The situation
Maybe you’ve asked for feedback on a presentation. From colleagues, or family, or friends. They’ll (usually) be honest! But do they tell the whole truth? If you really want to sharpen your sales presentations, your sales materials, you need to find out what audiences aren’t telling you—maybe what they don’t even know themselves!—about what is grabbing their attention, hitting their emotions. You need to read their minds.
When a financial services company wanted to up its sales game, and arm its sales professionals with real data and counsel on how to craft the most effective sales presentations and materials possible, it knew it needed to pull more than the traditional sales coaching and training levers. Feedback was only getting at part of the story. Their sales professionals needed to read minds.
Of course, mind reading is still well beyond the art of the possible. But could neuroscience—biometrics and the truths they illuminate—help them go well beyond traditional feedback mechanisms? Could science provide the detailed and fact-based insights that those traditional approaches often struggled to deliver? With help from Deloitte's Neuroscience of Winning team, they were about to find out.
Listening to what biometrics tells us about selling: Better data, better impact
The solve
The idea was simple. Analyze data delivered via physiological sensors to better understand an individual audience member’s intention, attention, engagement, stress, and emotions during a sales presentation. Specifically, the team would gather from individuals, in real time during live presentation rehearsals and while reviewing on-screen materials, eye movement tracking and galvanic skin response (GSR) data.
Participants were fitted with eye-tracking glasses and GSR sensors that tracked and recorded their gaze, emotional response, and attention, with associated timestamps captured. Additionally, participants were asked for feedback regarding their experience at the conclusion of the presentation. Separately, participants were asked to review and interact with on-screen materials, on a laptop outfitted with an eye-tracking bar, also while they were wearing GSR sensors.
From this data, the Neuroscience of Winning team was able to share with the client specific insights on what participants were actually focusing on and actually felt during these experiences. The biometrics provided detailed insights no other form of feedback could capture. For example, pupillometry measures pupil diameter, which conveys information regarding the cognitive load associated with increased brain processing, while real-time attention tracking provided specifics about how their brains processed visual information. The technology also provided insights into aspects of fatigue and measured emotional responses (conveyed via minute variations in the electric conductivity of the skin) to provide insight into when and where on the slide individuals were most emotionally engaged and focused.
Brains don’t lie. Better data equals better communications.
The impact
After reviewing the detailed and valuable insights on the impact of the sales materials and approach provided by the biometric data, the client has implemented leading practices suggested by the project directly into its sales team training. More broadly speaking, this single neuroscience project has fundamentally changed the company’s approach to presentations.
Insights were drawn from specific feedback on audience stress and attention and degree of empathy and engagement. Additionally, the data was able to pinpoint emotional responses to specific words and phrases and even detail where content was being ignored by the audiences altogether and where audiences were “reading ahead” of the material.
Changes made to presentations after the feedback was incorporated showed marked improvements, with improved positive emotion, memory retention, and attention scores. Overall engagement—which started high, at 90%—still jumped a full five percentage points.
Truth through neuroscience: The path to sales success
