Today is Thursday, so this post is on communication skills.
Last year, I did a series of podcasts on career and life success and leadership topics. Steve Roesler, a good friend of mine was my guest for one of the more interesting discussion. Steve is an expert on presentations.
Steve had some really interesting things to say about audience analysis as a key step in preparation for a presentation. What follows in this is post is an excerpt of our conversation on audience analysis…
Bud: “So, if I understand you correctly, before you even begin to start putting pencil to paper or start creating PowerPoint slides, like so many people do these days, the first thing you need to do is to spend sometime thinking about who your audience for this particular talk is going to be. I imagine there are a whole lot of things that go into analyzing your audience and it might be wise here to take a few minutes to talk about that.
Steve: “I have kind of a motto and that is “prognosis without diagnosis is malpractice”.
Bud: “Say that again…
Steve: “Prognosis without diagnosis is malpractice.
Bud: “Wow, we can quote you on that one. That’s a good one.
Steve: “If you walk into a room and you don’t know who’s going to be there, why they’re going to be there and what they’re looking for, chances are your presentation is not going to go very well; and whatever it is that you deliver isn’t necessarily going to satisfy what they came for. So I work with people on doing a good diagnosis before they go any further. You hit something on the head a few moments ago when you said don’t do your PowerPoint slides first, which is kind of the norm. I try to get people in the habit of getting some good information first about why the people are coming to your talk and what their objective happens to be. Are they there to get information, are they there to participate in a decision, are they there just to have fun or are they there just to be educated? And once you know why they’re going to be there, then you can formulate your information accordingly.
“Don’t bother guessing at it. This is kind of interesting. If you’ve got a small group of people, and I’m not talking about going into a group of 1,000, but you know probably many of our listeners are used to going into business meetings everyday and sitting around a conference table with a small group, there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t pick up the phone, call the people who are going to be in the meeting before they get there and say “hi, this is Steve and I’m going to be presenting at your meeting next week. Here’s my topic. Tell me, what is it that you need to know about this, what would be most helpful to you?” Quite literally, you can make a half dozen phone calls and those people will give you the content of your presentation and will cut your prep time down by about 30 percent.
Bud: “And my experience with this, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that not only does that cut your prep time, and helps you appeal more to your audience, because they appreciate it. They come to the presentation in favorably predisposed towards you because you’ve taken the time to let them know that they’re important.
Steve: “Exactly. You’ve established good rapport before the presentation ever started, and if you think about it, how many people have ever called you on the phone and said “hey, by the way, I’m coming to speak, you’re part of the audience, and I really would like to know what it is that important to you about the topic?” It immediately establishes some rapport.
“I’ll tell you a story that happened a few years ago. We were doing a workshop for a company, and the company was paying for a series of presentation skills workshops. One of the men that was in the workshop was sent there because his boss said “you’ve got to go present this to the president of the company next week, no better time to go to a presentation skills workshop - just before the presentation, and your task is to speak with the president and his committee for one hour about topic X”. So he came in and at the beginning of the workshop he explained why he was there.
“Well, I happened to know the president of the company and knew that he wasn’t prone to one hour presentations on anything. So, when we got to the audience analysis part of the workshop, I said trust me on this one. I said “let’s call the president on the telephone, tell him that we’re here at the workshop, ultimately he’s signing the check anyway, and let’s find out what he really wants to know”. And that created a little anxiety, but I’ll take the hit if he’s not happy about the phone call. So we call him up on the speaker phone, had about half a dozen people sitting around and the guy who was supposed to make the presentation, and we started asking him diagnostic questions and the presentation participant said “well, I’m supposed to present to you for an hour” and there was a hush at the other end of the phone and he said “if you’re in front of me for more than ten minutes, you’re dead, I want ten minutes worth of information”, then the natural question was “well, what do you want to know about?”
“So this fellow came in thinking he had to prepare for an hour and a single phone call later he ended up needing to do only ten minutes. The president was happy, he was happy, it was a lot easier and it turned into a conversational presentation and a successful one.
Bud: “I just had two clients who also had to present to some very senior people. They had literally spent -- two people -- most of their time, over a period of about 2 ½ to 3 weeks, just honing on this PowerPoint presentation to the point where they discussed every word. They had about 80 or 90 slides and then they kicked it up to their boss’ boss who was very close to the executive to whom they were going to present. He said “we don’t need this”, just like what you were saying, “we need a five minute overview”. So they were frustrated because they thought that they had put in all this time and effort for nothing.
“My question to them was “did you ask exactly what they needed?” and they said “well, no, we assumed they wanted a real thorough piece” and I said “well, that’s one of the problem that you make, you can’t assume about audiences”. And I think of the things that both you and I have learned is you present the people higher in organizations, brevity is probably something they value more than anything.
Steve: “They do, because they’re pressed for time, they usually want a big picture overview. If you think about it in this way, if you come in there with the main point of what you want to get across, they’ll ask you the questions that they want to have answered, and if you can present for a few minutes and get people asking questions, you get that conversation going, it’s a lot easier on you as a presenter. You don’t have to be there as an entertainer, what you’re there to do is have a conversation and have a discussion about what’s important to the organization and you’re probably the content expert.
Bud: “That’s great. So, before we leave the whole idea of audience analysis, a couple points. Are there one or two or three questions that in general you would suggest to people that they think about and answer for themselves before a presentation?
Steve: “Well, there are. First of all you ask “who is my audience?” and “who is the person, if there’s a single person or individual in the audience who is the decision maker or who happens to have the ultimate authority over what you’re doing?” You really need to find out what that individual wants and then educate the people around him or her.
“The second thing is if you think that what you’re going to talk about is going to be a little bit controversial, that you know it’s an organizational issue, then by all means, make some phone calls beforehand to let them know what they’re going to be discussing. You don’t need to try to sway peoples’ opinions before the presentation. If you have a good presentation, that should do that. What you do need to do is find out what the issues are that are hanging out there so you can address as many of those as possible.
“And the last thing is make sure that you do something upfront to establish some rapport with the group. If you don’t get a chance or don’t take the opportunity to call before hand, at least before the presentation starts, have an informal conversation with everybody as best as you can so that you don’t walk up there cold and it appears to be a presentation to everybody in the room and people like to have a discussion rather than a presentation…”
Some great common sense advice on presentation preparation from Steve Roesler. If you are interested in hearing my entire conversation with Steve, send me an e mail, and I will send you directions on how to download it.
That’s it for today. Thanks for reading. Log on to my website www.BudBilanich.com for more common sense. Check out my other blog: www.CommonSenseGuy.com for common sense advice on leading people and running a small business.
I’ll see you around the web, and at Alex’s Lemonade Stand.
Bud
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