“How was it?” is a pretty lousy survey question a presenter may ask of acquaintances, friends or their staff immediately after speaking. Unless they are your sworn enemy or a sadist, they are not going to tell you what they really think if you stink, because of the relationship you have with them. We need to make sure we are growing and improving as presenters, so objective feedback is crucial to achieving that aim. How can we grab ourselves some of that good oil?
I always talk about the importance of eye contact with your audience. The reason is simple. This is the key factor in getting objective feedback in real time. By engaging in eye contact with as many people in the audience as possible in the time allowed, you have a greater chance of reading the reaction to your words. We want the lighting in the room to be up and not darkened, so that the slides can’t dominate you as the speaker. This is because we want to be able to clearly see the audience.
If they are leaning in or leaning back, there are two completely different messages there. We get the lean back posture in our training classes from those individuals who were told by their boss to “go to training”. It is a common posture of sceptism, reluctance, irritation and disbelief. The same applies when speaking. There is no greater feeling when presenting than to have a large audience lean in to you. It only has to be a few millimetres but when done on mass, it is like a drug. Once you have experienced it you want that feeling every time.
Facial expression in Japan is a tough one. The serious “I am really listening to you” face and the “this is crap” face look exactly the same here. I was giving a speech in Japanese to 150 salespeople in Kobe and there was a gentleman seated about half way down on the left. Right throughout my talk his face oozed with the “this is crap” reaction. At the end, he sprang out of his seat and bolted down to where I was standing exchanging business cards with some of the audience. I thought my karate training was about to come into play here because he was going to hit me. Instead he was pumping my hand in the handshake and telling me how much he liked the talk. I was silently reflecting that I wished he had told his face he was enjoying it. Most people will have a positive or at least neutral facial expression but don’t assume a serious face is a negative reaction was the lesson for me.
Nodding the head up and down is a sign you want to see. It says the audience is in agreement with you. When you start to get this head nodding going on across a lot of faces it is a powerful acknowledgment that you are doing a good job selling your message. A way to train your audience to do this, is to nod up and down yourself when you make a statement you want people to agree with. They will mimic what you are doing and get this head nodding habit of responding that way to other things you say which they like.
Japanese audiences have zero conception that they are expected to take any action during your talk. We have to get them physically involved which helps to get them supporting your key points. We can’t go crazy and overdo it, but in a 30 minute speech you could get them to raise their hand twice and that wouldn’t feel like it was too much. Beyond that however and resistance will emerge. So, to increase engagement you can ask a question, a rhetorical question. That is good because it forces everyone to concentrate on what you are saying, rather than allowing their minds to roam around. You can also ask an actual question and raise your own arm up to model what you want them to do. The question you ask has to be delivered in such a way that the only possible answer is a “yes”. This makes it as easy as possible for them to raise their hand. For example, “Raise your hand if you are getting tired of Zoom meetings by now?”.
If you have someone with you when you make the speech, don’t ask them what they thought about it. Ask them to tell you what they thought went well and what could you do better next time. Having some helpful friend start canning your talk is not going to make that speech a positive experience for you. We have to ask them very specific question too, as far as possible. For example, “Did you find the speech opening grabbed your attention to stop thinking about other things?”; “When I mentioned the names of a couple of people in the audience I met before we started, did that help to make a deeper connection with the audience?”; “When I summed up again after the last question, did that help to recall what my main point was?” etc.
Some speech host organisations do surveys of the event and their response rate is usually microscopic and so of little help. You can always distribute a flyer to every table, with the QR code access to a site, where they can answer a few short questions. You can do this during the speech as you are wrapping up. It is not great timing, because you are asking people to divert their attention from what you are saying. However, if you wait until after the talk has finished very few people will bother to do the survey.
Instead say “please take one minute to do the survey using the QR code on your tables and then I will go through the final bonus slide for you”. Stop speaking for that minute and just wait. After the bonus slide has been covered, we sum up again to make sure our key message is the last thing they remember. In this way, we will get a much better survey of the crowd and the feedback will help us to focus on the areas needing more work.