Research has shown that the first and last 90 seconds of any speech have the most impact, so you should always give the opening and closing of your talk extra thought, time and effort.

Often your audience will have already listened to a number of other presentations and may be brain-dead or simply bored. Your job is to grab them by the throat, shake off their torpor and give them a compelling reason to listen. Because if you don’t, why should they bother?

However, most people lose this tremendous opportunity, simply ambling into their introduction without any real forethought. Many people put all their preparation into the body of their talk or presentation, and give none to the opening at all!

Let’s look at the five most common ways most presenters begin. Now there is nothing technically wrong with any of the following, and nobody will ever criticise you for using them. They’re just not memorable, that’s all.

Firstly, there are greetings.  Do not open with "Good morning/afternoon/evening, it’s a pleasure to be here today ….." Every speaker before you has probably already said it, it’s bland and obvious and it wastes too much of your precious 90 seconds.

Secondly, there are self-introductions, i.e. “My name is …” Get someone else to introduce you before you get on your feet. Failing that, do it after you’ve grabbed their attention.

Third, there are ‘false starts’ such as “OK, here goes …”, “1-2, 1-2” or “Can everyone hear me at the bac?” (especially when tapping the microphone).

Fourth, there are thanks, e.g. “Thank you for inviting me to speak here today,” or “When John asked me to speak here today I was delighted to accept …” Again – mundane, everyday, ‘safe’, predictable, boring ……
Fifth, there are apologies, such as “I’m really not used to doing this sort of thing”, “I’m glad there’s a lectern here so you can’t see my knees knocking”, “When I accepted my invitation to come tonight, I didn’t know I’d have to say anything. If I’d known that I’d probably have made an excuse,” or “I’m sure there are a lot of you in the audience more qualified to speak on this subject than myself.”

Nervous speakers say this to lower the audience’s expectations and gain sympathy, but to me it is the kiss of death. As soon as I hear words like this I wilt inside, for two reasons.

Firstly, nervousness is contagious. If a speaker owns up to it, it makes me nervous. If she is obviously uncomfortable, I start to squirm and look at the floor, avoiding eye contact. Is this the reaction you want from your audience?

Secondly, if there are people in the audience more knowledgeable than you, why isn’t one of them speaking instead? You’re hardly giving me a compelling reason to listen to you by admitting your lack of expertise! So I cannot stress this enough - No matter how nervous you feel, DO NOT comment on it in a pathetic, wimpish attempt to gain the audience’s sympathy.

So how should you open? Well to start with, energy is contagious, so you need to be warmed up before you take the floor. Try to gauge the audience's energy level and come out slightly higher. BUT if they're low key, don't come out too OTT or they'll be turned off.

Identify the exact spot on which you intend to stand beforehand and walk (don’t amble) energetically and briskly over to it. Just as nervousness is contagious, so is energy, and your own will vitalize everyone else in the room.

If there have been other speakers on before you, choose a spot none of them have used. Remember you are trying to make yourself stand out from them. And NEVER stand behind a lectern if you can help it. Lecterns are lethal and podiums are poison. Standing still makes you look wooden.

Get straight into it. Forget the greetings, self-introducutions, thanks, apologies, etc. - just get straight into it! While you are making your opening remarks, raise your head, establish eye contact and sweep your eyes across the entire audience (whether it be 5 or 500) whilst SMILING. This will help establish rapport and give everyone a sense of personal recognition from you. It also exudes confidence. Do NOT fix your gaze on one unfortunate individual (as so many speakers do) and direct your entire talk to him. This may feel difficult or awkward at first, but persevere – it’s important.

An excellent way to open is to use humour, which is a great way to grab people’s attention. However, I am not talking about  ‘An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman walk into a pub …” You are not a comedian, and your intention is not to tell jokes or make the audience laugh per se. Therefore any humour has to be contextual, i.e. relevant to the subject matter of your talk. Also remember the maxim: "The longer the story the funnier it had better be."

Opening with humour is also good if you intend to use it throughout your talk and your audience hasn’t heard you speak before. They won’t know what to expect., and if you don’t signal your intentions early in your talk or presentation, they will have no idea whether you are going to be serious or fun. Then, when you eventually deliver a humorous line, they will think to themselves, “Was that a joke?” or “Was that line I just heard funn?” Even if they are pretty sure it was funny, they may feel uncomfortable about laughing in case they are the only one who did.

Ever been the only person who clapped at something and felt as if someone was going to throw you a fish? People feel the same way about laughing alone. So GIVE THEM PERMISSION TO LAUGH. By this, I mean introduce something that is obviously humorous early on so that people know your speech is not going to be dull and boring. Once they’ve had permission, they’ll know it’s OK to laugh.

The other benefit of getting everyone to laugh early in the speech is that it provides what psychologists call ‘social proof’ for the audience. People tend to believe behaviour is correct or can be justified when they witness other people doing it. So if they see and hear other people laughing, they feel OK about doing it themselves.

In other words, once they know it’s OK to laugh, there is a far greater chance that they will do. The best seating for increasing the likelihood of this is semi-circular. This is because every audience member will be able to see a number of others, and whether or not they are laughing. Remember that laughter is contagious (social proof again) and that many will laugh simply because others are laughing (that’s why sitcoms generally have a laughter track). With theatre style seating each member of the audience can only see the sides of the heads of the people to their left and right. If they’re not laughing, they mightn’t either.

