Welcome to the Perfect Presentations Podcast, created for executives and business people who struggle to create and give compelling presentations. We’re going to break down the breakdowns…to share with you the tools and techniques we teach to executives around the country that help them craft presentations that stick.

In our first episode we’ll talk about understanding your audience, and the ways most executives fail to consider who their real audience is. We’ll discuss a method for segmenting your audience, and how to get them to understand, buy in, and act upon your message.

If you’re frustrated with your ability to hook your audience, keep them engaged and get them to act, this podcast is here to help.

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Welcome to P3, the Perfect Presentation podcast. My name is Doug Borsch and I’m co-owner of Perfect PlanIt. Since 2005, our company has created more than 7,000 presentations for conferences, trade shows, road shows, sales meetings, board of director meetings. Any kind of presentation you can imagine chances are we’ve created one. And because we’ve been at this for so long, we’ve seen practically everything when it comes to how people create presentations, both good and bad, and what I’m excited to talk about today is how to do it better. That’s probably a good place to start.

Since this first episode is about understanding your audience let me start by sharing who will and who won’t get a lot out of this podcast. If you’re an executive, a sales person, a product manager, an engineer, or anyone who gives presentations in a business environment, this is for you because chances are you struggle with how to keep your audience engaged or how to get them to walk out of a room and act upon what you’ve shared. In other words, you’ve spent some time together, but was it really quality time?

What we aren’t going to talk about is the traditional approach of how to be a great presenter, stand up tall, enunciate, don’t say um and like. There are a lot of good resources out there for that, but I’m going to make the assumption that if you’re interested in creating better presentations you probably have some of the core skills at being in front of an audience.

We also aren’t going to cover how to use PowerPoint or Keynote or Prezi or whatever your preferred software is. Now, a lot of what we talk about will certainly relate to how to use presentation programs, but we won’t be focused on the minutia and the mechanics of PowerPoint or Keynote, such as how to add images or change text or add video.

Before I start talking about understanding your audience let me tell you a little bit about why you’re sitting here listening to me at all today. About a dozen years ago, my wife and I had just started working together at Perfect PlanIt. I had joined from a previous company and was hoping to expand upon the marketing work that I had already been doing. But as often happens when you’re starting a new company, things weren’t going very well. I was in the midst of trying to develop a new client list and to be honest, I was just struggling.

Out of the blue, I received an email from Microsoft. They had found my writing samples on a website where I had them posted, trying to develop some work. They asked me if I’d be willing to take a copy test in exchange for a Starbucks gift card. Now, I was at a place in my career where I no longer worked for coffee and it’s funny when you get into a situation like this how it’s so easy to let ego get in the way. I figured I had a stellar client list and I just happened to be in a low spot, but the truth is I wasn’t busy and I do like coffee.

After I reviewed the test, I realized the entire premise of what they were asking for was wrong. It just didn’t make any sense to me. I figured they were either moving too fast, or didn’t know what they wanted, or maybe they wanted somebody to tell them they were doing it wrong, and that’s what I told them. I started over and I rewrote the entire thing from scratch in a way that I thought did make sense, and they loved it. That started a 10-year relationship with Microsoft that went from writing one or two pieces a month to eventually hiring a team of 10 people just to keep up with the work.

Ultimately in 2009, they asked if we could help them re-engineer how their salespeople went about creating presentations. We did some research and found that a 200-person sales team that we were working with was spending eight hours a week for each salesperson just designing their presentations so that they could go out and make a pitch. Obviously that’s not a very good use of anyone’s time and so we built them a system from the ground up to take the design work off of the sales team and put it on us.

So we started designing all of their presentations and turning them around incredibly fast. With the system we built, we were able to turn them around in about eight hours each and that led to us doing more than 5,000 presentations for that group alone. Ultimately, it led to us building an entire practice group specifically dedicated to helping improve presentations and ultimately, that led to you sitting here listening to me. Anything you learn out of this podcast you can thank a Starbucks gift card for.

