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CHAPTER 3

Understand the Audience

A STANDARD MODEL OF COMMUNICATION has the following parts: sender, medium, message, receiver, feedback, and noise. During a presentation, the first five elements have to be performing optimally, and the last minimally, in order for communication to take place. And yet, if you think about how most people approach the onerous chore of presenting, it often appears that they only consider the first two elements, perhaps the first three. They obsess about themselves and the technology. They worry about the content. But the receiver—the audience—gets scant attention, except perhaps as a faceless, scary mass. Feedback is a subject usually avoided altogether, or thought about briefly with true terror (“What if they ask me a question I can’t answer?”). Noise, the sixth element, is the result, usually compounded by a lack of rehearsal.

Great speakers listen to their audiences.

The successful presenter reverses this unfortunate polarity and instead focuses on receiver, feedback, and noise suppression. You can only do this if you’re well prepared. You can only be forgetful of the sender and the medium if you’ve got the message down cold and you know exactly how you’re going to put it over.

In this context, think of a speech not as a presentation but as an opportunity to listen to your audience. I will keep returning to that dictum as we work through the process I have developed for creating powerful content.

Here’s the process as a quick list:

 Understand the audience.

 Craft the elevator speech.

 Pick the level of need.

 Find the story.

 Structure the content.

 Make the journey.

 Involve the audience.

In order to be a successful public speaker, one who connects with audiences powerfully, makes an impact on them, and moves them to action, you have to shift your orientation. You need to think of yourself as a strong listener who carefully guides the audience where you want it to go, rather than as an orator who declaims like a professor, or a politician on the stump, or a lawyer summing up before a jury. You need listen to your audience.

What does this bold statement actually mean?

You are there because of them. A presentation doesn’t happen unless the audience gets it. Literally. Let me say that again another way: Your speech has mattered only if the audience has heard it. So you won’t actually know if your speech making has been a waste of time or not unless you do listen to your audience.

How does this work in practice? You have to let go of your own adrenaline-filled self-consciousness and begin to look at your audience. How are they doing? Are they attentive? Are they looking at you or out the window? Are they rapt, still, comfortable, or are they shifting in their chairs? Do they respond to your wit, your jokes, or are they inert? Are they leaning actively forward in their chairs, or sitting passively back, telegraphing inertia? In short, what is their emotional and intellectual state? You need to know this in order to know how to shape your presentation for best effect.

Think about the goal we have set ourselves to reach for in giving a speech. The only reason to give a speech is to change the world. In the case of the politician and the lawyer, the object is to move the audience to action of some kind—votes, a conviction, or an acquittal—but we’re after something even more basic, something stronger, something ultimately more important.

Aristotle was wrong: All speeches are persuasive acts.

We want to persuade people to do something new. That’s a tall order. But that is the essence of speech making: to move people to action. Anything else is wasted effort, because people simply don’t remember much of what they hear. It’s not a good format for imparting information. It is a good format for persuading people to believe in or act on something. (And just to drive a stake through the heart of one evil demon: Contrary to popular belief, PowerPoint slides don’t increase retention rates much, if at all. Indeed, most PowerPoint presentations are in fact speech outlines put together for the speaker’s benefit, not the audience’s. The result is a distraction that actually drives comprehension down, as the audience tries to match the words on the screen with what is coming out of the speaker’s mouth. You’re giving the audience twice as much to do and two places to look. Bad idea.)

Aristotle got it wrong. He said there were three kinds of speeches: informative, persuasive, and “decorative”—speeches of praise and the like. But there really is only one kind: the persuasive. When the secretary of defense gives a briefing to the press on the war effort, is that an informative speech? Not really. What’s actually going on is that the secretary of defense is persuading the press that he’s in control, in command of the situation, and that the war is going well. To be sure, some facts, some bits of information, are conveyed from speaker to audience. But the primary purpose is a different kind of show. And the extent to which the secretary is aware of his real purpose, and can focus on that, is the extent to which he will be successful. If he thinks that his purpose is exchanging information, then he’s in a game of “gotcha” with the press. He gives out information, and the press tries to prove him wrong.

If instead he’s being a persuasive leader, then he doesn’t have to know all the details. He can turn the briefing over to someone else for areas of expertise he doesn’t possess. All he has to do is act like the man in charge.

A classic instance of this point is the games played during the 2000 campaign and President Bush’s early weeks in office, when the press tried to catch him out on the names of foreign leaders and the like. Because Bush allowed the issue to become one of his expertise rather than his leadership abilities, what he knew and didn’t know became fair game. And the results were predictably disastrous.

So how can we take a page from the politician’s book of painful learning and ensure that the topic of a presentation gets framed the way it should, that the issue is one of persuasion, not information, and that you as speaker are allowed to shine—and to change the world?

Note that an important shift takes place as soon as you realize that you’re seeking to persuade, not inform. In all cases.The focus has to shift to the audience, because “persuade” is a verb that calls for an object: Persuade whom? Information can be given out, but not received. But persuasion requires a party of the second part.

This insight works just as well for presentations to five or fifty people at internal meetings as it does for the president of the United States. As soon as you set yourself up as someone who has all the answers, you invite people to raise objections. If instead you seek to enlist your audience to work with you to achieve a goal, one that involves action on the audience’s part, then you invite people to help you make your ideas work. It’s a subtle shift, but an enormously powerful one.

