Whether you're about to address 50 potential investors in a sales presentation or are preparing to speak at the next town hall meeting, your motives are essentially the same. You want to facilitate the meeting while still solving problems and addressing issues that are in the minds of the attendees.
This is generally accomplished in two highly predictable parts:
Parts of A Boring Sales Meeting
- Part one: Speaker portion, in which you enthusiastically present information while over half the participants commence cell phone engagement.
- Part two: Participants who paid zero attention to your initial presentation now engage in the question and answer portion, where you must reiterate most of the information you just went over.
If this sounds like a time waster, buckle your seat belt.
Possibly Even Worse Than a Boring Sales Meeting
What if you're preparing for a town hall meeting? At least during a sales presentation you're speaking to a group with a somewhat common agenda. Town hall meetings can be all over the board and often end up looking like a highly unorganized mess. How can they not, when so many individuals having completely different motives are all meeting together and attempting to push their questions, topics, arguments and thoughts through to center stage? You've worked up a headache just thinking about it.
Take a Tylenol and keep reading...
Whether you're preparing for a town hall meeting, a marketing event, or some other speaking engagement, they all have one thing in common. There is an audience, and you need to corral them in a certain direction, --hopefully a common direction. Although the "common direction" part may or may not be totally possible, using an audience response system is one of the best ways to measure meeting effectiveness and accomplish these key goals:
- Keep your audience engaged
- Find out what matters to them without giving up control of the meeting
- Quickly address issues and possibly change direction of the meeting based on audience response
- Possibly cause them to laugh a time or two and keep them away from their cell phones (unless they are tweeting about the awesomeness of your presentation)
Revolutionize Your Meeting Mojo in 5 Easy Steps
Not only is this voting system fun and engaging for the responders, the fact that the audience can participate and feel as if they are moving the meeting along in a certain direction helps them to retain more of the information provided. Attention span also increases as your participants look forward to the next engagement point. With this in mind, here are 5 steps to creating your questions and developing your participation flow:
1. Start simple to familiarize participants with the audience response system. Use a basic question or something humorous to double as an ice-breaker and put your participants at ease.
2. Ask demographic questions to help define your audience. This will help drive the flow of your information and how detailed you should be.
3. Ask questions that engage your audience. For example, audiences are engaged when they want to know the opinion of their peers. A town meeting on establishing new laws may ask the audience if they would be tempted to break the law if it was in place. Side note: Be sure responses are anonymous before taking this route.
4. Mix up the format of your questions - Yes and no answers are going to get old fast. There are several different ways to structure your questions. Try to use question formats tied to the outcomes you are trying to achieve. If learning is involved, multiple choice or pick all that apply type questions work well. If you are gathering opinions and creating alignment in a town hall meeting, scalar questions rating ideas or issues (agree/disagree, importance) work well.
5. Do something with the results - Results of the audience response system are immediate and the percentages can be displayed through your Power Point presentation. Benchmarking reports with survey or best practice data from the audience can be published after the meeting. Use this information to drive the content while you are presenting. Always have a strategy for the most valuable use of meeting data.
Are you ready to increase audience engagement, come away from town hall meetings with real results, along with statistics to work from when creating future presentations? There's no better answer than audience response systems.
Give us a call today for more information, a free demonstration, or innovative ideas for using the system for your next presentation. **We love to brainstorm!
