From the post:
Say you are speaking for an hour to an audience of 100. Its just a fact of human nature that nobody in the audience is going to be paying close attention to what you are saying for more than 1/4 of the time. The other 45 minutes of the time people will be thinking, talking, or just daydreaming. You must accept this as an unavoidable constraint.
Absent any intervention on your part then you will get a randomly selected 15 minutes of attention from each member of the audience. This means that at any one point in time you will have the attention of only 1/4 of your audience or 25 out of the 100 people. The very important things you will have to say will be processed and potentially remembered by 1/4 of your audience, the same fraction that will be paying attention to the least important things you have to say.
….
A forty-five minute time slot means you have about 11 minutes to say your important ideas.
See the post for some tips on doing exactly that.
I suspect the same is true for discussions with potential/actual customers as well.
They are not stupid, they just aren’t paying attention to what you are saying.
One response would be to wire them up like mice that get shocked at random. (That may be illegal in some jurisdictions.)
Another response would be to accept that people are as they are and not as we might want them to to be.
The second response is likely to be the more successful, if less satisfying. 😉
Not easy to do but explanations with complex diagrams to which more complexity is added, haven’t set the woods on fire as a marketing tool.