11:04Shannon Jenkins · Reaction
How to Sell an Idea in Under 2 Minutes
How an 11-minute Shark Tank pitch for a sponge sold in five supermarkets turned into a billion-dollar deal, and the one moment it almost fell apart.
September 26thThe argument in one line.
Presenters lose their audience in the first 30 seconds by opening with housekeeping and credentials, so start with something that creates curiosity, emotion, participation, relevance or tension instead.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A manager or team lead who presents to executives or colleagues and watches people drift to their phones within the first minute.
- Someone who runs virtual meetings and keeps burning the opening minutes waiting for latecomers and asking if everyone can hear.
- A speaker or trainer who wants concrete before-and-after opener examples rather than general advice about being engaging.
SKIP IF…
- You want slide design, vocal delivery or stage-fright coaching. This only covers the first 30 seconds of a talk.
The full version, fast.
Most presenters lose the room in the first 30 seconds because they open with greetings, tech checks and credentials. Jenkins offers five replacements: a surprising statistic, immediate audience interaction, the audience outcome, a short human story, or a prop, visual or activity. Each is shown against a flat corporate version of the same opening. All five work by creating curiosity, emotion, participation, relevance or tension. Put who you are after the hook, and tie the opener directly to your main message.
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- Most presenters lose their audience in the first 30 seconds, and it is because they open in the safest, most forgettable way.
- Opening with a single number and one slide signals urgency, scale or stakes before anyone has a chance to reach for their phone.
- Asking the audience a question moves them from passive to active, which is the fastest fix for multitasking.
- Introduce yourself after the interaction or hook, not before. Your name and title are not what the room came for.
- Explaining the topic is weaker than explaining the benefit. Lead with what the audience will gain from listening.
- A short, specific story drops the audience into a real moment, while corporate language keeps them analyzing.
- A good story opener names where you are, what is happening, what people said and what you thought but did not say.
- Waiting for latecomers on a call penalizes the people who showed up on time and hands attention to their inboxes.
- The nine-dot puzzle works as an opener because the audience feels the lesson (they imposed a box nobody mentioned) before you state it.
- Don't just tell the audience the message. Create an experience that helps them feel it and they will remember it longer.
- Every strong opener creates one of five things: curiosity, emotion, participation, relevance or tension.
Open with a hook, not housekeeping
WHAT TO LEARN
The first 30 seconds decide whether people listen, so replace greetings and credentials with something that creates curiosity, emotion, participation, relevance or tension.
- Lead with one convincing statistic on its own slide to show the scale of the problem or what is at stake before you explain anything.
- Ask a question the audience answers by show of hands, chat or direct reply, then reveal the answer and introduce yourself afterward.
- Open with the benefit the audience gets from listening rather than the topic you will cover, because most presenters never say why anyone should care.
- Use a short, specific story that drops people into one real moment, and make sure it connects directly to your main message.
- Start virtual meetings with something visual or interactive instead of waiting for latecomers, which wastes the best attention of the whole session.
Terms worth knowing.
- Corporate blah blah
- Abstract, jargon-heavy opening language that is technically correct but emotionally flat, such as listing frameworks and protocols before saying why anyone should care.
- Nine-dot puzzle
- A puzzle where you join nine dots in a grid with four straight lines without lifting the pen. It is solved by drawing outside the grid, which is where the phrase 'thinking outside the box' comes from.
Word for word.
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The moment you start your presentation, you have the listener's full attention. And then most people do this. Hello, everyone.
Nice to see you. So thanks for being here. Just checking.
Can everyone hear me okay? The urge to pull the phone increases. And then they add, just can everyone see me okay?
I'm just going to wait for a few more people to join the call. Okay, cool. So I'm Shannon Jenkins, marketing manager here at Resonate.
And then what happens? Audience pulls out their phone. You've lost them.
Most presenters lose their audience in the first 30 seconds and it's not because they are unintelligent people. It is because they open in the safest, most forgettable, most boring way. I've hosted stages with thousands of people at conferences like Startup Night, Start Summit, Health Tech Global Summit, and my job is literally to watch audience attention and make sure that people are engaged and with us.
Now, when it comes to speakers standing on those stages, I can tell within seconds whether they are going to be a speaker who keeps the room or lose it. I've also trained hundreds of managers and leaders at organizations like Nestle, Nespresso, Google to deliver more impactful presentations.