Let’s see if this sounds familiar to you. You have to give a presentation on a topic. It doesn’t matter who or what or why, but you got to get it done. So what’s the first thing that you do after procrastinating until it’s probably way too late? You open up PowerPoint and you start creating slides. Slide one, title. Slide two, first point you want to make. Slide three, second point and so on. I mean, that seems like a decent approach. It feels like progress, you’re getting content on the page. The problem is that’s typically what ends up being in the final product, some version of that first whack you took at the presentation. And after you give it, if you asked your audience to score it, what do you think they’d say? Probably on a scale of one to five, it would be sort of a meh. Or if you asked them what it was about, you’d likely get several different answers from different people who happened to be in the room with you.

You see the outcome of bad presentations every day. How many times have you been presenting to a group of people only to see them checking their phones or clicking away on laptops? How many times have you done that yourself when you’re listening to somebody else present? Worse, how many times is the person you’re most interested in winning over doing those things?

My goal is to make you a much more effective presenter, one who can hook your audience from the first sentence right through to the end. And when you’re done, you could theoretically ask your audience to summarize your talk and they’d nail it. Being better at presenting is a process. There is no magic bullet, and I’ve stumbled along the way as well.

I once gave a presentation on social media to a ballroom full of healthcare executives and I thought it’d be funny, after I was introduced, if I walked up the aisle to the stage while I was checking my phone. I got up on stage and I did that thing where I held my hand up as I continued to look at my phone, like sort of, “Just wait a minute, I’ll be with you in a second.” All I was trying to do is mimic the rudeness that we see all the time as a result of the constant interruption of social media. Wow did I start out on the wrong foot. I misread completely how quickly people take offense at somebody else being phone rude and I also know there was a portion of that audience that I never got back even after I explained what I was trying to do. I had colleagues in the back of the room. I looked back at them and they were just cringing at how badly it landed.

It was a great lesson for me also to understand my audience, not just who’s in the room, but where does that meeting take place in time and space? My presentation was right before lunch and people were starting to drag and I think that my topic was of interest, but I only had a moment to grab them. I could have done the intro so many different ways and it would have landed so much better and I still kick myself about it to this day. So we learn, we get better and we try and improve. And that’s a good segue into today’s topic, understanding your audience.

So understanding your audience is the most foundational topic we teach in our seminars. It’s interesting, when we start our seminars, I ask the room to rate their own ability at understanding their audience on a scale of one to five, and five is the best. The average we hear is about a four. The only reason I think we don’t get more fives is I think people don’t want to seem like they’re being smug about it, but they think they know their audience inside out. It seems like an obvious thing, you know who’s in the room with you, you know who you’re presenting to therefore, you must know your audience. By the time we finish our training I ask them to think back on their rating and what score would they give if they could go back and do it again. The average then is about a two.

When you think about understanding your audience, it seems obvious, “Oh, it’s my boss,” or it’s the VP of sales or it’s a room full of chief nursing officers. Well, that’s not an audience, that’s a title. Aren’t there other people in the room at the same time. Think to yourself, are those people your audience as well? Is everybody who’s in the room your audience?

So let’s dive into a couple of topics that will help you identify your audience and then pivot to how we understand them. I’m going to use a scenario for the rest of this, but the ideas here apply to any kind of meeting, from a ballroom to an everyday presentation.

For our example, let’s say we’re talking to a company that we’re hoping to work with and let’s say we’re selling them a big IT solution and we’re deep in the sales process. So we have a large group that’s made up of a CFO, a head of IT, several engineers, a couple of mid-level managers and let’s say a couple of executive assistants. Roughly a dozen people are in the room. In our scenario we’ll say we’ve already quoted the job, but so has one other company. This is our final pitch to tell them how we’re going to implement the solution if they’ve hired us. So this is in many respects a sales presentation, but in every respect, it is most definitely a presentation. What I want to emphasize in this scenario is there’s a lot at stake, just like there is when you present.

Here’s how most people approach this opportunity. They start by thinking, what do I want them to know? Why are we the best solution? How can we win the business? That’s a huge one, right? How can we win the business? So let’s be sure to talk about all the reasons we’re better than competitor B. You might check in with your colleague and ask what they want to include and maybe your boss gets involved and tosses a few slides in there too, and you’re starting to assemble a deck and you think you’re feeling pretty good about it. What you’ve most likely created is what we call a Franken deck, a monster that nobody knows what to do with. Sure, you’re making all of the points you want, but they’re not going to land with your audience because your audience was never a primary consideration as you built the presentation to begin with.

