more visual the input, the more likely it is to be recalled. Scientists call this the “pictorial superiority effect.”
Text and oral presentations are not just less efficient than pictures for retaining certain types of information; they are significantly less efficient. Again, research says that when tested 72 hours after exposure, only 10% of information presented orally is retained. That figures goes up to 65% if you add a picture. In other words, throw out your text-heavy PowerPoint and replace the slides with a graphic and several KEY words.
So if you want to maximize the impact on your audience, make sure you keep it short, keep it lively, and make it graphic.
It all sounds so easy, doesn’t it?
“A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of."
--- Burt Bacharach, performer and composer