Ask yourself what your audience wants to learn from you

The trick is to find the overlap between what you want to say and what they want to hear. If you only tell them what you want to get across, you risk the audience mentally switching off and nodding off to sleep. If you only tell them what they want to know, you may not achieve your own objective. Seeking out the overlap increases the chances of a win-win scenario.

Questions in advance

What the audience wants to know is a bit of a guess. That’s fine. A few simple questions will often get you a long way. Such as these, which you can ask yourself before you even begin putting your presentation together:

• Who will be there?

• What do they do?

• What matters to them?

• Why are they coming to this event/meeting?

• What information can I offer them that will be useful?

Here’s an example. I coached a postdoc who was researching alcohol consumption following surgery. Many doctors advise against it as standard, yet this postdoc had found that moderate consumption is not all that harmful. Allowing a sick person to enjoy a little pleasure in life helps them get back on their feet more quickly. She was given the opportunity to present her research at a conference for doctors. Running through the list of questions above yields the following information: the audience consists of doctors. They are all engaged in making patients better. They are frequently under considerable time pressure, so the faster they can help a patient, the better. They come to the conference to gain new insights for their day-to-day work. What they need, therefore, are practical tips they can use to help their patients — but in a way that requires little (additional) time.

Concrete tips

In the first version of her talk, the postdoc had not taken into account two important aspects: it needed to be practically applicable, and it needed to be quick. Her initial version focused largely on how she had conducted the research — the number of patients, the questionnaire used, the aspects of wellbeing she had examined, and so on. These are not unimportant matters, but they still left doctors none the wiser as to what they could actually do. Could they simply allow any patient to drink alcohol? How could they assess in advance whether it was safe for an individual patient? And would that assessment not take up too much time?

‘With these answers, putting your presentation together goes much faster’

She decided to shorten the section on her research process in order to make room for these concrete questions. That way, she could address the assessment she recommends, the interpretation of the results, and finally how much time it takes — as well as the time it saves in the long run. In doing so, she made the presentation not only more useful for her audience (and for patients!), but also for herself. She created a win-win situation.

Working through these preparatory questions took us just five minutes, incidentally. Ask yourself as well: what do I want to achieve? Once you have all these answers, putting your presentation together goes much faster, because you have a clearer sense of which information is relevant and which is not. In short: take a moment beforehand to consider what your audience wants. It will ensure a presentation with maximum impact — for them, and for yourself.