Capture Your Audience With A 'Howdahell' Moment

Forbes

4 days ago

Young confident successful business people discuss and analyze work, statistics, plans, startup in a ... More meeting room. Teamwork. Presentation.
During a sales call, a representative for an AI software company concluded his pitch to a prospective customer by saying, 'Our Large Language Model can learn all of your company's features and make them available to any query on demand.' And then he added, 'It's very much like the way you learned the French language when you worked for Alcatel Lucent.'
Astonished, the customer replied, 'How did you know that?'
'I see on your LinkedIn page that all your education and work experience have been in the U.S. except for the four years you spent in Colombes, France, so I put two and two together.'
Jeff Nussbaum, a former speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore, calls this a 'Howdahell' moment, because the listener thinks, 'Howdahell did he know that?' In his book, 'Undelivered: The Never-Heard Speeches That Would Have Rewritten History,' Nussbaum explains, 'That one line sent a message to the audience: 'This speaker knows something about us. He took the time to learn something about us.' And perhaps, on a subconscious level, it leads them to think, If he understands this problem we face, maybe we should listen to him when he discusses other problems we face.'
Nussbaum's conclusion describes the magic moment when a speaker truly connects with the audience, the ultimate goal of persuasion. Unfortunately, in this day and age of 'corporate pitches,' presenters deliver the same pitch to all audiences, over and over again, and that moment is lost.
This is not to say that you should abandon consistency of your company's messaging. Nor should you create a brand-new presentation for every audience. Instead, use the same slide deck but insert 'Howdahell' moments in your spoken narrative. Create the 'illusion of the first time,' a phrase that comes from the theater world, where actors often have to perform the same role in the same play hundreds of times. Fortunately, as a business presenter, you enjoy a freedom that stage actors don't have: you can reshape your narrative and give every presentation a new dose of freshness and spontaneity. And you have three excellent options to customize your content.
Visit LinkedIn in advance, as the sales rep above did, to learn about your audience and embed that information in your presentation. Two other sources for your customization are:
Your prospective company's website. Browse the site and learn about the company's products, culture, and people. You may find that some of their people or partners share connections with you and your company. Include these mutual connections in your narrative as a tasteful, appropriate form of name-dropping.
Find the key phrases of their mission or marketing material and repeat them back to the customer. People feel validated when they hear their own words resonated.
Chatbots. Query Perplexity, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, Microsoft's Copilot, or Meta's LLaMA for the latest news (ideally the day of your presentation) news about your prospective customer's business and its sector. Reference those trends as they might affect your customer's business.
Create the illusion of the first time every time you present.