Tips for reading the room

While speaking with an audience, you should be aware of your own verbal tone, body language and energy level. Stand or sit up straight, make eye contact, and gesture, if that’s part of your style. In other words, be a role model for your audience. After all, if you sound bored or disinterested, your audience will start tuning you out. Instead, you want everyone in the room to get a positive “reading” of you!

Finally, never become complacent and assume you can always deliver an effective talk. That’s a recipe for failure. Remember that your audience is different every time, and you still need to keep learning how to read the room.

It’s almost impossible to read the room while you are talking. So, do a quick check on yourself and the attendees before you dive into your talk. Do you know the key points you want to convey? Are you ready to handle the most likely questions or objections? Are you clear about your preferred outcome? Today, almost everyone seems to have short attention spans. So try to get your key points across as concisely as possible in most situations. But if you know how to read the room, there might be occasions where your audience wants you to drill down into your topic like specific features or use cases.

The first step in learning how to read the room is to focus your powers of observation. Look around to see who is smiling and who seems to be unhappy. What does their body language indicate? Are they leaning forward and paying attention, studying their mobile phones or getting ready to bolt out the door? Pay attention to facial expressions and watch the eyes. That will give you important clues. For instance, someone who looks down or to the side while you talk may be answering an email or text rather than paying attention to your words. From time to time, you could take a brief pause – perhaps for a sip of water – and take a moment to observe what’s happening in the room.

Open up the conversation for questions or ask for their ideas, thoughts, and wonderings. Could they picture a scenario where Paper could be beneficial for their students? As you listen, pay attention to the emotional tone of their words for clues to their responsiveness. You can also take a brief pause in your comments to look at each person. You could go around the room and ask each individual for a response. That’s a good way to engage them in the discussion and make sure their voices are heard. Often, the more a client gets to talk the more they tend to like you…and the product.

Sometimes you can almost feel a shift in your audience’s attention. People might start looking at their watches or cellphones, indicating they are ready to leave. Or something you say might provoke an outburst or a sudden quiet. If you observe this occurring, you should respond to the changing situation, rather than continue with your planned remarks. You might say something like, “I can tell you didn’t like my last comments, so let’s talk about it.” Or if time is running low, you could say, “I see we are almost out of time. Let’s schedule a time to finish up this conversation, so I can answer any questions you may have.

You might be a master at reading the room, but miss a subtle point along the way. Don’t be afraid to ask your manager or partners on the call what they thought of the audience’s response to your demo. Depending on their comments, you might draw up a slightly different game plan for your follow up actions. Getting that kind of third-party feedback can often be helpful in motivating your audience and getting them moving in the desired direction.