Episode #261: The Purpose Of Our Presentation

Before we tackle the purpose of our presentation we need to understand who is our audience. We covered this in Episode #260, so please go back and review that episode if you haven’t already heard it. Basically, don’t put pen to paper or start assembling a slide deck, until you are crystal clear on who is going to be in the audience. Once we know what level to frame the content, we can get started on the next step and that is being very clear on the purpose of the talk.

Perhaps it is an internal presentation. An All Hands Meeting, a Town Hall, a regular weekly report on your division or section’s numbers, the update on the marketing spend results, etc. It could be for an external audience drawn from your industry, a speech for the Chamber of Commerce, a benkyokai or study group, a public gathering, etc.

There are four things to consider regarding the type of talk we can give:

1. Inform - This is a very common structure for internal and industry presentations. These are often rich data and deep insight talks. We will have statistics, expert opinion, the latest research findings. We have our finger on the pulse of the industry trends and what our company’s outcomes have been. We want to provide value to the audience and so we try to bring something to them which they didn’t know or hadn’t thought about.

These types of public talks will often have titles such as, “The Top Five Things Regarding X”, “The Latest Research Results on Y”, etc. There will be detailed case studies from the front line that cast light on what is and isn’t working. The question is which data and how much data. We have to be careful, because we can quickly become data dump junkies. We are always tending to cram too much information into the talk and this can dilute the impact of the messages. Choosing what to keep and what not to use can be very difficult, but we must be disciplined. Always go for the gold and leave the silver and bronze to question time as reserve power.

2. Convince or Impress - As speakers we often think the task is selling our message. I am sure you have had this experience. You toddle off to hear a talk and the speaker is a dud. They are completely hopeless and can either barely string two words together or they read the text or the screen to us, or even worse they do both! Sub-consciously, we have now extended this buffoonery to the entire organisation and have developed a lack of confidence in this entire group.

We are musing that if this is who they put forward to the wider public, they must all be stupid and so how can you trust a company like that? Remember every time we stand up to speak, we are also selling ourselves and by extension our section, division or company.

We must believe that what we are sharing is important and we want our audience to think that too. Sadly, audiences today are living in the Age of Distraction and the Era of Cynicism, so as presenters we have to work super hard to overcome both. We need to be excellent presenters, really professional presenters. Plus, we also have to prove what we are saying is true. We have to show the value and we have to emphasise the importance of our message.

3. Persuade or Inspire to Action - This is a particular skill always needed by leaders. We may have a message which we think is very important and we want our audience to benefit from it. To do so they need to change what they are doing now or start doing something new. We want to get them to take some specific action. The only tools we have are our delivery excellence and our content relevancy and quality. Unless we have really assembled a quality content offer and have delivered it in a highly professional manner we won’t be persuading anyone to do anything, be that internally or externally.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill was the keynote speaker to Harrow, his old College, in October 1941, as Britain alone faced the Nazis domination of all of Europe. He said slowly, “Never, ever ever ever ever give up”. Those seven words were electrifying. Now that is persuasion, that is inspiration. We are all facing Covid’s war on our companies, on our businesses, on our livelihoods. Are we rising to the occasion with our persuasive, take action presentations to our troops?

4. Entertain – do we have to be stand up comedians? Great if you have that facility, but it is not required for speakers. Humour is a very difficult thing to master for an amateur business presenter, who only speaks a few times a year, at the most. We can bring passion to our talk and transfer our positive energy to the audience. If we say something and the audience laughs – write that down baby, because that is humorous, even though that may not have been our intention.

Know who is in our audience, craft the talk to match that audience and decide what is the purpose of our talk. Once you have that sorted, then get to work on the detailed design of close #1, close #2, the main body with tons of evidence and finally the opening and design it in that order.