Present Research That Sticks

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Can you repeat your Social Security number? Can you state your zip code? Unless you live in a state where your Social Security number is your driver’s license number, can you repeat your driver’s license number? My guess is your answers are, Yes, Yes, and No. And therein lies two very important sales and presentation principles for presenting research effectively.

Listeners Can Absorb Only So Much

The human brain does not remember very much in short term memory. Research shows people can recall seven items plus or minus two AND research also shows that repetition increases retention. This is why you can recall your Social Security number: it is chunked in three groups of no more than four numbers AND you are asked to repeat it frequently in life and in business. The same is true with your zip code-five numbers that you use repeatedly. However, you tend to not know your driver’s license number since it is one long number and you are rarely asked to repeat it. Note that when the Post Office went to nine digit zip-codes, they added a hyphen between the fifth and sixth number, because they knew how difficult it would be to recall nine numbers in a row.

In practice, most of us begin to lose retention (and attention) at four or five items. Think about it. If you leave your shopping list of twenty, or even ten, items home, won’t you likely forget something? (Now, you see one of the reasons why you have so much trouble remembering your various online passwords.)

Make It Easy

In selling or presenting, the same holds true. If you have twenty information slides in a presentation, your listeners will glaze over by the seventh slide. However, if you chunk your information into three or four sections and repeat where you are at the beginning and end of each section, they will stay with you.

For example, suppose you are presenting a batch of research slides that describes consumer behavior in stores, online, in response to direct mail, and in response to recommendations from friends. Instead of going through each slide on its own as in, “On this slide…On the next slide…On the next slide…On the next slide..” a flow that guarantees you will lose your group, present you information this way:

In the beginning of your presentation, show one high level slide with the four conclusions for the four areas you researched.
Then, state the first conclusion as you go into the details of the first section. Repeat the conclusion of that section before continuing to the next section.
State the conclusion of the next section. Present the details. Repeat the conclusion of that section.
Before you move into the third section, do a mid-recap, something like, “So, consumers tend to respond to featured items in stores and will spend more online on sites with videos. When it comes to direct mail, the story is a bit different. They tend to…” and that leads into your third section.
Go through the third and fourth sections similar to the way you went through the first and second sections.
Lock in the results of your research by summarizing on one slide the same four conclusions you introduced in your earlier opening slide.