Three great tips on how to mesmerize your audience, to make them fall in love with your pitch and your idea
I’m going to tell it to you straight: Your audience is wildly egoistical. They don’t want to hear you finish your pitch, if they don’t find it relevant. And they really don’t want to help you afterwards if you haven’t charmed them with a tailor-fitted pitch that speaks to their needs and interests. It might sound a bit harsh, but it’s true. To help you keep your audience interested, I’ve collected three important points that you need to consider when you create your pitch.
How does your audience speak?
When preparing your pitch you need to consider the context in which the audience exists and the audience’s current knowledge. For example, if your product is to be used at a hospital and is presented to a nurse you need to use her specific jargon and use words such as biopsy, pathologist and metastasis as she has an understanding of these technical terms. If you’re presenting the same product to an investor, you should instead use his jargon and use words such as tissue sample, doctor and spreading as these are words that he can relate to. If you are not attentive to this, you can easily end up with pitching a great product to an audience that don’t understand you – and you’ve wasted both their and your time. On the contrary, if you apply the correct technical language you display an understanding of the audience’s situation and a respect for that person’s expertise and context.
Be personal and create a relationship
When you’re personal in your pitch you are creating a relation to your audience. A relation is important because it helps improve your chances of your pitch being well-received by your audience and that they react to it. Often, you can get a long way ahead by replacing “one” or other pronouns with “you”. It seems simple, but it works. Consider this example: “If one gets cancer then one wants to be cured as fast as possible” / “If you get cancer then you want to be cured as fast as possible”. As you might notice it affects you more, as an audience, when the speech is directed towards you. Likewise, you can also look into whether you could include other relevant insights about the audience’s personality or background into your pitch. By appealing to the audience in this way, you are increasing the chances for your audience to be interested in your pitch and call to action.
What’s in it for me?
We human beings are quite easy to figure out: If something doesn’t interest us, we stop listening. That’s why it is important that you figure out what it is with your idea or product that attracts/interests the audience, which needs they have and how your idea will cover them. For example, if you speak to a nurse it is important to emphasize how your product improves her workflow and helps patients. When you are talking to an investor though, he would probably also want to hear about how your product helps a patient but what is more relevant is how your company is structured financially, and what his opportunities are for getting a return on his investment.
I know that it takes time to adjust your pitch every, single time you are talking to a new person. In return though, I promise you that your chances of your audience finding your idea interesting and relevant and wants to react to your pitch will increase dramatically. The more you practice your pitch and the more often you pitch, adjusting it will also become easier.
If you have other good tips on how to charm your audience, then I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences.
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