Before we do anything, we need to ask just who is going to be in our audience? If we don’t know that information, then we are thrashing around in the dark, trying to find the light switch. It may be an internal group we are speaking to, so we will have a pretty clear idea who will be in the room. It might be an industry association talk, so we can expect there will be people similar to us in the audience. It might be a public talk, sponsored by a chamber of commerce and so there could be people from many different industries gathered to hear us speak.
The key point is to try and find out who will be in the audience, by asking the organisers, if you are not sure who is coming. If for privacy reasons, you cannot get a list of attendees, then at least ask for as much detail as possible around age, rank and gender. A benefit of going to the venue early is usually all the name badges of the audience are lined up outside the room, so you can spend a bit of time seeing who is coming. The name badge will give you the company name but it won’t give you the rank or the status of the individuals. There is a simple solution for this issue.
Position yourself at the door and then try to greet as many people as possible. Japan is great, because handing over all your key private information is acceptable, because we exchange our meishi or business cards. You can see the position they hold and looking at their face, you can guess the age bracket. As you engage them you can ascertain why they have given up their time to attend, so you can gauge their motivations and interests. We can make adjustments on the fly in terms of our angle of delivery with these insights.
I heard a talk on Personal Branding, which completely missed the mark. The speaker was talking about how she elevated her personal brand in one of the biggest companies on the planet. Her audience were not in that company size bracket, so there was little to relate to. If she had spent time talking to people beforehand she would have realised she needed to make made some changes in order to accommodate her audience. Sadly that didn’t happen and the dry chicken for lunch was the only reward for attending.
Here are some ideas for preparing the talk, taking into consideration the likely composition of your audience:
Knowledge – are they novices on the subject or are they veterans? It is hard to know beforehand, so it is always a safe bet to assume there will be some very knowledgeable people in attendance and prepare on that basis. Expertise - if we can understand the level of knowledge of the audience, we can pitch the content at the right level. We don’t want to go too high or too low with the complexity of what we are talking about. If we get this wrong, we can alienate our listeners and they will tune us out and even worse, escape to the internet to fill in the time remaining. When we have a mixed audience, it is a lot more complex, so we need to search for the right balance. Experience-are the audience members theoreticians or are they people from the field? Experience in the laboratory is quite different from that of the practitioner on the front line. Bias-strong views can lead some people to have a particular bias regarding the subject we are addressing. If we know what those biases are, it will help us when preparing for the Q&A. This is where “working the room” as people arrive is important, to flush these out before you start. Needs – As mentioned, when we arrive early and spend some time mixing with the audience members, we can get a sense of what some of the needs around this subject may be. We want to leave them with some valuable take-aways which they will find useful. This needs to be baked into the design before we get there or we need to focus in on some key points based on what we heard when asking people why they came. Wants – Needs and wants are not the same. We again use our pre-talk audience informal survey, when chatting with the early arrivals, about what are some things they would want from the talk. As a result, we may only need to change our delivery by a few degrees, but it can have a tremendous leverage benefit for resonating with our audience. Goals – when we start planning the talk, we need to think what might be some of the goals for the audience members, which are inspiring them to make the effort to attend the speech. How can they apply some of the insights we are going to impart, the experiences, the data, the detail?As always, the key is to plan the talk in detail and not just spend all the time on assembling the slide deck. Rehearse, record, review. Listening to yourself, is what you are saying valuable or is it pap? Is it corporate propaganda or is it beneficial, practical, applicable? Plan with the audience reaction in your mind and things will go much better.
