When losing your audience, try a doozy of a question (can you follow me to the bathroom?)

Perhaps you already know the Spanx origin story...Sara Blakely was all set to go to law school. Until she bombed the LSAT. Twice.

Next stop, she sold fax machines door-to-door for five years. She eventually sat herself down and made a plan.

• I want to invent something that fills a need for people and sell it to them.
• Then one night, before going out on the town, she cut the feet out of her pantyhose and wore the body slimming product under a new pair of creme-colored slacks.

She spent two more years selling fax machines before turning her attention full-time to her pants and leggings intimate apparel endeavor.

But it was hardly smooth sailing.

• And then one day, after phone stalking a buyer at Neiman Marcus, she was granted a 15-minute meeting at their Dallas headquarters.

A few minutes into the meeting, Sara, a veteran of many "no" conversations as a fax machine salesperson, took stock of the non-verbals of the buyer.

• And they were lukewarm at best.

Realizing it was now or never, Sara took the reins of the conversation with a question:

Diane, will you come to the bathroom with me?

...the Neiman's buyer, impeccably dressed with her scarf matching her belt matching her shoes...you get the picture, says "Excuse me?"

I know it's a little weird, but can you just follow me to the bathroom and I'm gonna actually show you what my product can do.

Sara led her into the bathroom, gave her a mental picture of the "before" version, then went in the stall and put her sample product on under her white pants.

She then came out of the stall and showed her the "after" version.

The buyer sized her up for a few seconds...and now her non-verbals and verbals were singing a different tune.

I get it.

It's brilliant.

I'm gonna try it in seven stores.

How are you at reading non-verbals?

• And what are you prepared to do about them when they are slipping...?

Last spring, I was teaching a two-hour workshop that was squarely in the highly coveted "right after-lunch" slot.

• Based on the first five minutes of the session, I'm pretty sure the lunch buffet featured an extra high dose of turkey tryptophan.

• My audience was polite, but hardly passionate about taking ideas from our time together and putting them into action. (see this previous Sip for the 3 Ps)

So what did I do?

As time went on, I began to ask more and more contentious questions.

• If you were to summarize your life in a six-word story, what would it be?
• What word do you use to describe a presentation with dozens of slides and hundreds of bullets? And has this word ever been aimed at you?

Probing questions have a reliably disarming effect on your audience. So no, you don't have to invite them to the restroom down the hall.

But questions can boost connection...

...and with connection your chances of action beyond the meeting go up astronomically.