Grabbing Your Audience’s Attention Immediately: If You Don’t, Your Presentation May Be Doomed

Picture your audience at the start of your presentation. Imagine a group of potential customers who’ve come to hear you give a presentation about your company’s newest product drifting into a meeting room one by one, sipping their coffee, checking their BlackBerrys or iPhones. Or a banker in a wood-paneled office, sitting behind a tall stack of documents, who must decide whether or not to lend your start-up money for expansion. Or, as with my IPO clients, a roomful of institutional investors in an elegant hotel banquet room, wondering how the NASDAQ is doing at that very moment in time.

Where are their minds? Chances are, not on you, not at the start of your presentation. Chances are they are thinking about an urgent message on their handhelds, ...