"A" is for Audience
The importance of
tailoring talks to your listeners
Claudyne Wilder
A common mistake that
can bring down even the best-written presentations is the wrong "pitch"
for the audience. Managers who have to talk to their colleagues about
their projects, for instance, can give detailed presentations full of
specific concepts and technical terms. But what about when the manager
is asked to talk to upper management? The same presentation won't work,
because the upper managers don't need or want to know all those details.
For presentation developers,
the answer is to tailor the talk to the audience-in this case, the functional
group within the company. Change the talk's details and focus. If you
are creating a presentation to persuade the engineers to help the quality
engineering group, for instance, tell the engineers how they will benefit
from that action. This is a different pitch from the one that you would
have use in a talk explaining to customers how the quality engineering
group works.
Creating presentations
to be given to upper managers requires a certain touch. When developing
such talk, make sure that your speaker doesn't just show charts and read
off numbers. Instead, he or she should tell the upper managers what the
numbers mean, then explain the action to be taken. What is being done
to change a negative trend or continue a positive trend?
You
never spend too much time thinking about the audience. Successful talks
focus on their needs and interest.
One mid-level manager
recently told me that, in presentations to upper managers, he has to tell
them everything he's been doing. "How else will they know I've been working?"
he said. "I can't just get up and say my results and sit down." I told
him that he should do just that, for two reasons. First, upper managers
don't attend meetings to decide whether a middle manger works every minute
of every day. They just want to know the results and what the manager
plans to do next. Second, and just as important, upper managers don't
have the time to be bored.
Billing Error
A colleague of mine recently
gave a presentation about graphics programs at a training conference. The
announcement, however, billed her session as a talk about "multimedia."
As a result, the audience was made up of people who knew a lot about graphics
program as well as people who knew nothing about them. In the end, some
attendees were quite pleased with her talk, and others were not.
It is important to
be specific about the subjects that will be covered when you're developing
conference sessions. For the talk on graphic programs, for example, you
might say in the announcement, "this talk is for those who already know
the basics about [the programs under discussion]. The session will show
some of the programs' more unusual features."
Also, remember that
conference attendees often go from one session to another, and they like
to have a little time in between to get where they're going. Develop talks
that end five to eight minutes early, and build in a question-and-answer
period. That way, no one including the speaker, will feel harried.
Conferences aren't
the only events that can produce unexpected audiences. A technical specialist
showed up to speak to a group of other experts in her field. She had crafted
a fantastically detailed talk. But after about five minutes in front of
the group, she felt uneasy. She discovered that the audience consisted
of only a few technical people not only of technical people-despite what
she'd been told in advance-but of sales people with little technical background.
What did she do? The
brave woman acknowledged that the talk was wrong for the audience, stopped
it and changed on the spot to discuss subjects that would interest the
sales people. This meant that she wasn't able to use the prepared visuals
in their original sequence. It also gave her the opportunity to impress
her audience. They appreciated her ability to shift the talk and focus
the information for them.
Check, Check and
Recheck
Recently I was asked
to talk to a group at a conference. I asked the organizer how many people
in the audience were using laptop computers. The organizer said most of
them. This turned out not to be true when I polled the 250-person audience.
What did this mean for my talk? I had planned to talk about ways to use
the fancy features in a variety of programs. Instead, I spend extra time
talking about what to look for in a laptop and how to decide which equipment
to buy.
Presentation developers
can never spend too much time thinking about the audience. Check your
information a couple of times. Have speakers recheck it, if they can,
with the audience. Presentations that stay focused on the audience's interests
and needs are successful.
Next month, in "B
is for Beware," I will share audience horror stories and how presenters
can avoid those experiences.
AV Video & Multimedia
Producer, May 1997
Copyright © 2000,
Wilder Presentations
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