Whether you are making your pitch to a prospect to be their home stager in person, in a brochure, online or in a talk to a local Kiwanis club, you must communicate your entire pitch in the first 30 seconds or less.  Otherwise, you will lose a significant percentage of your prospects attention.

In 1986 Milo Frank wrote a short book called, “How to get your point across in 30 seconds or less.”

This idea applies to personal presentations, articles, speeches and other presentations.

That’s not to say everything needs be communicated in that 30 seconds, but the key concept, justification and call to action, can and should be.

Below this article you will find a link to Amazon where you can buy the book if you want to read his justification and suggested techniques to accomplish this seemingly extravagant goal.

I want you to consider applying the idea to all of  your promotional materials and to your stock presentation, starting today, because you need to if you are going to get your message across before your reader skips past your article and goes on to the next.

Already, 10-20% of the people who started to read this article have stopped and gone elsewhere. This is particularly easy to do online.

Even “hot” media like videos get clicked past at an alarmingly fast rate. Tube Mogul, the video service which makes its business by monitoring and quantifying video viewers behavior, indicates that fully 50% or more of video viewers click away from the average video within 30 seconds. Twelve percent are gone in the first ten seconds.

The attention span of the general public has been short for a long time. No wonder politics is done in 10 second sound bites. And that reality applies to you and your articles and even in person presentations as well.

That doesn’t mean you can’t take the time to develop your thoughts in detail. It just means that you need to grab their attention and tell them what you are going to tell them and what they should do about it in your introduction up front. And don’t be too disappointed if a lot of people don’t read your entire article, or skip past your website without reading it all.

Just imagine how many more have left the written word in the same amount of time compared to a video presentation. Now some of that is probably because the viewer discovered that the video was not relevant to their interests and or needs.

As such, maybe we shouldn’t get too upset that they left before we get around to our point. But it could be that they made a mistake. Had they waited they may have discovered our cleverly designed plot to draw them into our proposition was just what they needed. If only they would have waited to see or read our sales pitch and dynamite close.

If you really want your readers to get your point, make it upfront and quick. Elaborate and explain in depth later to those hangers on who are interested in more detail.

How to Get Your Point Across in 30 Seconds or Less

Technorati Tags: marketing tips, Milo Frank, presentations, speeches

Have you been listening in?

Last night was the second session of the League of Extraordinary Minds, and what a great two hours it was.

While you as a home stager might not think that the internationally famous panelists that are participating in the program have anything to offer a small business like yours, you would be wrong.

I took a ton of notes last night, and got a lot of actionable ideas in the process. One I will share with you today is the understanding that people buy emotionally, and that they are motivated more by fear of loss than by hope of gain.

As an example a person is far more likely to take action to avoid suffering a $20 loss than they would be to gain $20.

What this may mean to a home stager, is that your clients are more likely to respond to a pitch that focuses on their risk of having to pay double mortgage payments, than they are to the hope of getting a higher price from a well staged home.

They may similarly respond to a pitch that details all the work they will have to do by themselves and the drudgery entailed rather than to the freedom they may enjoy by letting you do it for them.

That doesn’t mean the positive doesn’t matter, but rather that the loss elements are more effective in selling your services.

Now there was a lot more that I pulled out of last night, but I thought I would share that one.  It’s up to you to think about how you could apply that knowledge in your own interactions with prospects.

Replays of the League of Extraordinary Minds sessions are not available, as they are being turned into paid products.  But you are able to sign up and listen in to the remaining sessions for free, if you register at League of Extraordinary Minds. The next session is at 8PM, your time, next Thursday, no matter where in the world you are.

I encourage you to register and to listen in.  There have been two sessions so far and 7 to go. The first two have been very powerful, and have lead me to make several changes to the way I do things.  I am confident that you too will find value in each of them as well.