Step Five of I promote, we are coming to the very end of your speech. And I am a great believer in having a call to action. So this step is called, I invite them to act. Notice the verb invite. This is a very soft, nice gracious step. We are not trying to push anything on anyone, there is no point because they will only resist it later.

So if you have any doubts at any stage of I promote about it being manipulative, don't worry, people simply won't do something that they don't want to do. So relax and enjoy asking people to take action. One of the main difficulties people have when they're doing sales or persuasion, is to just ask people to do something. It takes a bit of courage, and it's theater and people who haven't done much sales before that they simply won't ask for the business. This is a great thing to practice, take a deep breath in, relax, look people in the eye, and just ask them. When you're on stage, this is only a very short step in comparison to all of the others.

But don't rush it. I often see people doing a speech and they don't leave enough time for this at the end. That is a disaster. You have done all of this work to build up to this moment to ask the audience to do something. The idea that you then cut that is terrible. So you should know your exact timing for this piece.

This is probably in your final five minutes, but do not miss it out. So you can ask them to do all kinds of things in an audience, you might ask them to sign up to something using technology like their mobile phones or give a link on a slide. You might be selling something at the back of the room might want them to buy your book, you might want them to just raise their hand Do you might want them to just commit to something, maybe turn to the person next to them and say that they're going to do something, you might have an exhibition stand outside and you want to drive the traffic around to that afterwards. Whatever it is that you want them to do. Keep it simple. People have listened to you for maybe 20 or 30, or even 40 minutes by now.

And they just need one instruction. Don't make this complicated. There is a saying that I love. If you confuse them, you lose them. So simplicity is key here, one thing to do, and one thing that they can do really easily that won't fail. So take some time before you go on stage to think about what this call to action is going to be and make sure that you've created any collateral that goes around that like handouts, brochures, books, technology, links, and so on.

Because then it'd be very easy for you to just asked them to do something. So I really hope that you've found this useful and I want you to go away and craft this call to action. even think about doing that first and writing the whole talk backwards from there. Because in persuasion, what you're wanting to ask people to do really is the key note here. Good luck.