Here are the five ways to start a presentation so that people actually listen, engage, and resist the temptation to check their phones. First, start with a surprising statistic. A statistic that immediately signals either urgency, tension, or even opportunity.
So let me give you a bad example. Let's say that I am a leader in digital transformation at a company and I'm presenting to executives. Here's what I could do.
Hi, everyone. I'm Shannon Jenkins from Digital Strategy, head of digital transformation. And today I'll be talking to you about how we can optimize website efficiency across the business.
Boring. Dull. Instead, a good example could be to start with a statistic that shows urgency.
So imagine he walks into the room and instead he has one slide, one statistic, and he says this, 40 million. That is how much we spend on websites every single year. It is far worse than the industry average.
And I'm going to present a plan to make sure we can optimize and reduce that so we stay ahead as a business. Hi, everyone. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Shannon Jenkins.
I am the head of digital transformation here. et cetera, et cetera. So you see people are paying attention as soon as you signal that urgency.
So very simply show a statistic, choose the best, most convincing piece of data and start there. Reason being because people understand. immediately why this matters, the scale of the problem, or potentially what is at stake.
And that is far more interesting than entering with the details I started with. Second way to start a presentation. Start immediately with audience interaction.
The fastest way to increase engagement and reduce that problem of picking up the phone, checking the email, multitasking, is to ask the audience a question. Make them go into active mode rather than passive. So for example, example, if you're in person with a group of people, you can ask for a show of hands.
If you are doing a virtual presentation, you can ask for people to type in the chat. Or maybe if you're in smaller meetings, you can just ask people around the room directly. So here is a good example of how to do that using the exact example I just shared with you.
So imagine me, Shannon Jenkins, head of digital transformation. I come in and I say, how much do you think we spend on websites annually? Three choices.
10 million, 20 million, 40 million. Hands up if you think it's 20 million. 10, 40.
It's actually 40 million, 40 million on websites annually. This is far beyond the industry average. And I'm going to share with you a plan of how we are going to reduce that so we can stay ahead as a business.
Hello, I'm Shannon Jenkins. For those of you who don't know me, I'm head of digital strategy at Resonate. Can you notice the difference?
You start with the interaction and then you introduce who you are for people who don't know you. That is far more interesting than where I started. A third way to start a presentation lead with.
the audience outcome. This is one of the biggest mistakes I see in coaching, and it's honestly one of the easiest. fixes.
Because most presenters explain the topic, but very few explain why the audience should care. So instead of introducing the subject you're going to talk about, you are going to introduce the benefit the audience will have from listening to you. This is my default introduction as a keynote speaker and a corporate trainer.
Let me give you a real example from my own work. So last year, I was invited to give a keynote presentation at Nestle in Barcelona. on storytelling in business.
And instead of walking up on stage in front of an unknown group of about 70 people and saying, hi, hello, everyone. I'm Shannon Jenkins. Thank you for being here.
Today, I'm going to talk to you about storytelling. I walked on stage and I opened with this. There is one communication tool that will make people engage with you, increase your influence across the business and make your message seven times more likely to be remembered.
That tool. is storytelling. Hello, I'm Shannon Jenkins.
It's such a pleasure to be here with you today. I am a keynote speaker and a specialist in storytelling. etc.
What I noticed even myself in doing that, the audience paid attention because I showed them exactly what they had to gain from listening. They wanted more influence in the business. They wanted people to be more engaged with what they say and they want to be more remembered.
So I speak to that first. This is one of the easiest, perhaps least creative openings, but something that works without fail. Start number four.
Start with a story. This is one of the most powerful ways to open a presentation because stories immediately shift people from analyzing business as usual to experiencing.
And contrary to what many professionals assume, storytelling isn't just entertainment or emotional fluff. Research actually suggests that storytelling is one of the most efficient ways to communicate complex information in a way that the brain can understand, remember, and act on.
But most presenters make the mistake of opening with abstract corporate language, corporate blah blah, I call it, instead of something that's human and concrete. So let me give you an example. I have a client who is an employee health manager at a global company.
And here is the corporate blah blah example of a presentation opener. Good morning, everyone. Today, I'm going to walk you through the updated mental health and well -being frameworks, including our revised psychological safety protocols, escalation pathways, and support resources available to all employees across the organization.
Maybe that is technically or conceptually correct, but it is emotionally flat and it leads to reactions like this. No cameras on a virtual call, people pulling out their telephones, or completely disengaging. But compare that.
to this. Two weeks ago, I walked in to the office. And first thing I did was open my email.
