Episode #220: How To Work The Room Before and After Your Talk

Rushing out the door to get to your talk and arriving in the nick of time is bad, bad, bad. You have cut it very fine. Breathless, you greet the hosts, who are looking suitably pale as they thought they had an event with no guest speaker. The shambles has started and now the odds are it will continue into your talk, as you battle with the tech. The laptop decides to throw a tantrum and not behave. The slide clicker won’t cooperate and the microphone has developed a bad case of static. You become flustered and your equilibrium has been thoroughly turfed out the window. I have done all of these things, fortunately not all in one, at the same event but definitely accumulatively.

The worst delusion ever was when I had this genius thought that I could create my talk on the plane, flying from Osaka to Sydney overnight and then go straight to the venue from the airport. Man, I was so efficient too, arriving just in time for the talk. Mercifully, it was an internal peer presentation, so no clients were exposed to this total unmitigated disaster. I was cranky too because of no sleep on the plane. I turned into a bear, not a cuddly Koala bear, more a Grizzly bear in the Q&A, when someone had the temerity to question my thesis.

I learnt my lesson the hard way. Getting there early has so many advantages, so we need to prioritise that over the many competing tasks we are facing. It is a choice we can make and should make. Wouldn’t aimlessly chatting with punters before the talk be a waste of my valuable time, you may be thinking? No. Arriving an hour before the gun goes off is advised. You have plenty of time now to stiff arm the tech into submission and make it behave. Check the microphone is working properly. Confirm that we can we get the slide projector to talk to the laptop?

If the organisers have breezily told you don’t worry about lugging your laptop around and to just bring the USB, then don’t listen. For some unknown reason, the slide layout can change depending on the type of laptop being used. That was news to me until it happened. Fortunately, I arrived early, connected all the gizmos and bingo the layout had gone totally crazy. I reworked the entire deck, while sweating profusely and got it done with one minute to spare. Whew, I was a wreck and we hadn’t even started. But I was able to do it. Imagine if I hadn’t gotten there early enough.

Getting there early also harks back to why you are doing this talk at all. You have plenty of other things to do with your valuable time. Presumably you are there to win converts to your message, fans for your firm and build your professional network, image and profile. Not too many speakers are there under duress. They may have been roped into giving this talk because they owe someone or feel some giri or obligation. That can happen, but it is extremely rare for most speakers.

Getting there early allows you time to work the room as the audience members are traipsing in. You are charm personified as you smile, exchange cards, chat, thank them for attending and create that all important positive first impression. The key here is to let them do all the talking. Your turn will come, so let them tell you why they are here for the talk, what interests them about the topic etc. In this way, you pick up valuable data on the topic and on the zeitgeist in the room. You are also winning over fans for your presentation before you even give it. It is rare that anyone can withstand this type of charm offensive before the talk, then suddenly turn into a Frankenstein monster at Q&A time and start savaging you. That scrum of the great unwashed are those who turned up late and you didn’t get a chance to smooze them.

Don’t be in hurry to bolt out of the room after you have finished either. Allow the time to spend chatting with those who have a big enough interest to stay back and engage with you. They will want to exchange business cards and build their network, so make time for them to do that. There will be those with a burning interest in the subject who want to ask a question of you directly and privately. There will be business groupies who like to meet big shots and by definition, being the speaker, you are a big shot.

You will have gotten a good sense of how things went by your observations of people’s faces as you were in delivery mode, plus from the nature of the questions at Q&A. After the talk is over, you can also get a good gauge by how many people want to hang around in a long line to meet you. Don’t rush off. Instead, allocate the time to be gracious with people who are also allocating their time to talk with you. The charm offensive has to go all the way, so don’t try and be “efficient” and truncate it.

I have also found that if you are high energy speaker, a powerful and passionate presenter then the whole thing is draining. Also, if you are introvert like me, all of those people are wearing you out. I find being charming is really tiring. So don’t forget to build in a bit of recovery time for yourself, rather than rushing straight back into the fray. Find a quite coffee shop and take a few moments to regroup and quietly reflect on how it went. This introspection is important and even better, take some notes and keep the record for review before the next event.