So we listen to the audience, from start to finish, in real time, as the presentation happens. And to make that possible, we have to begin by shaping the content of the speech in terms of the audience’s needs. The first step in this process of creating audience-centered content is to figure out who’s in the audience, and what their needs and expectations are. Second, we’ll focus the content once and for all by deciding upon what we call the elevator speech—in some ways the most difficult step in preparing a speech, since it involves thinking hard about what you are not going to say. Third, we’ll look at the level of need you’ll be addressing. This step is important because it determines, in essence, how hard your “sell” will be. It stands to reason that if you’re making a speech about a fire in a crowded theater, you’ll get the audience’s attention. Someone else trying to sell Milk Duds will go unheeded.

Fourth, you’ll decide overall what kind of story will help you get your message across to the audience. There are a few basic stories that have nearly universal resonance, and picking one of those will ensure that your audience can quickly and as effortlessly as possible orient themselves to your message in a way that makes them receptive. It’s a way of framing the presentation that puts it in a context that connects with an audience at a deep, intuitive level.

Fifth, you’ll structure the arguments and information you will actually present in ways that are as time-honored as the ancient Greeks’ understanding of speech structure, and as modern as recent psychological insights into the way the brain works and what motivates people to action.

Finally, as part of that structure, you’ll figure out ways to involve the audience kinesthetically, visually, and aurally.

Now, let’s get down to the details.

Determine everything you can about the audience.

First, you need to spend some time thinking hard about the audience itself in very basic ways. Who are they? What do they fear? What do they want? Spend some real time developing detailed answers to these key questions. Note that the first questions we ask involve emotions—fears and wants. If you don’t understand those key motivators, then you’ll never be able to connect with the people in the audience. As I will say more than once, great presentations are both emotional and intellectual journeys that you, the speaker, and the audience take together. You can’t take an audience on that journey unless you know what its hopes, fears, and motivations are.

How do you get that information? If you don’t know already, if you’re presenting to a group of people who are relatively unknown to you, begin with the person or group that talked you into giving the presentation. Then research the group or the audience in all the ways you can imagine—the Internet, periodicals, books, whatever seems likely to be useful.

Then gather the rest of the information:

 What is the age range of the audience?

 What is its socioeconomic makeup?

 Are you speaking in your first language? Theirs?

 How different are you from them?

 What do you have in common?

 What is their status compared to yours—higher, lower, the same?

 Have they had any bad news recently? Any good news?

 Do you know anyone in the audience? Would it be appropriate to address them directly?

Each of these questions has implications for how you will shape your comments. You want to match your talk to the age range of the audience without talking down to the young. You need to give thought to what you may have in common with a group that comes from a very different socioeconomic group than your own. Everyone has fears and dreams. Start there.

If you’re speaking to a group for whom your language is nonnative, then eliminate as many of your colloquialisms as possible, and slow down a little. It’s the colloquialisms and jokes that give foreign speakers the most trouble.

The most important act of imagination, however, is to figure out what the audience’s emotional state is. If you know what they wish for, and what they are afraid of, you can talk to any audience with a chance at making a real connection.

Get with the program.

Once you’ve figured out the emotional state of the people in front of you, ask questions about the event:

 When is the speech to be given?

 Who comes before you?

 Who comes after?

 What kind of an occasion is it?

 How many people will be in the room?

 What are they expecting?

 Are you the after-dinner entertainment, or a keynoter?

If you’re speaking after dinner, plan to speak for about twelve minutes at the most. If you’re the keynote speaker, you can go longer. I like hour-long time slots with time left for interaction, say, forty-five minutes of planned talk, interrupted occasionally with about fifteen minutes of unscripted interaction. Some events and conferences plan segments that go as long as ninety minutes. I find that, in most cases, what can be said in ninety minutes can be said more succinctly in sixty with a little more preparation and thought. I have rarely witnessed a ninety-minute talk that truly had a half-hour of extra meat in it. No one ever wishes a speech would run longer, or is sorry if one ends early.

And while I’m on the subject, if the typical attention span is something like twenty minutes, then in an hour’s presentation, there should be at least three opportunities for questions—after twenty minutes, forty minutes, and near the end. Breaks like that not only allow audiences to catch up and clarify anything they may have missed, but the pauses also allow audiences to recharge and refresh.

All of these questions, and any others you can think of, will help you develop a sense of who the audience is that you’ll be addressing. The more you know about the people in front of you, the better you’ll know how to connect with them. One of the best ways to warm up the connection with an audience, for example, is to personalize your presentation so that you refer to specific members of the audience and specific events that are important to them, not to mention cultural touchstones and inside references. Of course, all this can be carried too far, and must be done with tact. But more speeches err on the side of impersonality than on the excessively cozy and intimate. Connecting with your audience begins with knowing as much about them and the occasion as possible.

Make an effort, too, to think consciously about how you and the audience are alike. What hopes, fears, dreams do you share? Are you similar in outlook, age, experience? One of the simple ways to connect with an audience is to bridge the gaps between you and it by finding ways in which you are similar. The results can be extraordinary. Former First Lady Barbara Bush connected powerfully with some inner-city children during one of her literacy tours by sitting down with them and openly discussing her own childhood dreams and fears. Soon they were opening up and telling her about theirs. She had managed to find the universal connection between a privileged woman of power and rank and a group of poor elementary schoolkids. With a little work and imagination, it can be done.

Remember

 A standard model of communication has the following parts: sender, medium, message, receiver, feedback, and noise.

 Each is important to successful public speaking.

 Think of a presentation as an opportunity to listen to your audience.

 Find out everything you possibly can about your audience and plan to communicate with that unique group, no other.