Does Your Pitch Address Visual Learners?

His eyes glaze over the second he sees text.  Ask him to write a long-form content piece like a blog post and you get the sense he’d rather try to summit Everest in a T-shirt and Crocs. 

But sketch something on a napkin for him and he’s instantly engaged.

This is one of the folks on my team, and I can tell you loads of funny stories about the absurd path we had to take to figure out one another’s learning styles.

“I’m more of a visual learner,” is something a business associate of yours might relate after you’ve worked together for a bit.  And I can’t stress enough how important it is to listen to people when they tell you how they prefer to ingest information. 

You know a lot of people who are terrific at learning new concepts when they’re presented visually.  Depending on who you ask, between half and two-thirds of us have a preference for learning this way.

But if you’re going to pitch a room full of executives you may have never even met, how can you gauge whether they’re visual learners or people who will rely on text or auditory cues?

The short answer is you don’t.  But I’m guessing you won’t settle for the short answer.

It can be frustrating to encounter confused looks when you’re delivering a pitch.  Particularly when we’re discussing the complex concepts that need to come across in media or ad tech presentations, confusion can derail the entire pitch.

The good news is that there’s two simple methods for engaging both visual and auditory learners at the same time.

1)     Presenting in Parallel.  Show a visual that illustrates your concept, then voice it over.  This may seem like a no-brainer, but many of the presentations I used to see on the agency side consisted of salespeople reading text bullets from PowerPoint slides.  That’s not what we’re talking about here.  Not only does it put your audience to sleep, but it fails to take advantage of a learning technique that keeps your audience engaged:  When auditory stimuli enhance a visual representation of a concept, the combination of the two can have a 1+1=3 effect when delivered simultaneously.

2)     Participatory Activities.  Regardless of whether we’re visual or auditory learners, there’s nothing quite like learning by doing.  I once explained the basics of programmatic advertising by engaging in a role-playing exercise that cast me in the role of an ad impression, with meeting participants playing the roles of SSP, DSP, DMP, Ad Exchange, etc.  I bounced around the room, interacting with each, in order to get them to understand their role in determining whether I’m served on a web page or not.  Everybody walked away from it with at least a basic understanding of how an ad impression gets targeted, it kept everyone engaged, and it made everybody smile and laugh.

When you’re pitching to a room of decision-makers who need to understand what you do before they can understand how you’re going to help them, it pays to lend some TLC to how you’re presenting the complex concepts that characterize the digital media industry.  Address all kinds of learners so that you’re not losing people along the way.