And I saw I received an email from one of my colleagues at 2 .37am in the morning. I saw him later on that day, we were in a conference room together, and he had a distant blank look on his face. So I asked him, Are you okay?
And he said, Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm fine. I'm fine. So we continued as usual.
And then as of yesterday, he was signed off with burnout and it taught. us in health such an important lesson just because someone says they're fine it doesn't mean they are now we have worked on some new mental health guidelines that we want to present to you today because we want our employees to be well and healthy and happy and avoid the situations like my colleague is facing can you see the difference when you tell a story even if it's short it drops the audience directly into a specific moment best practice is if you can Signal where you are, what's happening, what people are saying, what you're thinking, but perhaps not saying out loud.
And most importantly, the story needs to connect to your main message. You see in that example I just shared, I saw this happen in practice that people paid attention because it was unexpected. It wasn't just the corporate blah, blah, usual opening.
It was a very real moment and perhaps something that was relatable because they have experienced it or their colleagues have. So a good business story and a good business opening will be one which creates relevance, emotion, meaning around the idea that you want people to remember. So start with a story first.
And the final opening that works really well is if you use a prop. a visual tool or an activity. This I find is very, very effective in virtual presentations where people are still joining the meeting and they're either distracted or they're mentally elsewhere or they're checking their email and still doing some other work.
I encouraged one of my groups at Nestle to do this last year. And what was funny is that somebody came to me and they said, yeah, I literally join a meeting about three to four minutes late on purpose because I want to avoid that awkward start where people don't. cut right into the meeting or the presentation.
And they do that exact thing like, oh, just going to wait. Thanks. Hi, guys.
Thanks for being here. I'm just I'm just going to wait a couple of minutes for people to join. Don't do that.
This is what when attention disappears and also penalizes people who actually show up on time. So here's what you can do instead. You start your meeting with something visual, interactive or unexpected.
One real example of this. So I had a client working at Innovation. at Nespresso.
And he expressed to me that his goal was to get the company to be more innovative, to have more creative thinking and to think outside the box. And I said to him, are you familiar with that exercise where that terminology actually came from of thinking outside the box? He didn't know.
Maybe you don't know, but it came from this, the nine dot. puzzle. So there's nine dots in a sequence here and the challenge is that you have to connect all of these nine dots using four straight lines without lifting your pen off the paper.
For any of you who want to pause right now and have a go yourself, challenge yourself to do it in one minute, go ahead. Otherwise I'm going to spoil it. In order to join those nine dots using only four straight lines you have to go outside.
the box. So I said to this innovation manager, start your presentation like that. Have your screen immediately shared on MS Teams, spotlight yourself so it shows up large, and then give people this challenge.
And then you say what you're going to do in the presentation. So he tested this out with his virtual presentation. They're about...
25 people or so on the call. And some people grabbed their pen and paper. Others started commenting on it in the chat.
It not only created curiosity, engagement, it also directly linked to the main message he wanted to share. So he said something like this. Most people fail this challenge because they unconsciously create limitations that don't actually exist.
I didn't tell you that you had to stay within the box. And yet you did. What we need here at Nespresso is to have more out -of -the -box creative thinking so that we can stay relevant and ahead as a business.
Could you see how that is such a more powerful opening? So the main lesson here, don't just tell the audience the message. create an experience that helps them feel it.
Not only will they be more engaged, I promise you they will remember the message far longer afterwards. So let's recap. The best presentations usually do one of the five following things.
They create curiosity, emotion, participation, relevance, or tension. And you can do that through first, sharing a surprising statistic. Second, encouraging audience interaction.
Third, a clear audience outcome, a benefit. Four, starting with a story. Or five, starting with a prop, a visual activity or experience.
The key message here being We know people make very quick decisions on whether they are going to pay attention to you. And most presenters lose the room before they even reach slide number two.
So if you want to have stronger presentations, do not start the safe, boring way. Start in a way that makes people actually care. Now, if you want a checklist of all of the things that will help you to become a great presenter, things that you need to include in a presentation to go to the next level, you can download my free presentation checklist below that has been used by hundreds of professionals now in organizations like Google, Nestle, Nespresso and others.
And if you want to improve your communication skills and avoid the common errors people make, I recommend this video next.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
You have the room's full attention for about one breath, and most people spend it on hellos, tech checks and a job title. Jenkins shows what that sounds like, then replaces it five ways.
