In any presentation or piece of writing, the first words spoken or written need to get your audience’s attention. Those first words are your headline. They tell people, “look at this–this is important”.
If your audience knows you and trusts you to deliver something they will value, you can jump right in and say what you want to say. That’s what I did at the start of this post.
But in other situations, you need to do more.
You can’t go wrong by promising a benefit in your headline. Tell people what they will learn or gain by reading or listening. The title of this post does that by promising to show you 3 sure-fire ways to start a presentation.
But there are other ways to get attention. Here are 3 of the best:
(1) Tell a story
Start your talk or article with a story. People like stories because they are about people and things that happen to them. They keep reading or listening to find out, “what happened next”.
Start with a story about a former client, for example. What happened to him? What did you do to help him? How did it all turn out?
(2) Make a provacative statement
Say something unusual or shocking, something people don’t know or don’t expect you to say. You might share a surprising fact, for example, or a statistic related to the subject of your talk.
If I was speaking about identify theft, for example, I might say, “Most people think identity theft means that someone has stolen your financial information. The truth is, there are five different types of identity theft”.
This gets the audience thinking about what these are, and whether they might be a victim of one of them.
(3) Ask an probing question
Questions work because they bring the reader or listener into the conversation. If you start your talk by asking, “When was the last time you updated your Will?” your audience starts thinking about the answer to that question.
Questions asked at the beginning of a presentation also make the audience continue to listen or read, to find out the answers.
With that in mind, would you like to know the best way to end a presentation? I’ll tell you tomorrow.
