Best Practices: Achieving Success by Knowing Your Audience

(Note to reader: This article is being moved here from previous blog. Original date: 2/16/2006 )

How do you show leadership with your presentations?

Identify who your audience is and what their needs are before you start preparing your presentation:
What do you need to address in your presentation in order to meet the audience's expectations? Your audience may be, for example,

• your clients
• your team
• your direct management
• your senior management
• your service providers
• the auditors

Identify the considerations for the different types of audiences:

If you are presenting to your clients, consider what they need to make them more comfortable in working with you and your team. What are their key concerns? Is it their budget and your costs? Are your services helping them meet their objectives with their clients and management? What can you do to help them out with their objectives? If you identify a list of your audience's concerns at the beginning of your presentation, that will set their minds at ease. They will feel that you've acknowledged their concerns and will therefore address those issues. They will listen better to your presentation as a result.

If you are presenting to your team, your objectives may be team building, budget cuts, changes coming down the line, new procedures. Your presentation should include key items for them to focus on and key steps to move forward. Consider if you want to identify the key steps or if you want to solicit input from your team. Soliciting input has the benefit of getting your team to buy-in to the next steps.

When you are presenting to your direct management, it may be easier than presenting to senior management since you are more aware of the style of your direct manager. You can understand their priorities and frame of reference. You know whether they are detail-oriented or if they just want the bottom line. Since you may not work with your senior management as often, you might not know what to expect. Speak with your management or others who have presented to senior management so that you can better prepare yourself. If the presentation is financial, you need to show them that you have a command of the budget. You can do this by presenting both the high-level directions and by being very prepared to show and discuss the details behind the high level. Make sure you include cost-saving measures that you are implementing or pursuing, the efficiencies that you have or will implement. You want your senior management to feel confident that you are addressing their concerns and issues proactively.

If you presenting to your service provider, your presentation may be about the status of work, next steps, budget, issues. Your audience would typically allow more time for the presentation since they want to meet your needs and satisfy your concerns. Having samples to discuss in more detail would be very useful.

With auditors, presentations are typically very, very detail oriented. But never skip the high level overview to ensure that you are addressing the right issues.

Consider other items that can affect your presentation:

For a successful presentation, also plan for the following:

• how many presentations are going to be given along with yours? Try to not exhaust your audience.
• when in the day are you presenting? If it is at the end of day or before lunch, be prepared to cut your presentation short. Prepare your verbal presentation to summarize slides that are not presented.
• how much time is your presentation allotted for? That will indicate how much detail is expected. Always prepare a high level presentation, speak to the audience with the details in mind, have extra slides ready just in case. When you practice for your presentation, make sure you are fluent with where the slides are and their sequence so you can change directions quickly at presentation time. When presenters are not prepared for this, they feel letdown after their hard work. And worse, the message that they want to get across to the audience is somehow lost in the shuffle. If the message is lost, the presentation is not successful.

The results show your leadership skills:

By addressing the considerations listed above, your presentation would be addressing "what is in it for the audience?" and in turn, "what feedback do I need back from the audience?" to achieve your objectives. By summarizing the presentation and presenting 'Next Steps', you are reminding the audience of the key points of the presentation and the next steps needed to progress forward. The discussion with your audience around ‘next steps’ is critical. It will ensure the commitment or buy-in from the audience and from you as to what needs to get done. Once agreement occurs around what the next steps should be, then there can be a feeling of closure. A comfort level is felt by you and your audience that progress will continue. You leave your audience feeling that you have achieved the command of the material as well as the ability to make a successful presentation.