Many marketing and promotional executives truly aim to create an interactive and participatory learning environment. Yet, many times promotional specialist gives in to the discomfort of being in front of their prospect and resort to lecture mode, thus losing them.
If you want to be a great promotional product and marketing consultant you must be able to shift the pressure off of you and onto them. In other words, rather than having to be the "talking heads" with all the answers, your job is to pull the answers from the group. By continually challenging them, asking them questions, and forcing them to answer. So how do you do this? First you deliver your ideas and material in the form of asking a lot of questions. How many of you see this promotional product as a fit? Do have any other ideas that we didn't show you? The second way is by continually tasking the group to talk among themselves what has been discussed and challenge them to come up with other possible ideas for their promotional campaign.
Finally, the most powerful and the most difficult challenge: NOT TO ANSWER THEIR QUESTIONS!!! That's right! If you answer their questions, you have taken them off the hook and robbed them of their thinking.