Can you tell me which are the players, the participants of a presentation? It’s you and your audience.
How much time during the preparation of your presentation do you invest in analyzing your audience?
How important it is to analyze your audience? think of that.
It’s very, very, important that you have your audience in mind.
What is the secret of a presentation?
What is the most important thing in a presentation?
I’ve asked this question to a lot of people and I never get, well not never, but most of the time I don’t get the right answer.
A lot of people tell me that “the design”, “the content”, “ the messages” “the speaker”, if you have a very good speaker, that’s what the secret of a good presentation, nearly no one has ever told me, the audience.
THE SECRET OF A SUCCESSFUL PRESENTATION IT’S THE AUDIENCE!
Why do you do the presentation? You do a presentation to generate a change in the audience, knowing the audience it’s very, very, important.
Let me give you one little example: Imagene you are a technical member of a project and you are asked to do a presentation about a certain type of technology to some members of the project. How important is it to know how much they know about the technology?
KNOWING HOW MUCH YOUR AUDIENCE KNOWS ABOUT YOUR TOPIC IS CRITICAL.
If you start too basic, they will be bored in 5 minutes, if you start too high, they will think that this the messages are in expert mode and I am amateur mode. Knowing as much as you can from the audience is critical to prepare the correct presentation, the correct messages estructura.
Think of this: the success of your presentation, selling something, achieving the next meeting with the boss or whoever you look into, the exact gold of your presentation depends 100% of how you have in front.
YOU HAVE TO ADAPT TO YOUR AUDIENCE TO ACHIEVE YOUR GOAL
You are going to have multiple paths to achieve that goal, choosing the right one, knowing your audience, and using that to create your presentation.
You never talk the same to people that have a background in finance pr to people that have a background in history, because some of them will be more emotional and the financial people will need more proof, mode data, so it’s a totally different language, these even modify how you use the language, how you use the stories, how you use the examples, depends a 100% again on your audience.
YOUR AUDIENCE’S BACKGROUND WILL HELP YOU TO ADAPT YOUR LANGUAGE
your audience is that Lighthouse that guides you to where you need to go, and where you don’t need to go. The lighthouse tells the ship where they shouldn’t go, where is the limit of the earth and the see, well the information from the audience works in the same way, it will tell you what you can do to connect with them better, and it will tell you what not to do, for example starting with a knowledge level too low.
KNOWING WHAT TO SAY/INCLUDE AND WHAT TO AVOID DEPENDS 100% ON THE AUDIENCE: DIKA ANALYSIS
In order to analyze the audience I use a method called D.I.K.A. method I made it, just the first letter of each words
- Demographics
- Interest
- Knowledge and
- Attitude
Those are the four areas in which I focus to analyse the audience. Let’s talk about each of them:
DEMOGRAPHICS:
Where do they come from? which age, nationality, language, etc.
I’m not a english native speaker, im Spanish, but when I speak with people I try to adapt the way i speak, If i have to deliver a pitch presentation in English, and they are no fluent in English, I will make sure that I stopped, I give them time to understand the words, I don’t try to use too much slang, I don’t use complex words, or trying to speak too fast, as you may understand is way different to speak with a 20-25 year old, than to Millennial, than to a 60-70 year old, it’s a complete different experience in life, it’s a complete different knowledge you have to adapt,so, demographics is ask yourself which is the profile of that person in terms of, where are they from? Which language they speak? so that you can adapt.
INTEREST
Why are they there? Why are they in front of you? If you are doing a conference, Why are people attending the conference? Ask yourself that. Can you believe that there are people, and I’m sure that you’ve been in this situation because, I’ve been and everyone’s been in the situation, that you are invited to a presentation but you don’t know why you should be there.
well the same happens to you, you have to try to understand why they’re there, because if you understand the reason why they need to learn from you certain things, you can narrow the information that you give them, so that the information that you provide to them aligns with their interests, which is the level of expectation they have, what do they expect from me?
KNOWLEDGE
The knowledge level of your audience is very important, let me provide you an example:
In the world of real estate, the process to sell one asset, plot of land and building or whatever, follow certain rules cases, you’ve got a method, you’ve got the preparation, you’ve got the marketing, they go to marketing to connect with investors, then you receive offers, then you give them more information, there is a competitive process, then there is the final offer and then the closing and then they closing in negotiation.
