Audience heat mapping

Grant Leboff: Simon, in the book you talk about audience heat mapping, and you sort of have three areas to kind of look at. I wonder if you can expound on those areas for all our audience so they understand a bit more.

Simon Morton: Yes, so the audience heat mapping tool came really as a result of needing to find a simple mechanism by which people could plot their audience. By prompting them thinking about their audience, I needed some way of saying, okay, what if we’re going to do that, these are typically the three elements that an audience would be made up of. It’s made up of emotional, factual, and visionary. Typically an audience would be a mixture of all three. It’s very rare that you have an audience that’s purely one, but there will be certain accentuated elements. Factual, and friendly if you could present to this audience on a spreadsheet, they’d love it. They’re all about the facts, they just want the information, and they will then process that, and that will help them reach a conclusion.

The visionary is the big picture stuff. That’s very much actually, “If I do this now, in three months time or three years time, I’ll get this.” A pretty benefit-led sort of thinking. Then you’ve got the emotional side which can be very positive, “Great, I’m excited about this topic, I’ve been looking forward to this presentation,” or it could be quite negative. “The information that you’re sharing with me could put me out of a job, could change my lifestyle,” could be a whole heap of things. You’re going to have a mixture of all three in play at any one time. The purpose of the presentation, sort of, audience heat mapping process, is to make sure that when you’re preparing for your presentation, you have that very much in mind.

We have a story in the book that talks about a pitch that was being made to the NHS, and naively we thought that it would be very emotional because we were pitching a recycling service to a particular part of the NHS, and we thought if we talked about the positive elements that are happening, in terms of recycling, and green issues, and what have you, great. Completely missed the boat on that one. Actually, the audience was incredibly factual. If it wasn’t going to save the money, no matter how many trees it was going to save, they weren’t interested.

By analyzing the audience, thinking a little bit deeper, asking some of those tricky questions of yourself, allowed us then to prepare a presentation that was more focused on the audience, which frankly puts you in a much better place to get your objectives met as a result of the presentation.

Grant Leboff: How do you get the balance right? Because if you understand, there are these three areas and these three considerations and they’re all important to different extents. How do you start to understand how you get that bond of trust especially if you are not so experienced at presentations.

Simon Morton: We try and prompt a whole list of questions, and some of them are frightfully simple, but they do make a difference. Why are they there? What’s the purpose of that individual carving out an hour of their day, to sit in your presentation? What are they looking to get from it? What experience have you had with them to date? Have you got on famously with them, have you rubbed up against them in the past, what’s the back ground there? All of these elements that, if you prompt yourself to ask the question, will paint a clearer and clearer picture as to what the mindset of the audience as a whole is.

It’s not an exact science, there’s no way that you can fill out the heat map and go, “Right, if I say this things, yeah, it will be a success,” but just by prompting that thinking process will put you on a much better track, leading forward, and getting the results that you want from the presentation.

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