Step One of I promote is I establish immediate rapport. Now those of you that know me will know that I talk about this a lot with speaking. But that first impression when you come on stage is really important. What you're trying to achieve here is to get people to know like and trust you really quickly, because as you know, that is what makes people buy from you in the end. So how can you do that? Well, first of all, it's really important to keep your energy high.
When you first come on stage, you need to hit the ground running and not warm up slowly. Make sure you smile, acknowledge the audience, and be larger than perhaps feels natural, that will really help get you into the body of the speech. Secondly, think about whether you're on brand. What is it that you're going to end up selling? You might be selling an idea or a product or a service. What is that?
And when you backtrack from thinking about that, does that mean that you look aligned with that? Are you wearing the right sort of clothes Do you have the right feel about you? If you want to know more about personal brand, then I cover that in I present to do take a look at that as well. So, how can you technically do getting into rapport with people? Well, Robert Cialdini, when he published his best selling book, influence, the science of persuasion, talks about six key principles of persuasion, and one of them is consistency. So getting people to agree with you early on is a really great way to get them to agree with you later on, when you might be asking them for example, to take action.
So how can you get agreement? Well, in I prepare, I covered an acronym called intro, all about how to make an impactful start. So do have a look at that if you want more detail on this, but from there, we can borrow a technique called statement story or question. You can make a statement or tell a story or ask a question that gets the audience in agreement with you really early on, let's say, for example, that you want to sell really high end bicycles, luxury product. I do a lot of working with luxury clients. So what might you say as a statement?
Well, let's make up a fact about this. You could say, only 3% of adults in the UK can't ride a bicycle. Did you know that? You can ask them that. Or you could tell a story. You could say, when I was nine years old, I got my first bike.
And I was taught to ride it by my dad. And he can go on and elaborate about that. And there might be some lessons in there that you're going to pick up later. Or you can just ask a question, how many people can remember buying their first bike, or how many people can remember learning to ride whatever you want to say that you might come back to later to tie it all up at the end of this video. to try out those few pointers, so that you do not pass go until you have established rapport with your audience, then we can start to get into the more difficult stuff, of how to persuade them to change.