A speaker opens a keynote to 450 salespeople with a story about a CEO's eye contact that signals a lost deal. He uses silence and a relatable moment to set the emotional tone in the first 30 seconds, showing how to hook an audience before saying anything substantive.
I got asked to address 400 sellers from all over the world at a large company. This was their global sales meeting, and they have it every other year. And so I got asked to do a keynote there. And so I was sitting at one of the, you can imagine, a conference room or a hotel room, and there's these tables of five in this large conference room, raised stage, all the lights and the, you know, the heavy lights, and they got camera guys in the back and all that kind of stuff. All this, like, major, like, this is a major production. I mean, companies spend millions on these kind of meetings. And so I did this keynote and so I'm sitting at a front table and they tell me, this is where you are in the agenda. Here's this thing. What's going to happen then? You're going to be next. I was like, okay, so I did that thing. Now, for me, people always think, oh, you're such a natural speaker. Oh, you're so good at. It's like, oh, heck no. I'm just, my nerves are like, you know, off the chart and everything like that. And I go, and. And then they announce my name over the speaker. And, you know, nobody knows who I am. Nobody knows me from a hole in the wall because I'm not a public figure. I'm not, I'm not Tony Robbins or something like that, right? But everybody's like, you know, it's the polite, but it's Sellers, right? So they're very enthusiastic. So they're like, yay. And so 450 people applaud. And I walk over to the raised stage, walk up to the stage, and I walk to the back of the stage on the back corner, kind of in the dark, and I just look at the crowd and the clapping was like. And then everybody stopped. And I waited till you could hear a pin drop. And I walked forward to the front of the stage and I said, have you ever looked as a chief executive officer in the eyes at the end of a proposal meeting and you knew you weren't going to win? Wow. That was me. We had eight minutes left and we won the work. I want to share with you how that was done. And I said in about that level of a voice, and now you could go. People going, like, I need to hear from this guy now. I set the stage, I put them in a room with the CEO and I put them in a place of saying they've all been there of like, you know, that, that, that awkward silence, that moment where you go like this, this isn't going to work. They all knew. They all knew that place. So part of this is like, how do you set the tone in the very first 30 seconds? How do you get people wrapped up and pull them in to the story and want to know what's next?
