Yes, there really are two and you need them both for your business presentation to have much significant impact. They’re heavily related questions and I’m not even sure you can answer them individually… so pretty obviously I’m going to look at them separately 🙂 You might think of them as the same question asked in two different ways.
The audience’s “so what”?
If your audience can’t see why they should listen to your presentation, they can’t listen to your presentation. It’s that simple, and that brutal!
It’s not won’t, or don’t – it’s can’t. We’re much, much better at concentrating and learning if we can see the sense, the point, in what we’re trying to learn. Think back to school if you don’t believe me. How much easier was it to learn things if they were interesting? If you could see what you were aiming at – and I don’t mean just “passing the exam”.
Put like that, it’s pretty obvious, right? And what you should do about is pretty obvious too…
As soon as you can, make it obvious to your audience why they should listen. Tell them the “so what”. It might be in the title or the subtitle of your presentation but even so, it doesn’t hurt to remind audiences: “By the end of this presentation you’ll be able to…”. Once you’ve done that your audience will split into two groups – one group is up for your content and the other can already zone out.
And believe it or not, that second group is a win. If you know they’re not interested you can let them get on with something else instead of trying to keep them onside all the time. I’ve even been known to encourage people to leave at that point. It’s a win-win, because I get an interested audience and the others get some time back to get on with things.
The presenter’s “so what”?
Why are you doing the presentation? …and I don’t mean “because the boss says so”. I mean something more profound. What do you want to change?
If you don’t know what’s going to change by the end of the presentation, then (to be brutal): what are you doing the presentation for?
If you don’t have an end game, why waste your time?
If you don’t have a next step for your audience, how will they make that step?
Let’s take a brutal example from a couple of presentations I watched at an expo
I watched two, one failed both tests, one passed both.
The failure first… Setting aside the fact that the presentation itself wasn’t very good in terms of delivery, the key problem presentation was about his company. Yawn. It’s a marketing company. Yawn. They’ve been in business for seven years. Yawn. It has this-or-that in-house system. Yawn and Yawn again.
The thing is, at no point did the presenter say “If you listen to this you’ll know how to…“.
The result was inevitable. By only half way through the 15 minutes of their time on stage, I noted that over half the audience were look at their phones.
Part of that was that the presentation’s structure was wrong – there might have been a great reason to listen but it was at the end, and not flagged up beforehand. We (the audience) didn’t know what the point of listening was.
And I suspect the reason there was no such WIIFM from the audience was because the speaker hand’t asked himself what the presentation was for. Not “what is it about” but “what do I want to change by the end?’.
Contrast this to the other presentation I watched (which was only a little technically better) but started with a big bold statement of why I should listen. By the end of this 30 minutes you’ll know why you should start a podcast, and some of the bits and bobs about how to do it. A few people tuned out at this point, but even for the folks who tuned out it was a win, because they’d got 30 minutes of their time back. It really was only one or two people, largely because the title of the presentation had done its job. Pretty much only those people who wanted to be there were there.
Having got us to listen, the speaker gave us enough content to mean the answer to the second big question was obvious: “If you’ve got enough to be going on with, get on with it but – as is more likely – you need help, I’m who you should come to“. And people did. I watched them almost mob her with enquiries about working with the speaker and booking her studio!
It’s not presentation genius
… it’s bloody obvious, so ask yourself the two questions.
Please.
Your audience and your bank balance will thank you.
