Segment the Audience
If you see your audience as a homogenous, faceless clump of people, you’ll have a hard time making a connection and moving them to action. Instead, think of them as a line of individuals waiting to have a conversation with you.
Your audience will usually include a mix of people—individuals in diverse roles, with various levels of decision-making authority, from different parts of the organization—each needing to hear your message for different reasons. Decide which subgroup is the most important to you, and zero in on that subgroup’s needs when you develop your presentation.
When you’re segmenting your audience, take a look at:
- Politics: Power, influence, decision process
- Demographics: Age, education, ethnicity, gender, and geography
- Psychographics: Personality, values, attitudes, interests, communities, and lifestyle
- Firmographics: Number of employees, revenue size, industry, number of locations, location of headquarters
- Ethnographics: Social and cultural needs
After you’ve segmented the group, figure out which members will have the greatest impact on the adoption of your idea. Is there a layer of management you need to appeal to? Is there a type of customer in the room with a lot of sway over the industry?
Then view yourself as a curator of content for your most valuable and powerful stakeholders. Pick the one type of person in the room with the most influence, and write your presentation as if just to that subgroup. The presentation can’t be so specialized that it will alienate everyone else—you’ll need some content that appeals to the greater group. But tailor most of your specifics to the subgroup you’ve targeted.
Say you’re presenting a new product concept to the executive team, and you know you won’t get their buy-in unless Trent, the president of the enterprise division, gets excited about the idea, because they always defer to his instincts on new initiatives. Appeal first to Trent’s entrepreneurial nature by describing how exciting the new market is—while keeping in mind what the other executives will care about. Here’s where your segmentation work will come in handy (table 1–1).
Draw on your understanding of the team members as you prepare your talk. In addition to fanning the flames of Trent’s entrepreneurism, for example, have data in your pocket to respond to Marco, the analytical and risk-averse CTO, when he inevitably balks. And try to work with, not against, your CMO’s arrogance: Ask for his counsel on a key marketing point or two before the group meets, and he’ll be less likely to lash out during the presentation or sit there quietly plotting a coup, as is his wont.
What if some audience members are already familiar with your idea and others need to be brought up to speed? (This is most likely to happen when you’re presenting within your organization.) Consider evening things out by giving the newbies a crash course before you conduct the larger presentation. Or you may decide just to do two separate presentations.