33- Great presenters target their objectives

Once you have completed your Macro, Meso, and Micro level research it is time to identify your objectives. When preparing your presentation, you need to be able to answer two important questions: What is your desired outcome? And what is your audience’s desired outcome? 

Objectives are dependent on many factors including the audience, the type of presentation, and, in the case of a sales presentation, where you are in the sales cycle. For example, if you are presenting to a client, your objective may be to obtain a contract. Whereas, if you are preparing an academic presentation, your objective may be to get a good grade from your professor. In another circumstance, if you are presenting at an industry conference, your objective may be to establish your image as an expert in the field, or to teach the audience a new skill.

As a professional, if you are standing in front of an audience, it is because one or more of the people listening to you is interested in the information you have to share with them and you likely are already an expert in the subject matter. This is true for business meetings and professional training such as conferences. The audience members are spending their valuable time with you. By identifying the objectives of the people who will be attending your presentation you will be able to prepare a presentation that shows the audience you respect their time by focusing on information they want to learn.

To illustrate this point, imagine that you work for a company that manufactures car parts. You’ve been asked to present your company’s latest technologies to a new customer. This customer specializes in building custom gasoline-powered race cars. Your company has just developed an exciting new engine control unit that allows for increased acceleration. After twenty-five minutes of presenting this new part to your customer, one of the audience members informs you that they were interested in purchasing several of your company’s new electric motors because they are starting a new division focused on electric cars. They really wanted to know more about the specification and lead time of this product. By not learning about your audience’s objectives, you’ve wasted your time, and your audience’s time. Recovering from such a mishap it is not easy. From your client’s perspective, how much attention will your company give their new car line when, as a representative of your company, you didn’t take the time to find out what your client wanted to learn about? Identifying your audience’s objective is critical to successful presentation preparation.

At this point, you’re probably thinking, “This sounds great, but how do you identify objectives of the people who will be at my presentation before I even meet them?” You have already determined the client’s need during the research phase, now you must translate that need to what they want to get out of the presentation.

You may have enough information to be able to do this without additional work. For example, the client need you identified in your research was to have no warranty issues with the product they produce. Some of the concerns you identified include product quality control and long-term performance. Therefore, you could draw the conclusion that their objective is to leave the presentation with an overall comfort level with the quality of your product and its long term performance.

However, if you don’t have a clear vision of your audience’s objectives before you prepare the main content of your presentation you should call or visit them again and ask additional open-ended questions.

Open-ended questions are different than closed-ended questions because, rather than encouraging a digital “yes or no” answer, they allow the respondent to answer the question more fully.  Additionally, closed-ended questions are often leading. In other words, the person asking often phrases the question in a way that solicits their expected result. Instead, asking open-ended questions allows the respondent to answer in their own way and with their own words. Another advantage to open-ended questions is that they encourage two-way interaction which helps build rapport.

Here are some questions you can ask people who will be in the audience:

·       What do you hope to gain by attending the presentation?

·       How will you determine if attending the presentation has been a successful use of your time?

·       What are your business goals?

·       What makes your company unique?

·       What upcoming opportunities do you see?

·       What are your current challenges?

·       What are your customer’s current challenges?

·       What makes you personally excited to come to work every day?

Asking these types of questions allows you to identify objectives and makes the presentation better for both you and your audience. It also allows you to open a dialogue with your audience before the day of the presentation, which can make the presentation more comfortable for everyone.

Once you have identified your objectives, and those of the audience, write them down, keep them close and (most importantly) visible. This will help serve as a guide in preparing your presentation, and keep you on track when developing content.

With the research and objective setting portions of the pre-work complete, the next step is to outline your presentation. Your outline should consist of what you plan to cover during your presentation. In general, the outline format I recommend you use includes: an Introduction, Main Content, “Proof” Statements, a Summary, and a Call to Action.

The Introduction will let the audience know who you are and why you are presenting to them. The Main Content will include the content that explains your topic. This content is be based on the clients’ needs you identified during your earlier research. “Proof” Statements include information that confirms and reinforces the Main Content such as case studies, statistics, and/or third party testimonials. Once you have discussed your main content, with a focus on the audience’s needs, add a Summary to remind the audience of the information you’ve covered. Lastly, include a Call to Action. This is your chance to let people know what you want them to do with the information provided.

For example, if you are presenting a new patented line of nighttime running apparel to a potential investor, your outline may look like this:

I.                  Introduction

II.                Engineering of the System

III.              Construction of the System

IV.              Case Studies

V.                Summary

VI.              Call to Action.

Be sure to base your outline and subsequent content not only on the objectives you identified in of your pre-work, but also on how much time you have.

Once you’ve compiled your research, identified your objectives and prepared your outline, it is time to start with the Introduction. I’ll cover that topic in the next blog.

How do you set objectives for your presentations?