Before we tackle the purpose of our presentation we need to understand who is our audience. We covered this in Episode #260, so please go back and review that episode if you haven’t already heard it. Basically, don’t put pen to paper or start assembling a slide deck, until you are crystal clear on who is going to be in the audience.  Once we know what level to frame the content, we can get started on the next step and that is being very clear on the purpose of the talk.

Perhaps it is an internal presentation.  An All Hands Meeting, a Town Hall, a regular weekly report on your division or section’s numbers, the update on the marketing spend results, etc. It could be for an external audience drawn from your industry, a speech for the Chamber of Commerce, a benkyokai or study group, a public gathering, etc. 

There are four things to consider regarding the type of talk we can give.

1. Inform - This is a very common structure for internal and industry presentations. These are often rich data and deep insight talks. We will have statistics, expert opinion, the latest research findings.  We have our finger on the pulse of the industry trends and what our company’s outcomes have been.  We want to provide value to the audience and so we try to bring something to them which they didn’t know or hadn’t thought about. 

These types of public talks will often have titles such as, “The Top Five Things Regarding X”, “The Latest Research Results on Y”, etc. There will be detailed case studies from the front line that cast light on what is and isn’t working. The question is which data and how much data.  We have to be careful, because we can quickly become data dump junkies. We are always tending to cram too much information into the talk and this can dilute the impact of the messages.  Choosing what to keep and what not to use can be very difficult, but we must be disciplined.  Always go for the gold and leave the silver and bronze to question time as reserve power.

2. Convince or Impress - As speakers we often think the task is selling our message. I am sure you have had this experience.  You toddle off to hear a talk and the speaker is a dud.  They are completely hopeless and can either barely string two words together or they read the text or the screen to us, or even worse they do both! Sub-consciously, we have now extended this buffoonery to the entire organisation and have developed a lack of confidence in this entire group. 

We are musing that if this is who they put forward to the wider public, they must all be stupid and so how can you trust a company like that? Remember every time we stand up to speak, we are also selling ourselves and by extension our section, division or company.

We must believe that what we are sharing is important and we want our audience to think that too.  Sadly, audiences today are living in the Age of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism, so as presenters  we have to work super hard to overcome both.  We need to be excellent presenters, really professional presenters. Plus, we also have to prove what we are saying is true. We have to show the value and we have to emphasise the importance of our message.

3. Persuade or Inspire to Action - This is a particular skill always needed by leaders. We may have a message which we think is very important and we want our audience to benefit from it.  To do so they need to change what they are doing now or start doing something new.  We want to get them to take some specific action.  The only tools we have are our delivery excellence and our content relevancy and quality.  Unless we have really assembled a quality content offer and have delivered it in a highly professional manner we won’t be persuading anyone to do anything, be that internally or externally. 

Prime Minister Winston Churchill was the keynote speaker to Harrow, his old College, in October 1941, as Britain alone faced the Nazis domination of all of Europe.  He said slowly, “Never, ever ever ever ever give up”.  Those seven words were electrifying.  Now that is persuasion, that is inspiration.  We are all facing Covid’s war on our companies, on our businesses, on our livelihoods.  Are we rising to the occasion with our persuasive, take action presentations to our troops?

4. Entertain – do we have to be stand up comedians? Great if you have that facility, but it is not required for speakers.  Humour is a very difficult thing to master for an amateur business presenter, who only speaks a few times a year, at the most.  We can bring passion to our talk and transfer our positive energy to the audience.  If we say something and the audience laughs – write that down baby, because that is humorous, even though that may not have been our intention.

Know who is in our audience, craft the talk to match that audience and decide what is the purpose of our talk.  Once you have that sorted, then get to work on the detailed design of close #1, close #2, the main body with tons of evidence and finally the opening and design it in that order.

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.

They are usually a bunch of strangers attending out talk.  We may know one or two people in the audience, but generally we have no clue about most of them.  The feeling is likewise.  They may have perfunctorily glanced at our introduction in the blurb advertising the event but who are we as a person?  How smart are we, how useful is this time allocation going to be, can we speak well, are we adding any value to them?  Here are twelve ideas to build rapport with the audience.

1. Consider ourselves honoured to be asked to address an audience and say so. However, don’t do this at the start of the talk.  You hear this all the time, “Thank you for inviting me today, it is a great honour to be able to speak to such a distinguished audience”. Boring!!!  Design a powerful opening to grab everyone’s attention and only then thank the organisers and the audience for the chance to speak.

2. Give our listeners sincere appreciation. Arrive early and meet some members of the audience and thank them for coming to listen to you.  At the end of the talk, we can also express our appreciation for their attendance.  Don’t make this the last comment though.  We reserve that for our final close, where we make sure our key message is reverberating in their ears, as they walk out of the venue.

3. Mention the names of some listeners. Getting there early allows us to meet the guests and then when we get up on stage we can refer to a conversation we had before the start of the speech.  For example, “I was chatting with Suzuki san and she made a very interesting point about….” There is an invisible wall between the speaker and the audience and this connecting with people in the audience breaks that wall down and we feel as one unit.

4. Play ourselves down – not up. Nobody likes someone who is egotistical and acting superior.  We should always be humble and never talk about ourselves, as if we were something special, just because we are the speaker.  Yes, you need some degree of ego to stand up and speak to an audience, but let’s keep the full dimensions of that ego to ourselves.

5. Say “we” not “you”. When we use “we”, it is inclusive language and we want to have our audience to feel as if we are one united team. “You should do…” doesn’t work as well as “we should do”, when we want to appeal to our audience.  Let’s remove all barriers between ourselves and our listeners.

