When you walk into a meeting, what do you want your audience to do? What is your call to action? Focus on these three outcomes:
- What do you want them to think?
- What do you want them to feel?
- What do you want them to do?
Build in, before you leave a call to action, “this is what I expect you to either think, feel, do.” If you haven’t given your audience a call to action it is unlikely you will be able to close them. You need to give them something to do, otherwise, they don’t know why they are there.
Another way to think about this is: What is different after communication has taken place? If you’ve gone into a meeting and nothing has changed, all you’ve done is taken thirty minutes of their time, and you aren’t going to get very far.