Recently I went to see Cher at Caesar’s palace in Las Vegas. The Coliseum Theater holds about 4,300 people. Listed ticket prices are $100-$255 although tickets can be over $500 a piece on line for premium seats. The average ticket price appears to be about $180. That means her audience paid approximately $750,000 for her ninety minute “presentation”.

By and large the audience already loved Cher before they arrived, evidenced by the ticket prices. How did she open this presentation?  Even though she didn’t need to gain the audience’s affection she started with the cameras showing the crowd. They paused on each area long enough for the audience members to wave, do their best dance moves or act completely silly on a large screen in front of 4,000 strangers. Bottom line is she got her audience involved in the show before she even came onto the stage. She then descended from 40 feet above the audience onto the stage in a gondola she calls her “Flying Wallenda, Evel Knievel death-mobile.”

After she landed and stepped onto the stage she immediately used humor to connect with the audience. In the show I attended she had stained her back the same day and wove the story of how it happened into her obviously normal material. Her material was not extremely well written or delivered exceptional well.  It didn’t need to be.  She is a singer and at 63 still has a phenomenal voice. She didn’t need to involve the audience or use humor to put on an incredible show but she did and I could tell the audience appreciated it.

One of my mentors, Darren LaCroix, teaches that if you want to be the best, learn from the best. While I don’t have the desire, or TALENT, to be a singer I do want my audiences to have a great experience when they hear me present.

My ah-ha moments at Cher’s concert taught me three things;

1.Involve your audience as early as possible? Use questions or use stories that make the audience the hero. Know your audience and realte to them EARLY.

2.Have a memorable opening? You don’t need to descend form the ceiling but you need to do something different from the standard boring “Good morning, thank you for attending, blah blah, blah , you can go to sleep now blah, blah, blah” opening.

3.Use humor to enhance the audience’s experience even though you may not be delivering humorous material? Humor was not her presentation, it added to her presentation, and made the show more enjoyable. Your humor does have to be prefect to be impactful.

If Cher, one of the best in the world at what she does uses these techniques shouldn’t you consider using them?

What will you do in your next presentation to improve the audience experience?

Guy Burns
www.SuccessAndBeyond4U.com

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