How Beginning Your Presentation With An Audience Poll Sets You Up For Success
For a powerful executive presentation that connects with and is remembered by your audience, you have to engage with everyone in the room (whether physical or virtual) within the first few minutes of your talk.
Whether you’re presenting in a virtual conference panel or physically in front of the board of your company, that engagement is crucial to your success. You have several options for this type of presentation introductory strategy — a simple yet effective choice is taking a poll.
Why Conducting A Poll Will Amp Up Your Introduction
At JPG, we teach our clients the importance of having this “cognitive anchor” at the beginning of our presentations or somewhere within — no matter what kind of presentations they are. A “cognitive anchor” refers to the anchoring effect, which is when an audience relies heavily on the first information they receive to make a judgment or decision (such as whether or not to trust and/or listen to you while you’re speaking).
Studies show that audiences decide whether or not to fully participate (pay attention) to a presentation within the first 10 seconds of listening. So, if you start strong, chances are your audience will stay with you for your entire talk. One way to win this strong start is to engage your audience immediately.
How Polling Your Audience Draws Them In
Starting your presentation with something simple, such as a “How many of you had to drive in this morning?” connects your audience to you and what you’re about to present to them immediately. Polling stops them from multitasking, encourages participation, and makes your presentation more interactive.
Polling your audience gets you two huge wins as a speaker immediately.
- It prompts the audience (when in a physical room) to look around the space and see what the majority answer is.
- People connect with one another — those in the front row turn around, folks in the back look beside them — it gets everyone curious about the baseline answer that the poll questioned.
- It gives you context for whatever you’re about to speak on next.
- It gives you an entry point to engage more with an audience member later on in your talk.
After you get these wins, you need to use them. When you ask for the “show of hands” — follow that up with sharing with the audience what you’re seeing and what you’re learning about them. Give them the context that you’ll use to appeal to them more.
Using Your Introduction To Tailor Your Talk To Your Audience
A simple question might seem surface-level, but it gives you valuable insight into the mindset of your audience, which is vital for your success as a speaker. You can go a level deeper if the question starts off the topic of your presentation.
Recently, JPG coached an executive to take part in a roundtable panel to discuss the current state of the construction industry.
When asked what artificial intelligence innovations or tools his company is looking at investing in and implementing, he turned to the audience with a question: “How many pages of documentation do you think you generate for a 400-foot high-rise job? Show of hands if you think it’s at least 500,000.”
The majority of hands in the room went up.
He then increased the question to 1 million, then 2 million, then 3 million. With each raise, more and more hands went down until only a few were left held high.
The answer was 3.2 million.
He used this audience poll not just as context for the audience, but as knowledge for himself so that he could accurately frame and inflect his vocal tone on what he said next not only about the automation tools that his company is considering and why, but how tools like this could potentially impact the entire industry — including everyone in the room.
That audience poll gave him an “in” to the rest of his talk and, in the process, grabbed the attention of everyone in the room.
This is exactly how you need to approach not only audience engagement but also the first few precious minutes of any talk you give.
Master Audience Engagement with Janicek Performance Group
Executive Presentation Coaching can help with Strategy
When used intentionally, polling isn’t just a moment of audience interaction—it’s a strategic move that sets the tone for the rest of your talk. A well-timed poll captures attention, builds immediate rapport, and gives you real-time insight into your audience’s mindset. With the right coaching, you can turn this simple technique into one of your most effective communication tools.
At JPG, we can give you the skills to master this simple yet powerful tool. We help professionals master tools like audience polling to deliver confident, relevant, and high-impact presentations — whether on stage or on screen.
