Good day everybody, and welcome to the show. Today’s episode and the upcoming series is about knowing your audience in meetings, presentations, and conversations in general.
Why is that important? It’s pretty easy. Think about it.
You already know your thoughts. You know what you want to say. You know your story, your slides, whatever. But they don’t. So essentially, you’re never talking for yourself.
You’re doing it for others.
And in order to have a successful conversation, it is crucial that you understand who you are talking to. What do they expect? What do they need? How are they ticking?
What is the context? What are they able to understand and so on. To put it in a nutshell, if you don’t know your audience: imagine your boss asks you to give a presentation to a group of potential customers. This has happened to me too. So I created great, more or less self-explanatory slides.
In my opinion, an excellent job. The slides were in German. But before I went to the lectern I realized that no one in the audience spoke German, only English.
Also, most of the audience were not tech savvy, but my presentation was to show how capable I am, a Tech Masterclass. Also, my English business vocabulary wasn’t very strong at that point, so in short: useless slides, content that missed the audience completely, and I literally didn’t have the words I needed.
So, I would like to point out some important aspects and advantages of knowing your audience well enough before you address them, just in case you’re trying to achieve a goal.
I mean, if you are more the monologue type, then of course you can skip this episode. If you want to avoid misunderstandings, it’s important to find the right language for your audience. I’m not talking about foreign languages. Well, they’re important, yes, but I’m mean technical jargon and figurative language.
Technical jargon may be suitable for a specialist conference, for example, but not for general audience.
Similarly, diagrams and statistics are very welcome in management meetings, but stock photos surely are not. These would be better suited to a marketing conference. And where do you wanna see code? Only where you can read code and where you can understand code and where code issues matter.
People generally have a short attention span and little patience. So be precise, relevant, and understandable. Otherwise, you will lose people after a short time. And if nobody listens or follows you, it doesn’t matter how brilliant your content is. Another aspect is the right tone.
Your tone should match the expectations and preferences of your audience.
A formal tone might be expected in academic or professional settings, while a more casual tone might be suitable for informal gatherings or creative spaces. Understanding your audience helps you to adopt the appropriate tone and language. By understanding the background, interests and level of knowledge of your audience, you can tailor your message to make it more relevant and engaging for them. This ensures that your content is appropriate and accessible, whether it involves simplifying complex topics for beginners or delving deeper for experts.
If your customers are selling cars, it makes no sense showing them a demo of someone selling clothes ’cause they won’t be emotionally attached, which makes influencing or let’s say even persuading them impossible. But if you know that background, you can show them value for their domain, speak the language, and solve their problems, which will for sure resonate with them. When you talk to non technicians, it’s never about explaining the exact solution anyway. Nobody will understand that.
It’s about explaining the principle in such a way that the technical jargon becomes completely irrelevant.
Let me give you an example. I was in a meeting once where we had to present our API. It turned out that the people were already lost with the vocabulary API. So that was a problem. They had no idea what it meant.
And suddenly someone got a bit courageous and asked about it, and then our tech guy explained it pretty much like this. API stands for application programming interface. In the context of APIs, the word application refers to any software with a distinct function.
Interface can be thought of as a contract of service between two applications. This contract defines how the two communicate with each other using requests and responses.
Standing ovation, ah, no, everyone was even more confused. We needed an idea. So I stood up and I pointed at the socket on the wall and said, that’s pretty much the API for electricity, your electricity interface, so to say. If you need power for an electrical device, then you need a plug, your input. The plug and the socket are normed.
Every plug has two thin metal pins, two centimeters apart that match every socket. If you plug it in, it will give you electricity. Exactly 230 volts at 69 ampere every time. That’s an API contract, a defined input, a defined interface, and defined outcome. I’ve used figurative example from the public domain that everyone more or less can relate to without using a single programming vocabulary.
Nevertheless, the principle was clear to everyone afterwards. Every time I give a presentation at a conference, I ask the organizers in advance about the typical audience.
How old are they? What is their professional background? Do they tend to be men or women?
What nationality are they? Why are they coming to this conference? And so on and so on.
This gives me a pretty good idea of the audience and what they’re likely to expect from my presentation. Listen, you can exceed expectation and that’s the jackpot.
But if you don’t meet expectations because they expected something else, it doesn’t matter how good your presentation is. Unfulfilled expectations are called disappointments, and you don’t want that. So my advice, prepare yourself. Victory loves preparation. Let’s make a simple template comparison to see how clearly the expectations of our immediate environment already differ.
Take a look at the following groups of colleagues, marketing and brand sales, direct supervisors, upper management, and customers to understand exactly what someone expects. You need to ask yourself the right questions to put yourself in the shoes of the person or group in question.
It is an advantage if you try to see the world through their eyes. Ask yourself, what are their KPIs? KPIs are key performance indicators, IE key figures that measure success progress or the degree to which objectives have been met.
What does the target group want to hear from me? What are the common problems? What should I definitely tell them and what should I definitely not tell them? What are the typical contact situations? And of course, as always, you should ask yourself the question, how can I benefit from the target group?
In short, if you’re one of those people who like to communicate efficiently and successfully, then I strongly advise you to prepare well for meetings, presentations or any other type of communication. There are many different ways to get a message across. The goal is to recognize the right way. To do this, you need information about the target group. So stay tuned because we’ll fill our information templates in the upcoming episodes, But I can already anticipate the most important information because it applies to all target groups.
Nobody, except for software engineers is interested in technical jibber jabber, and why should they? That’s what you are there for.
Tech is complicated and only for experts, but what it does can be explained to non-experts. So, see you soon.
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