It reminds me of that old story about the self-centered guy who went on a date and said, “But enough about me, let’s talk about you. What do you think about me?” Let’s take a step back. Let’s throw out the presentation. There is no presentation. It’s just a meeting date some point in the future and you about to get prepared.

Now, we know that we’ve been invited to tell them how we’d implement our IT solution if we’re awarded the business. Step one, do you know who’s going to be in the room? If you don’t know who’s going to be in the room, you’re set up for failure from the start, so ask. People do this really well at industry conferences, they learn about who they’re going to speak to, what are the titles of the people who are going to be in the audience, what do they want to know? But for some reason we don’t do it with smaller presentations. Our goal should be to identify our primary, our secondary and our tertiary audience.

Our primary audience is the single most important person or people in the room. They are the ones with the ability to adopt my idea or to approve it or basically to move it forward. If I don’t sway those people, the rest won’t matter. There are others in the room that may influence decisions or possess knowledge that helps that primary audience in some way, that’s your secondary audience. And there will always be others who have a role in some way of supporting the primary and the secondary audience. You want them to have information that they need so even though they don’t make a decision they can support the people who do. Everybody else is ancillary. They are the chaff among the wheat.

So keep in mind we’re using a sales presentation as our example, but if you’re in front of 500 executives at a big conference you can do this same exercise and narrow that audience down quickly to the ones that matter most to you.

So again, the CFO is there, the head of IT, several engineers, some mid-level managers and some executive assistants. The CFO seems to be the obvious target since she’s the most senior person, but I’m betting since we’re talking about how we’ll implement the solution, we’ve already passed the money discussion and we’re now focused on the process of implementing, so I’m going to say that the head of IT is our primary audience. He’s the one who’s considering the impact of the solution on his company and of course, he won’t make his decision in a vacuum.

The first thing he’s likely to do as soon as the presentation is over is to get with the engineers and get their take on it. He won’t need their approval, but he definitely will value their input. So I already know that my discussion had better address what I think their concerns will be. Finally, the CFO is there for a reason. You don’t get her time casually so she better like what she hears. I’m guessing already that I’ll probably need to relate back to the quote and how all the pieces fit together so she’s assured that we’re focused on her bottom line. And finally, the executive assistants who are in the room, I don’t want to ignore them either. I’m going to consider them my tertiary audience. Some of what I present will be important to them supporting the people above them.

Now that we have our map sketched out, we should have documented everybody who’s going to be in the room. We know our primary, our secondary and our tertiary audience. We also know who’s not our audience, even if they are in the room. But of course, as I said, just identifying who’s in the room doesn’t mean we understand our audience, so now let’s focus on that understanding part of understanding your audience. In future podcasts, I’m going to talk about this in more depth, but for now I want to focus on what drives them.

So here’s what I want you to think about, envision your primary audience. Let’s just focus on them. Let’s think about three things, the head, the heart and the hand. So first the head, let’s think about what gets them mentally engaged with your presentation.

To do that effectively, you have to understand that your presentation does not exist in a vacuum of time. Chances are you’re in the middle of a very busy day or a week or a quarter and there are a lot of pressures on your audience, so you’re fighting for their attention. So let’s keep those things in mind as we create our own content. What is their average day like? Are they in nonstop meetings? Are they focused on this moment right now or are they looking forward to the future? That’s going to influence how we give them their information because of where they are in the sales cycle. “I feel like my audience today wants to get into the details. I’m going to avoid simply talking about the big picture and I’m going to get into the weeds a little bit. I’m also going to consider what they already know about the subject.” You always have to start from their current understanding. It’s possible that some of the people in the room haven’t been involved in the process until this point, I need to keep that in mind especially if they’re my primary audience.

Finally, when it comes to the head, let’s think about the outcome. What do we want them to know when we’re finished? What kind of information are we going to fill their brain with? Second, let’s focus on how to connect emotionally with them. And when I say connect with them emotionally, I don’t expect them to tear up when I talk about an IT solution. When I say emotionally, I’m talking about a connection with them where they bought in, they’re interested in what you have to say.

