www.presentationtraininginstitute.com for free learning tools.

Audience Hook

The Audience Hook is designed to engage your listeners by tapping into WHY they would want to sit through your remarks. This portion of your presentation needs to hook into pain or pleasure – specifically pain the listener is experiencing or pleasure they would enjoy. Now in a work context the pain might be a tough problem that needs resolution, whereas the pleasure might be improved confidence in a skill set. Either way, the trick is to use an engagement device such as a question, a statistic, or a story to hook the audience into listening. For example you might ask “Have any of you ever been caught off guard by negative comments during your annual performance review? Have you ever worried that your job might be at risk due to poor communication with your boss?”.

Answer

Once you’ve hooked the audience, now you need to let them know the answer to their problem – and why you’re just the person to reveal it. The Answer section of your remarks is the time to reveal your solution, your name, and your credentials. For example, you might say “Today we’ll be discussing how to ensure open dialogue between you and your boss to ensure there are never any year-end surprises. My name is Suzanne Guthrie and I am a master consultant in communication skills and conflict resolution. Over the past 10 years I have consulted with dozens of organizations including Fortune 500 companies on workplace communications and published numerous articles on how to avoid communication screw ups at work”. Read on to learn more or visit https://boldnewdirections.com/home/ and our partner site http://www.presentationtraininginstitute.com for free learning tools.

Agenda

Now that you’ve established you have a solution (and the street cred to back it up), it’s time to give more details of your agenda for the rest of the presentation. We recommend that you use a three point approach to your agenda to help your audience remember key words. The three agenda items should related to the overall solution and provide a framework for your consequent remarks. For example, our speaker might say:

“During the course of the next hour we’ll look at three essential aspects of workplace communications so that you’ll never be caught off guard again:
1 – Timeliness
2 – Transparency
3 – Totality”

Audience Takeaway

Once you’ve revealed the agenda you need to highlight explicitly why this will help your audience. This is time to reinforce what’s in it for them (the audience) and what will they take away from your talk. Of course the audience takeaway ties back into the previous three A’s and should not be a surprise to either you the speaker or the audience. Our speaker might wrap up this 4th A saying “By the end of this session you’ll know how to use Timeliness, Transparency and Totality of workplace communications to ensure you have open dialogue with your boss so that you’ll never be caught off guard in important meetings again!”.

Summary

Using these four A’s provides invaluable structure and support to your remarks. It also helps listeners engage more deeply, follow your comments, and take away important learning tools. While learning this 4 A Approach takes practice and requires formal presentation skills training, it is well worth the time invested.

You can learn more about how to grow your presentation skills at https://boldnewdirections.com or by visiting our partner site at http://www.presentationtraininginstitute.com

About the Author

Suzanne Guthrie is co-founder of Bold New Directions a transformational learning organization that offers transformational learning via Leadership Training, Communications Training, and Resilience Training Solutions. Bold New Directions, and their sister company Presentation Training Institute work with Fortune 500 companies, mid-sized firms and educational institutions to grow people and performance. Find out more about Suzanne Guthrie, Presentation Skills Training, and Bold New Directions at https://boldnewdirections.com or at http://www.presentationtraininginstitute.com

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