What if your audience loses interest?
How often do you present to a team, room, or client?
What would you do if your audience lost interest?
Let’s consider a bunch of potential scenarios.
Scenario 1: You’re in sales or marketing, and you’re delivering a presentation to your client or prospect (I prefer ‘potential client’)
Scenario 2: You’re facilitating a workshop or training for a group.
Scenario 3: You’re a manager or team leader, running a meeting.
Scenario 4: You’re delivering online…. (this is harder to do well, particularly if they refuse to turn their cameras on. But there is a trick to handle that💪📹)
Two really important questions that we need to start with:
How do you know they’ve lost interest? What are the signs?
Why would your audience lose interest?
To quote Socrates. “The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.” As Socrates suggests, let’s get clear on what it means to lose ‘interest’.
interest
a. A state of curiosity or concern about or attention to something: an interest in sports.
b. Something, such as a quality, subject, or activity, that evokes this mental state: counts the theatre among his interests.Often interests Regard for one's own benefit or advantage; self-interest: It is in your best interest to cooperate. She kept her own interests in mind.
Therefore, can we deduce that if your audience has lost interest, they were at some point curious, but not any more?
Consider the following :
Did something change?
Is the content too long?
Is there too much content on each slide?
Are you talking too much without demonstrating?
Have you made your point and now you’re dragging it out?
Did you set an expectation about how long this would take?
Did they think they would be interested, but actually they’re not because It’s not what they thought it was?
Or, is it just not that interesting?
Perhaps they’re distracted or need to be somewhere else.
Maybe you’re not fluctuating your tone enough.
Perhaps you could ask more questions.
Perhaps they’re bored. I strongly encourage you to look up the definition of ‘boredom’ in a good dictionary.
I see this happen often: a meeting, presentation or workshop has a start time, but no finish time. People start getting antsy after a certain amount of time passes–generally when the assumed or expected time sails by. The way to handle this is to:
A. Observe that they’re getting restless
B. Tell them how long there is left until the break or end.
Next, you could do what my mentor suggests: ‘As is’ it. This is a game-changer and will quickly get everything out in the open. From there, you can pivot if needed. We’ll discuss this in my workshop in June, but it’s basically about asking calibrating questions.
If you’re working with Gen Z, then consider a method of constant visual change: keeping moving, asking questions, and changing the slides. What we know about Gen Z is that they’ve been trained by social media—15-second stories and YouTube Shorts—to need constant visual change to stay engaged.
Learn how to handle all this!
Learn how to handle all this in my workshop The Art of Facilitation: How to Master Your Presentations & Workshops.
June 12, Adelaide.
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