A second way is to tell a short story. Too many speakers rely on cold data to support their argument, but successive pieces of research has proven that you have a far greater chance of converting an audience if you also engage their emotions, and one of the best ways to do this is to tell anecdotes and stories to illustrate the points you are making. These can be from your own personal experiences, something you have read in magazines or books, or from other people.

Often when I go back to a company someone will say, ‘I saw you speak about twelve months ago …’ Then they say something like, ‘I always remember that story you told about the hotel in Australia …’ Nobody has EVER said, ‘I always remember that slide you showed with the three bullet points …’

Use the mnemonic STORY to get it right:

• Make it SIMPLE. Avoid anything over-complicated and trim the story down to essentials.
• Make it TRIMMED. Epics lose the audience’s attention unless you are an extremely good storyteller. There should be no dull patches and the story should only last a couple of minutes. In preparing a story, continually ask the question, "How can I say this in less time and in fewer words?" Physically write out your story and then condense it.
• Make it OBVIOUS. The audience shouldn’t have to wonder why the story is being told.
• Make it RELEVANT. The story should ideally have some relevance to the audience, but most importantly, to the point being made.
• Make it YOU. Put yourself into the story. Use body language, facial expressions, eye contact and dramatic pauses to make it interesting and enthralling.

Like humour, stories should complement the content of your speech. Never allow your audience to ask themselves, ‘Why is she telling us this?’

A third way is to use a startling (but relevant) statistic. I recently heard an art gallery owner (talking to a Board of Directors on why more and more companies are investing in works of art) begin his presentation with the sentence, “When the Twin Towers were destroyed on 9/11, over $155 million worth of corporate art went up in smoke…..”  Wow! $155 million? He had our attention right away – who had heard that before?

Alternatively, a speaker at a dinner looking to raise donations for cancer research could open with, “64% of the people in the audience this evening will either contract cancer at some point in their lives, or experience a loved one suffer from it.” (NB: I invented that statistic as I don’t know what the real figure is, but remember the comedian Vic Reeves’ dictum that “83.2% of statistics are made up on the spot!”)

Fourth, ask a question. The gallery owner mentioned above could have begun by asking  “Does anyone have any idea what the value was of the corporate art lost when the Twin Towers were destroyed on 9/11?” Straight away the audience would be engaged as he went around the table soliciting guesses.

Another way to use this with a larger audience is to say, “Hands up how many people in the audience have ever ….” However, if you do plan to do this, have a fallback plan available in case you don’t get the answer you expected. You might be expecting 75% of the audience to raise their hands and have a follow-up sentence that reflects that, but what would you say if only 25% responded?

A fifth way is to personalize your opening to the event/date/location, as this shows that it is not your ‘standard’ opening you use on every occasion. You could refer to something that happened on the same date in history and relate it to the theme of the conference (this information can be found on a number of websites, one of which is http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday).On March 1st, for example (to take a date at random), 1200 Protestant Huguenots were massacred in an orgy of religious intolerance in France in 1562, the Salem witch trials began in 1692, ‘Gone With The Wind’ won an Oscar in 1940, Joe Louis retired as heavyweight boxing champion in 1949 and ‘Sergeant Pepper’ finally dropped out of the charts after 88 weeks in 1969. Is there any way you could weave any of these facts into your speech or presentation if you were speaking on that day?

Another way is to personalize it to the location, e.g. the city if it is not your own (why do you think rock bands always start off with “Helloooooooo Liverpool/Leeds/London/etc.!”) or the building in which you are speaking.

How about opening with a quotation (there are dozens of quotation sites on the web)?  For example: “The German philosopher Friedrich von Nietzsche once said, ‘The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.’ Over recent years we in the salesforce have rejected too many of our customers’ requests on the grounds of ‘that’s not the way we do it’. It is time to take off the blinkers and look at things from a fresh, customer-oriented perspective …”

Or: “Winston Churchill once said, ‘Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.’ Today I want to talk to you about the journey upon which we in the salesforce are about to embark …”
A final option is to have a high impact gimmick. One way I sometimes begin my ‘Corporate Combat’ keynote speech is by playing a tape of battle sounds (machinegun fire, explosions, etc.) at high volume before entering dressed in military uniform, shouting at them like a deranged Sergeant-Major. The buzz that this creates is amazing.

I have seen other speakers arrive onstage astride a Harley-Davidson, or pushed on seemingly asleep in a bed. However ........... this is only for those who are very confident of being able to pull it off, and is a high-risk gambit (Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's histrionic, over-the-top opening at one company conference virtually made him a laughing stock; watch it on YouTube) - the rest of your talk needs to just as impactful, or it will be incongruent.

So with such a variety of options open to you, why would you possibly want to waste that first invaluable (and non-recoverable) 90 seconds with thanks, greetings or introductions? Remember the objective of your introduction is to grab the audience by the throat and give them a compelling reason to listen to you for the rest of your presentation.

As Samuel Johnson wrote in 1751, “Few have strength of reason to overrule the perceptions of sense, and yet fewer have curiosity or benevolence to struggle long against the first impression: he who therefore fails to please in his salutation and address is at once rejected, and never obtains an opportunity of showing his latest excellences or essential qualities."

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