6. Don’t talk with a “scowling face an upbraiding voice”. I never do that you say.  Really? Check the video. When we are concentrating, without knowing it, our face can look like we are scowling at our audience.  Smiling is a great way to make sure we are not doing that, as long as the smile is congruent with what we are saying.  If it is a serious topic, then our face should be serious.  But a scowling face is too much, because it looks like we are angry and admonishing our audience.

7. Talk in terms of your listener’s interests. We might have a great love of a subject and we get a lot of satisfaction from talking about it, but are our audience members interested. We need to design the talk, looking at things from their point of view and their likely interest.  What is in it for them?  What can they take away from this talk which they can apply in theIr world?

8. Have a good time delivering your talk. If we look like giving this talk is killing us, it will make our audience feel uncomfortable and will have a very negative impact on our personal and professional brands.  If we are nervous, we can come across as a wounded animal on stage.  Best to mask that wounded animal look, as much as possible.  Keep all of that type of “I’m nervous” information to yourself.

9. Don’t apologise. This is a very common way to start talks in Japan, but we should start with a well designed opening that breaks through all of the competing distractions for our message and grabs the listener’s attention.  Apologies are all about us, when we should be totally focused on the audience and not ourselves.

10. Appeal to the nobler emotions of your audience. People turn up to hear us speak on the basis they want us to succeed. We should assume that and then be very sincere in our preparations, so that we can match their high expectations of us.

11. Welcome criticism instead of resenting it. If some audience member takes issue with the logic of what we have said or the conclusions we have drawn from the data, we shouldn’t get into an argument. We should just say “thank you” and say we will take that on board and have another look at our assumptions.  If we are receiving some feedback on the delivery of the talk, then we should not allow our emotions to get involved. We should just take it as helpful feedback so that we improve.

12. Be “a good person skilled in speaking”. The most clever criminals around the world all have something in common- they are good talkers. We want to be better than just being a smooth talker.  We want to have our audience’s best interests upper most in our minds at all times. They will feel the difference.

Try these twelve ideas when you are preparing for and delivering your next presentation and you will do a much better job of connecting with your audience.

We all stumble into public speaking in business.  We don’t start our first job with a grand plan for our future public speaking career.  We just work as hard as we can.  If we knew at the start how important this facility was, we would definitely plot out the path forward, corresponding to each stage in our careers.  However, we are left to our own devices and we have no guidelines for presenting.  Let’s fill in that gap in our business education and take a look at some useful guidelines on the basis it is never too late to start becoming a better presenter. 

Here are nine guidelines to adopt.

1. Make brief notes in the order you want to mention them. 

This is your navigation and could be on notes sitting on the podium or you might place a big sheet of paper on the backwall, behind the audience and use code words that only you understand.  There is nothing wrong with quickly consulting your notes if you need to.  Audience members will not jump to their feet and start denouncing us as frauds just because we took a peek at our notes.  No one cares that much.

2. Unless absolutely necessary for legal reasons etc., do not read your speech. I have had the experience of representing my boss and reading his speech word for word.  So painful. Yes, preparing the whole speech as a document is fine to help you practice. Just don’t read it to us.  You can send it by email instead and we won’t need you or your presentation.

3. Never memorise a speech word for word.

This is no fun doing it this way because of the enormous mental strain it places on us.  A thirty minute speech fully recalled from memory is pointless. We should enjoy giving talks so let’s not burden ourselves with that massive memory expectation.  Just have the key points you want to cover and talk to them.

4. Use evidence to substantiate your points

We have to be very careful with general sweeping statements we may make. We will attract skepticism from our audience and we may find ourselves under attack during the Q&A.  Always back up what is being said with evidence, proof, statistics, expert testimony, etc.

5. Know far more about your subject than you can use.

We don’t know what we will be asked in the Q&A, so we have to make sure we can answer any reasonable question, otherwise our personal and professional brands can be damaged.  If we can’t answer a relevant question on our topic, then people will immediately doubt our credibility as a business professional.

6. Rehearse your presentation in front of your professional associates.

However, never, ever ask them “what do you think?”.  All you will hear will be annoying negative comments that will ruin your day and your confidence. Instead, ask them “what was good” and “how can I make it better?”.

7. Use visual aids where appropriate.

We don’t automatically need slides.  If they add value then absolutely use them. Visual aids are helpful because a picture is worth a thousand words, as we say.  Pictures with people in them are the best. Also the visuals provide our navigation through the content of the speech, so we don’t have to remember all of the detail.  We only have to talk to the information or the point on the slide and this is much easier.

8. Control “butterflies” in the tummy by taking in deep, slow, lower diaphragm breaths.  This will help lower our pulse rate, reduce body heat and calm us down. We can also do some strenuous walking around, out of sight, to burn off excess nervous energy. For other people, they may need to lift up their energy levels, by giving themselves a pep talk.

9. Don’t imitate others: be yourself

It is tempting to copy other speakers, but we don’t need to do that.  Life is short, so why try and become a facsimile of someone else? Be you every time and be the best version of you possible. If we work hard on the design, rehearsal and delivery of our talk we will develop our own natural style.

These guidelines are not exhaustive by any means, but they encompass some basics we should apply to our talks. I ran away from public speaking for my first thirty years.  Why?  Because I didn’t know what to do. I had no guidelines, no training and no clue. Even worse, I didn’t understand that I should go and get the training.  I got there eventually, but I wasted so much time and opportunity by being in denial.  Don’t be like me – don’t wait, go and get trained.

We all stumble into public speaking in business.  We don’t start our first job with a grand plan for our future public speaking career.  We just work as hard as we can.  If we knew at the start how important this facility was, we would definitely plot out the path forward, corresponding to each stage in our careers.  However, we are left to our own devices and we have no guidelines for presenting.  Let’s fill in that gap in our business education and take a look at some useful guidelines on the basis it is never too late to start becoming a better presenter.