I was in a presentation about real estate, about selling a plot of land, and I asked this question: which is Knowledge level of this person? He was a very Green known investor in the real estate Arena, probably sold and bought hundreds of Assets in his life, are you going to spend 10 minutes of your presentation to explain how the process of selling the plot of land to that person, if there’s nothing in the process that is a specific or customized for that certain situation?
No, because he’s like explaining to a teenager how to use Snapchat or how do you use Instagram, that would generate a lack of connectivity, you don’t connect with them, you’re not talking the same language, okay. So the knowledge level is very important to identify all the elements that your presentation contains and make sure that you know exactly covering anything that is too obvious. That will lower down the success of your presentation but that’s another side of the story, you can’t just have information that they don’t know about, you have to make sure that you provide the beginning of each of your messages from the level of knowledge they have or underneath.
For example, going back to the plot of land sale process, you can start by saying look: In these slide you’re going to find the typical sales process as you already may know and you talk to them like that: “You already know this process so they understand that you know”, that they already know, so you keep connecting with them, but you were starting to talk from underneath the knowledge level, and then you go up, and then you go okay “We’re not going to invest any time in these but let me focus on one thing: In this specific parts does this, this, this and this specifics things that we have to take into consideration….”
So it’s not just starting to talk about things that they don’t know, we have to hook them from their knowledge level into your new knowledge level into your new knowledge level in which you are informing them.
ATTITUDE
How friendly or how hostile they are about what I’m going to talk about. Long time ago, I had a presentation, I was selling a software product about internal communication that did saved a lot of time, a lot of man-hours from the developers, and and it was completely automatic, etc, So, one of my big claims was: “I’m going to save your money with this product” I’m going to ask you for $800 per month but I’m going to save you 4000€ per month.well those 4000€ per month that I was saving them, it was the job from the IT manager that I had in front of. That guy was very hostile about bringing one piece of software that was going to save a lots of hours, that meant that, that guy had to fire a couple of people or at least get them into trouble and find a new project for those people, and also he was quite against tools that generated the code automatically.
So, if you have that person in you audience, you can convince the other two of the other three but, you have to understand that, this person can blow up your presentation, saying that “for us this is not possible in this infrastructure” so, with you messages, you will have to cover the worries that, this person has.
How do you do all this? well you might have a lot of information just by assuming a lot of information from who you’re going to talk to, but this implies that you have to know Who you’re going to talk to.
HOW DO YOU RESEARCH YOUR AUDIENCE?
How do you do all this? Well you might have a lot of information just by assuming, you can assume a lot of information from who you’re going to talk to, but this implies that you have to know how you’re going to talk to.
ALWAYS ASK: WHO IS COMING TO THE PRESENTATION?
The first thing you have to ask is, who is coming to the presentation? That’s something that I always DO. Ask who is coming, name and surname, trying to ask a bit further what do they expect to get from this presentation, from this moment on that leg and spend with me. If you have a name and surname do some research, a lot of people have LinkedIn profiles, a lot of people have social networks profiles, some people have publications, so read about them, trying to connect with them.
RESEARCH YOUR AUDIENCE ONLINE
Another thing that you can do is try to understand which interests do they have apart from the ones from your topic, from your presentation, for example if they are really fans of football or really fans of golf, Are they from the south of Spain or from the north of England? Try to identify as much as you can from each decision maker that you are going to have in front, some people tell me: yes Javer How about if you are doing a conference?
IN A CONFERENCE MODE, ASK THE ORGANISER ABOUT THE
PROFILE OF THE AUDIENCE
Well I do some conferences some times, and I never do a conference without knowing who I have in front, I asked the organizer of the event the profile, how many CEO labels do I have? How many CFO? How many IT Managers? How many people are from marketing? Which type of companies do I have? Which type of companies? Do I have a lot of Pharmaceuticals? Do I have a lot of from Logistics? so I can adapt, with all this information, from the D.I.K.A. method, who is coming, researching the,m knowing the background profile, so you can adapt:
- The messages
- The stories
- The examples
- The language
- The knowledge level
All those things think of it as if it was an equalizer, play all music at the same levels in each of the bands of sound of an equalizer, okay, No you have to adapt, because drum and bass will be like this Solo, etc. well each presentation has a different equalizer, you can even have the same content, or similar content, but a different audiences so make sure you understand as much as you can you audience to adapt your content and you deliver.
REMEMBER
- Never prepare a presentation with your audience in your mind
- Ask yourself about their Demographics, Interest, Knowledge and Attitude
- Use that information to filter content and your language, examples, messages and visuals.