Here’s a really powerful way to do that, tell them what the future looks like if they adopt your idea. Create a powerful picture in their minds, remind them what their current state looks like, then contrast it with that future state. If you create that image in their mind, they can see themselves in it. And if that picture resonates, they won’t be satisfied until they’re in that picture. Helping your audience see a different future is one of the most powerful ways to connect emotionally with them.

So as we focus on their heart, let’s think about what keeps them up at night. Think about the stresses they’re facing. Maybe it’s related to our solution, maybe it’s not, but let’s try and look at it from their perspective. All I can really see is how our solution might impact them emotionally so I’m going to start to create that image of what a future looks like once they’ve adopted my idea. And let’s think through how are they best connected with. We can support this with data all day long, but that’s not an emotional connection. Showing them a better future, that’s an emotional connection. Let’s think through about how they feel about the subject right now. Are they supporters or are they detractors, or maybe they’re just neutral?

We deal with this frequently when we make presentations, you get into a room and you’ve got some supporters and you’ve got some detractors. I find one of the most powerful things we can do is to acknowledge the detractors as we present. Sometimes I’ll even put their arguments right up on the screen that way I can address them head on and reassure them by doing that, I’m able to get them on my side.

Don’t be afraid of acknowledging the people in the room who may not agree with the direction you’re taking or your ideas. The whole goal of presenting is to persuade and therefore, we want to move them to our side. So let’s acknowledge that and then let’s address it.

And finally thinking outcome focused, how are they going to feel about the subject when we’re done? Are they going to be passionate to change or will they be motivated by the possibilities? That’s where we want to get.

Third, let’s talk about the hand. How do we get them to act? This is a breakdown we see over and over again. I see it everywhere. I see it in Ted Talks where I’m so engaged throughout, but at the end I’m left with this feeling of, “Well that was pretty cool, but I don’t have any way to do anything with the information.” Once your audience is bought in with the head and the heart, they’re ready to be told how to make it happen. It’s so easy to include this information and it’s so often left out. What are the next steps for our IT presentation? What does implementation look like? What are the different roles of the people in the audience? How will they play their part? Help them understand their role in moving forward. I’m not just talking about getting them to buy. I’m talking about looking out six months and helping them understand what they’ll do at each step. Be very specific here. What do you want them to do next? What motivates them? Do they love new ideas? Are they driven by new challenges? Maybe they like to cross things off a list.

If you’re in an IT presentation and you’ve got a bunch of engineers in the room, there’s a pretty good chance they like crossing things off a list. When I’m building my presentation, I might visually put that checklist up there and start to check some things off, give a sense of progress. I try and think through how do they approach problems? How do they solve problems? Are they going to take my presentation and share it around?

Now, here’s something that can be really valuable for you. Oftentimes a presentation lives after you leave, but if you’re creating a really powerful presentation chances are you don’t have a lot of content on the screen while you’re presenting. Well, that can be a real problem after you’re gone. The presentation then gets emailed around or handed off, but there’s no context. You’re not there to present. So if you’re going to be the missing piece, you’ve got to rethink how you do that.

Oftentimes what we’ll do is we’ll create a backup presentation that’ll be a more detailed version of what we actually showed when we’re in the room. So I’ll have a visually beautiful and very focused presentation with one idea on each slide, all leading towards this conclusion. But when I leave that behind, each of those slides will have more fill in detail that might’ve been in the notes section when I was actually just talking, but now it needs to live inside the presentation to give it some context as it gets handed around. Finally, just remember the single idea when it comes to the hand, what do you want them to do?

Let’s regroup here as I wrap this up. When you think back on the presentations you’ve given recently, how would you score yourself in understanding your own audience? As you move forward, think about who’s your primary, your secondary and your tertiary audience, and work through how you’re going to connect with them with the head, the heart and the hand.

I hope you’ve got some new ideas to pursue coming out of this first podcast. I’m always interested in the experiences of people who put these ideas to work. Feel free to reach out to me with your own experiences and let me know how it’s going. Good luck and have a great week. I hope you’ll join us again soon as we explore more topics on presentations.