Synchronizing customers' brains in virtual sales presentations

When you present a value proposition to a customer and have an audience larger than one person, it's important to ask: do multiple people process the same information the same way? Much like matching your footsteps to someone else's or singing in unison, it feels good when neural rhythms synchronize too. Have you ever had a conversation with someone and felt like "you were on the same page"?

Communication is a single act performed by multiple brains

What do we know about brain synchronization and why is it important in B2B sales and marketing? When your customers' brains process information and their neurons fire, they give off electrical signals, which align to certain frequencies and which we can record at the scalp through EEG technology. Brain wave frequencies are measured in hertz (cycles per second) and modern technology and statistical analyses make it possible to observe when neural oscillations are similar between two or more brains (this is what we mean by brain synchronization).

Typically, brain synchronization is associated with collaboration, cooperation, shared understanding and engagement. You can now see why brain synchronization is desirable in business settings: variables such as cooperation, shared understanding and engagement are important in any persuasive context, and especially as more business is conducted virtually.

The picture and video above are from our most recent study at B2B Decision Labs and shows people simultaneously viewing a live sales pitch delivered by a seller via Zoom, along with their brain waves; during this study, we were comparing brain synchronization of potential customers during virtual, phone, face-to-face, and hybrid presentations. Surprisingly, synchronization was significantly better for people in the virtual groups vs. the groups that had a face-to-face component (i.e, in-person or hybrid). Why is that and how can you achieve synchronization in your own virtual meetings?

One suggestion is that cooperation, understanding and engagement are mitigated by shared attention mechanisms, meaning that multiple people's brains are looking at the same things. So how can you convince viewers to focus on the same things in a Zoom call? Here are two techniques we used in our study, which rendered the virtual medium superior.

Use motion for new details, while keeping a main message static

The human visual system has evolved to perceive motion. Knowing that people are drawn to what moves, you can create motion with animation included in slides. A gradual display of information (especially on more complex slides) will direct your viewers gaze to the area where you want them to look. The video below displays the eye tracker activity for one participant and you can see how the person's gaze is directed to specific areas on the screen as they are displayed. The heat map indicates the results from the entire experimental group in the virtual condition, confirming that their focus was on the 3 sections that the presenter wanted to bring to their attention.

The three sections in the screen shot above were then kept static through the rest of the presentation, and more details were added around them. This combination of static (familiar) and moving (new) allows you to offer your customers' brains something they will find useful: motion that attracts interest, novelty (which gives the brain a buzz), and a familiar context in which to place the novelty and movement, so they don't produce anxiety.

Once you are willing to incorporate more movement, be prepared to sustain it. In other neuroscience studies, we observed that when there was not enough motion (something happening at least once every 80 seconds), motivation to watch dropped. In our most recent study, we used a slide change every 30 seconds and some slides had on average 33 animations (not on click animations, just timed animations that showed elements appearing tastefully on the screen to support relevant points).

Speak so the eyes can see

Another way to keep people's brains synchronized when they listen to you at a distance (via Zoom or Zoom + phone) is to help them build mental pictures of your value proposition. In our neuroscience study, one of the experimental conditions included participants listening to the same sales pitch over the phone, no slides. This modality performed well in terms of how people paid attention, how engaged they were, and how they remembered the information later. We credit this to the fact that the script for the sales pitch was written in a way that enabled participants to "see" in their mind's eye what the presenter was talking about. For example, we invited participants to: "imagine you're a homeowner and you're hiring a real-estate agent to sell your house." Or, even for more abstract concepts, the script invited people to "picture a straight line, where you have Goals on one side and Compensation at the other side."

Keep in mind that the statement "some people are auditory" is a myth. The brain is primarily a visual organ. So if you want to enable your virtual participants to see the same things and synchronize their brains, help everyone to really see, even if they are just calling in. As a result, you will enjoy better collaboration, shared understanding and engagement - all desirable when you seek persuasion in a virtual medium.

Carmen Simon, PhD, is the Chief Science Officer at Corporate Visions and author of Impossible to Ignore: Creating Memorable Content to Influence Decisions. She conducts research for CVI's research arm, B2B Decision Labs, and uses neuroscience tools to research how the brain processes business messages, remembers them, and decides to act (or not).