What About Your Audience?

and the crowd goes wild... or not...

Yesterday, I spent a couple hours coaching a colleague on his presentation style.

He's struggling, because his boss asked him to create a one-slide presentation (!) covering the material in depth, so that his boss can present the message to his boss, who can then present it to his boss.

Ummm... right... Who wouldn't struggle?

My coachee very cleverly animated his slide to deliver 10 slides worth of information on what is - technically - one slide. Combine that with 8 point font, and you've got a message that everyone in the chain is confused by. 

But... they're so locked into their ideologies: 1 slide, no backup slides, present by email or proxy; that they can't see a way out. 

That's because there isn't a way out of that mess!

In such situations, I always start at the beginning: Who is your audience?

In this case, the audience is three separate people - his boss, his bosses' boss, and his bosses' bosses' boss. Got it?

Then I asked, what is the "Call to Action"? What do you want each person to do with the information?

In this case, each audience member had a different and separate Call to Action.

Next, I asked, What is their WIIFM (what's in it for me)?
We listed 8 separate advantages of his program and asked which ones each audience member would be interested in. This time, there was some overlap, but each member had variances in what would interest them.

Finally, we draw an ADKAR table. In terms of this program, what is the Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement status of each person. 

The answers to this were enlightening (one wasn't aware at all,  one had high knowledge, etc).

As we added all this up, it because clear - he needed three different presentations.

To present successfully, you must say to your audience, "Here's what I want you to do. Here's why you should want to do it. And here's how you can do it."

The exercise of creating one presentation for three audiences - let alone one slide -  is an exercise in futility. This explains why global marketing presentations often do not satisfy any of their targets.

This is obvious, right?

So why do people overlook audience analysis?

To find the answer, I looked at my favorite presentation books.

Here's what I found (from worst to first):

• Presentation Zen - 0/229 pages dedicated to audience analysis
• Speak Like Churchill, Stand Like Lincoln - 0/199 pages
• Perfect Presentations - 1/95 pages
• Public Speaking for Success - 1/437 pages
• beyond bullet points - 2/349 pages
• The Charisma Effect - 3/316 pages
• slide:ology - 4/274 pages
• Lend Me Your Ears - 6/371 pages
• Life is a Series of Presentations - 15/254 pages
• Presenting to Win - 22/249 pages

I'm not picking on these books. They are very good books and a number of them aren't meant to address audience analysis.

Still, these are the books we turn to for presentation advice.

The best one spends 10% of the book on the audience - but there is no presentation without an audience!

No wonder we miss the mark...

What about my coachee?

Unfortunately, he's still trapped in the template of one-slide, but at least he now knew his three audiences and messages.  Here's what we did.

1. He created a stakeholder visual that shows his three managers (and other stakeholders) in context of the problem and the environment.
2. He wrote a narrative that tells each manager what the program does for the manager, and what is expected of the manager. If they get this in an email, they can read the part that applies to them. If it's presented, the presenter can focus on that area.

Is it a perfect solution?

No. We're still trying to change the company culture around slideware.

But, this workaround will allow my colleague to communicate successfully.

In this business, it's results that matter - so I'm marking that up as a win!