36- Give your audience what they want
After you’ve started the presentation with a solid introduction, transition from the introduction to the body by providing a summary of the current audience needs as you understand them. For example, picture yourself selling a new machine for an assembly line and you identified audience needs of project cost, schedule, and safety. When you begin the body of your presentation, you should summarize these with a simple statement such as, “From what you have told me, I understand that you need a system that can be deployed within your current project schedule, is within your project budget, and can be safely implemented with your current set up.” During the presentation, this need summary serves to reconfirm that you are addressing their specific needs and creates a smooth transition for the audience.
Most of your presentation time is spent in the body. This is the heart of the presentation and your opportunity to present information to educate and persuade your client. When preparing the body, you should focus on the audience needs and the objectives you previously identified.
You should present solutions to both internal and external challenges that individual audience members are facing. For example, imagine you are selling logo and branding services to a company. This company wants to grow its share of the construction market. Specifically, they want to capture a younger audience and believe better branding is an important step to do this. The company has an internal marketing team, as well as engineering and operations teams. Through your initial research you have learned that the internal marketing team is frustrated because they are not able to adequately capture photos of projects from the operations team, preventing them from generating sticky social media posts that capture the attention of their target audience. In this case, the external challenge is outside competition, while the internal challenge is dysfunction between the two teams. Using this information, you can generate a presentation that highlights how the company’s sales will grow as a result of branding and provide a roll out plan that engages all the teams. Specifically, the roll out plan will include a plan for the marketing team to assign weekly social media posts to operations team members. This will provide a repeatable plan to generate photos that the marketing team can use with the new branding to drive sales.
This is an example of what I call a Need Block. Presenting your information in a series of Need Blocks that address how your product or service will address the needs of the audience will allow you to organize the body of your presentation in a way that is logical to the audience. To develop a Need Block, follow this five-step process: Define, Identify, Expand, Relate, Remind.
Because of the research you’ve done, defining the need is easy. In a recent presentation to a construction group, one of the defined needs was for their project to come in on-schedule. I had learned that on-time project delivery was critical to the project’s funding. Therefore, as an opening statement for this Need Block, I simply reiterated this information by saying, “From speaking to several of you, I understand that maintaining the construction schedule is critical to the project financing. I’m going to show you how our foundation system can keep your project on-track.”
Once you have defined the need, in this case it is an on-time schedule, identify the feature of your service or product and focus on the benefit to them. This may include how your product is installed, constructed, designed, etc. For the above example, I explained how the system I proposed can be installed in wet weather conditions, specifically emphasizing its positive impact on the construction schedule as delays to weather are eliminated or minimized as compared to other systems.
Next, expand on the feature. This means adding substance to your feature and should include using supporting facts, figures, or demonstrations. Use meaningful facts and describe the impacts of those facts on the audience. For the construction example, I showed a video of the installation of the system and as it was playing said, “Unlike other foundation systems that use concrete, this system only uses stone.” I continued to explain that it is often more time consuming to use construct foundation elements in wet weather when using concrete. However, there are rarely weather delays related to using stone.
To complete the Need Block, relate the feature to the audience and show them the benefit. There are several ways to do this, you can use testimonials, project case studies, or a story.
Some tips when using testimonials include using a testimonial that is from an unbiased source, presented from a person your audience can relate to, and includes features and benefits that support the Need Block you are presenting. For example, if you are trying to sell a new floor system to a group that works in home remodeling, don’t use your spouse’s testimonial. While it may be fully of energy and is familiar to you, it will not appear to be from an independent source because it isn’t! Also, you need to choose a testimonial from a person that your audience can relate to. Picture yourself as a senior citizen sitting through a presentation on investment options and the presenter uses a testimonial from a thirty-year old woman who describes how happy she is with the investments she has made. If you don’t use a testimonial from a relatable person it will not be effective, and worse, can result in you distancing yourself from the audience. Lastly, use a testimonial that supports the feature and benefit you are presenting in the current Need Block. If the client is a hotel group that needs to have less expensive housekeeping and you have just presented your awesome new floor cleaning system that cleans and waxes floors faster than any other on the market, you should use a testimonial from a hotel client that discusses not only how awesome your system is, but more importantly, how much money they save each month by using it.
Like using testimonials, if you use a case study you should be sure that the audience can relate to it. Using another construction example, you have learned through your research that the company you are visiting is a specialist in apartment construction but would like to expand their parking garage market. An excellent case study for this situation is one that includes both a parking garage and an apartment building as part of the same project. The case study should be relevant in other ways as well. These could include using project information from companies your client is familiar with or presenting projects in the same geographic region as the one your client is focusing on, among others. If your client’s projects are mainly in New York, and you are presenting case studies from Mexico City you are not capturing the opportunity to connect with your audience and give them relevant information.
While you want to use audience specific details as often as possible, doing it at the end of a Need Block is critical because people tend to remember better information they heard last. For the construction foundation example, the feature in this Need Block is the ability to perform in rainy weather conditions, and the audience’s need being addressed is the ability to maintain project schedule. To relate this to the audience you could present a local project you recently completed and actual installation metrics such as how may days did it take to complete the job, and include nearby historic rainfall data. The local project coupled with the rainfall data make this feature considerably more meaningful to your audience.
One you are ready to close your Need Block, remind the audience of their need, and how you can meet it using similar language used in the introduction. In the above example, you could say, “As you can see, adverse weather does not affect performance or the schedule for this system. This will enable you to keep project costs low by maintaining your schedule as weather delays are eliminated”.
Depending on the amount of time you have available, you can repeat this process and add additional Need Blocks to address several audience needs. If you plan to present more than one Need Block, start with the one that is most familiar to your audience or the least most important need. Be sure to summarize each feature and reiterate how it meets their need before transitioning to the next one.
Don’t underestimate the importance of transition statements. Presenting is like writing. When you write, you use transition words such as “and,” “however,” and “because” to tie ideas together between sentences. This is critical to good writing as it makes your content easier to read and keeps the reader on track as they follow your logic. You need to use adequate transition statements during your presentation for the same reasons; they allow the audience to follow you from topic to topic. Using good transition statements makes your presentation cohesive and allows you to move smoothly from one part of the presentation to the next. An example of a short transition statement you can use is, “Now that we have discussed x, y, and z, we will focus on how these can benefit your project schedule.”
Lastly, always end the body of your presentation with the Need Block that focuses on your strongest feature. This is the benefit that is exclusive to you and your company. The reason for placing this need block last is simple: People will remember it better because it was the last item presented.
After you have fully developed each Need Block by making it relevant to the audience you are ready to close the presentation with a Call to Action, which will be discussed in my next blog.
