Episode #331: Engaging Our Audience When Presenting

We have a talk coming up which we have to give to a business audience and we work hard on the preparation. We make sure that we don’t suck up all of the time though, with preparing the slide deck and forget to do our rehearsal. This run through of the talk before we give it live, is a key component of getting our timing right and our cadence flowing. This makes us easy to follow for the listeners and allows the talk to move seamlessly through the different chapters of the content.

We arrive early to the venue and start interacting with our audience as they arrive. We try and meet as many people as possible and build that powerful personal connection. We ask them why they chose to attend, what are they doing at the moment, what are they interested in, etc. As the speaker we want to try and demolish that invisible wall separating us from the attendees. We are trying to form a collective, where we are all members together, trying to locate pertinent answers to business conundrums we are all facing. Their feedback is also useful for us to further refine the delivery of the talk to include some issues they have raised.

Everyone is naturally totally preoccupied with themselves and their problems, so we need a blockbuster opening to grab everyone’s attention from the start. At the end, we wrap it up with a sharp summary or a call to action, such that our words are still ringing in their ears, as they wind their way out of the venue. All the technical aspects of the talk need to be in place.

We can’t be satisfied with this though. We need to be aiming to strongly engage our audience during our talk. Sounds easy. However, think back and consider how many speakers you have sat through, who managed to really engage their audiences? I am guessing very few or certainly not enough. Why is that the case? We would expect that this engagement process would be a big part of the speaker’s efforts to sell their message.

We want to get the audience on our side and we want to establish rapport and build trust, so they buy what we are saying. The problem is often the speaker has a misconception of their role. They think they are there to pile on the information, data, statistics, evidence, etc., and if they do that, then they will be successful as a presenter.

The problem with this approach is it can be very dry, boring and painful to sit through. Reeling off numbers is a favourite but often it is an abstraction. We leave the listeners to do all of the hard work to connect these numbers to their individual realities. For example, I could note that Government figures talk about the number of Japanese aged 15-34 having halved over the last twenty years and that they will halve again by 2060. Now this is a very abstract idea and useful to a point, but what are the audience members supposed to do with those numbers?

Instead, I could reference those same numbers and then add, “So what does this mean for all of us in this room?” This is a nice framing exercise to stimulate everyone to start thinking about how to connect the data to their own situation. We could then go on to add, “basically the data shows we are running out of young Japanese to hire for our firms and we are heading into a zero sum game headwind of winners and losers in recruiting staff. Which one are you planning for, to be a winner or a loser, in this war for talent?”. Now I have successfully connected the numbers with a real business problem, they are all either facing now or will face in the future, regardless of their industry or the age and stage of their business.

I could take it even further and start adding in a story from my own experience to really drive home the point and make a common cause with my audience. After telling them the numbers and asking about whether they will be winner or losers, I could relate a relevant anecdote.

I could say, “As I stand here, I reflect on this for myself. Ten years ago, I would have a nice thick pile of resumes on my desk to sort through and plenty of options about who to choose for my new staff. Each year however, I started to notice that the size of that pile of resumes was getting smaller and smaller and so were my options. I also noticed that the candidates seem to be gaining a lot more choices about accepting offers. They were becoming pickier and pickier about who they would choose to join. It has become harder than ever to actually recruit staff. I am sure I am not the only one here to have this experience, which just underlines that we have to switch our thinking about recruiting and retaining staff”.

Even if they hadn’t personally been in a position of responsibility to recruit staff, everyone in the room can get the point. It makes the statistics come alive as a real business problem we are all facing, as the Japanese population continues its unstoppable decline. They are going to be sitting there contemplating the ramifications for their own firm.

We can use a combination of pointed questions to drive the audience to react to a problem or a topic and also add in stories, which further highlight the issues. Questions are powerful, particularly rhetorical questions, for which we don’t expect an answer. They are useful in order to direct the listener’s attention to a problem we want to highlight and engage their problem-solving thought processes.

When using storytelling, personal stories are best. Within the personal story group, disaster stories are the top of the tree for effectiveness. If I said, “let me tell you how we increased our revenues by 300%”, that will not be as interesting to an audience as if I said, “let me tell you why we saw revenues drop by 300%”. We are geared up for lessons to avoid mistakes and we love a good train wreck story, so that we don’t repeat that same misfortune ourselves.

Ideally, we would have a train wreck story and a salvation story of how we turned things around. That makes for a brilliant combination and the audience will be all ears to discover the solution, so that they can learn from it too. The key is to translate the data into issues they will be facing and to make our story delivery as personal as possible. If that isn’t necessarily available, then referencing third party examples and what happened will also work.

By doing some simple adjustments to our talk, we can elevate if from a remote topic, which is pretty boring, to a theme of hot interest and relevance. The key is to start from a point of view of how can I find a connector to my audience’s interest, which will engage them, such that they want to hear more from me. In this way, we can become very effective in building up our personal and professional brands.