Presentations – The Audience is most important

Grant Leboff:  Simon, one of the things that you say in the book – which I really loved, and it’s kind of obvious, but I don’t know if people put it into practice – you say that the audience is the most important aspect of the presentation. I’d like you to expand on that a bit.

Simon Morton: You’re absolutely right. It’s one of those areas that is blindingly obvious but people, in their panic, when they see a presentation coming at them, forget all of the fundamentals and leap straight into the medium, typically that they are using. So a lot of people, when they contact me or the business, to talk about presentations, directly jump into PowerPoint as the cause of the problem, rather than actually thinking about the purpose of the presentation. And all of that starts with the audience, so a key part of what we want to achieve is to nail what an audience is, the part that they play in that presentation, and how you can get the most out of it.

Grant Leboff: How do you get to the heart of that, because I can imagine there’s two kinds as well. There is when you know who the audience is – if you’re doing a company presentation in house, you might know some of the people in that audience pretty well. But what about the presentations when you actually don’t know the audience at all?

Simon Morton: One of my favourite parts of the process was actually looking beyond the stereotypes and beyond the job title. This is really easy to think; well I’m talking to a bunch of accountants, so it’s got to be very factual in terms of the content that I’m sharing. But actually that audience might be quite emotionally charged in terms of what they are looking to get from your presentation. So look beyond the job title, look beyond the fact that they are a procurement manager and actually look towards what they are looking to achieve and get from that presentation. I think that might be something around trust or comfort or something that’s non-statistical and that’s the exciting part of what we call the Audience heat map process, which is actually allowing you to plot different ways of where your audience’s heads are, and off the back of that get the most out of that in terms of preparing your presentation.

Grant Leboff: So once you have identified the objectives that the audience want to take from it, or the things that they want to get out of it, how do you then go about starting to think about how you deliver that?

Simon Morton: Well it’s matching the assessment of the audience to how you structure the message. The language you use within the presentation, even the visuals. If you are dealing with a very factual audience, then you need to cut to the chase very quickly. They don’t want the rapport build, they don’t want the gentle intro. They want to get straight to the facts as quickly as you can.

Once you’ve got those facts over, you’ve won their trust, you’ve won there approval and credibility. Then, off the back of that, you can start adding further flavour and colour to it. So it’s by having that fundamental understanding of the audience, by building your presentation on the audience, that allows you then to be a little bit more flexible and build it very much with them in mind. The connection between you, the presenter, and the audience, has to be super super strong.

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