Episode #159 How To Personalise Your Presentation

Are we talking at our audiences or with our audiences? There is a vast difference between the two. Most of the time, the talks we attend are in the talking at category. The speaker has some information to impart and proceeds to go into the detail with us. There is a very one way approach, broken only by the Q&A section. The degree of detail and advice can be very convincing and valuable and we are happy to hear it. The speaker though remains remote and removed from us. We have nothing to grab on to, in order to bring the speaker closer to us, to feel some greater simpatico with them. They speak, we listen, they finish, they leave, we all move on.

Our personal brand is driven hard by the “personal” part, yet many speakers are very impersonal in the way they approach the task. This comes back to their starting point, to what they are trying to achieve. In this sense their horizon can be very limited. If you have only ever seen speakers being distant, when it is your chance, you think that is how you are supposed to do it. Most speakers are pouring forth data in its raw form. They are not wrapping it up inside insightful stories, that that grab our imagination and become transfixed in our memories. It is all a very dry affair really.

To make the whole process more personalised we need to switch our thinking. If we look at business, what do we see everyone trying to do? They are trying to personalise their products and services for the buyers. In speaking terms, we need to be doing the very same thing. The irony is that we can have speakers talking about marketing in the most detached manner from their audience. Let s do not be like that.

What is the key message for your audience and why is it important? What will this do for them should they choose to follow your advice? Who is it most suitable for and when is the best timing to get started? These questions should arise at the very start of the planning process. Trying to write your key message on a single grain of rice is a great metaphor for gaining the clarity needed to refine your key message down to its most important parts. This is where we begin.

Who is the message aimed at is a theoretical construct. What we need is to see who is turning up to the talk. Today, some host organisations won’t release the names of who is coming, but you should insist on getting the names of the companies, so that you can get a sense of which industries are in the room. This means that you can now juxtapose a general point you are making on to the business reality of the company representatives in your audience. By specifically personalising the message to their reality, you have just made a massive connection with your audience. If you can keep repeating this throughout the talk, the power of this engagement is immense. Probably you won’t be able to personalise the messaging for every company in the room, depending on the size of the attendance and the time allowed to speak, but you can certainly gain a big share of audience attention when you do this.

When using examples from the industries in attendance, the credibility of those examples skyrocket compared to using a general comparison. It does take some research and more work in the preparation stage, but the rewards are greater. When people in the audience feel you are speaking to them directly, they feel greater connectivity with the speaker.

Even those who didn’t enjoy a direct example from their industry, will appreciate that the speaker knows their stuff, because they bring their points to bear on specific company’s actual situations. We have moved from the general and theoretical to the real and practical. Businesspeople much prefer a good dose of reality in their speakers. So find out who will be in the room, start your talk composition from that point and then build in examples that will resonate with those in the room.