Driving Your Audience from Point “A” to Point “B”
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A presentation is your opportunity to transport an audience from point “A” — their point of view on the subject when they come into the room — to point “B,” where you want them to be on the subject when they leave.
From resistant to supportive.
From indifferent to committed.
From uninformed to educated.
To do this you’ll need to know where they are and where you want to take them:
Audience Perspective (where they are).
Crystal Clear Objective (where you want to take them).
These seem like simple concepts, but don’t be fooled. They’re no less than the foundation of every presentation, and they require some thought and often a little research to determine. The majority of presentations that fail do so because the presenter didn’t have these two elements established.
Any presentation is merely an opportunity to transport an audience from where they are to where you want them to be.
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Know what your audience is thinking—Or pay the price FOR making uninformed assumptions.
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Your audience’s point of view on the subject when they come into the room, including their biases and sensibilities, is your starting point. Would you tell the same joke to a room filled with investment bankers as you would to punk rockers? Probably not. Because they are two different groups of people, with different life experiences, concerns, and expectations. As a speaker, your job is to know as much as you possibly can about the people you will face. Specifically:
What is their point of view, bias, and disposition regarding your presentation?
How will your presentation potentially impact what they have at stake?
What questions/issues might they have regarding your presentation?
The more you know about your audience and their predispositions, the better your chances of transporting them. This knowledge also equips you to anticipate questions or resistance so you can defuse responses that could derail you midstream.
EXERCISE
Write down at least one word that accurately describes your audience’s state of mind regarding your presentation. Are they skeptical, exhausted, ignorant, sympathetic, or are they hostile?
audience PERSPECTIVE
Would you tell the same joke to investment bankers as you would to punk rockers? Why not?
exercise
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So, what makes an objective crystal clear? The fact that it can be expressed in one simple phrase. It begins with the word “to.”The next word is the single-minded objective of every actor
CRYSTAL CLEAR OBJECTIVE
Almost all executives I’ve worked with have had a hard time expressing their Crystal Clear Objective in one simple phrase.
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in stage, film, and television. It’s the word that film critics use to unequivocally affirm a brilliant performance. Can you find it in the list of what actors call “action verbs” below?
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“Mr. Day-Lewis is startling, unsettling, and entirely convincing as Lincoln.”—A.O. Scott, the New York Times
So the first two words in a Crystal Clear Objective (CCO) are “to convince.”
Now it’s up to you to finish the phrase for your own CCO:
to convince [ my audience ] that [ my main point ]
Here are a few examples:
to convince faculty that Saturday classes will raise test scores
to convince journalists that today’s news business is volatile
to convince my wife that I deserve a motorcycle
Almost all executives I’ve worked with find this challenging, even when they’re attempting to craft it for a presentation they’ve already given many times.
Having a CCO when presenting to a CEO is critical. CEOs have no time to waste. They’re listening for the single reason you’re there. When that CEO is Steve Jobs—my client when he was at NeXT Computer—the clarity of my CCO is a matter of career life and death; the difference between Steve listening to my presentation or walking out of the room.
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The word that film critics use to acknowledgea truly remarkable achievement by an actor.
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