Do you want to have a “home run” with your presentation?
Or, better yet, do you want to “hit it out of the ballpark”?
If so, tailor your presentation to your audience.
It doesn’t matter if you have the most polished delivery skills, or the most moving stories, if you don’t connect with your audience, your presentation will fall flat.
A few years ago, I attended a Toastmasters International convention and witnessed the worst speaker/audience match I have ever seen. The opening evening keynote speaker was polished, high energy, and had well-crafted stories. And his presentation was completely wrong for the audience. The audience was an international gathering of Toastmaster members—the average age was probably about 40, and most of the audience was successful enough to be able to afford hotel, airfare and convention costs. The speaker’s content and style would have been appropriate for high school or college students. It was such a disconnect for me, personally, that I started texting snarky comments back and forth with a couple of my friends in the audience. And I am generally NOT that kind of person.
The organization had likely paid a hefty speaker fee and paid other costs for the speaker, with the intention of inspiring or motivating the audience. Waste of money. The organization clearly made a mistake, but so did the speaker. He should have either declined the event as not being a good fit for his presentation, or he should have tailored his presentation to the audience.
How do you tailor your presentation?
In this post, I’ll address connecting your CONTENT.
Let me give you a recent example.
Yesterday, I presented a 90-minute session on presentation skills for the Minnesota Twins Front office. The audience was engaged and interactive for the entire presentation. Several came up to me afterwards and told me specific takeaways that they would be taking action on. The HR person who hired me enthusiastically said, “That was awesome! Thanks so much!”
It was a “home run” for both me and the baseball team’s front office staff.
Part of the success was that I had tweaked the content slightly to tailor it for the organization.
I spent about 2 hours tailoring the content:
- Asked questions of the meeting planner about what specific communication challenges they had around my topic of presentation skills.
- Conducted informational interviews with 6 key people (about 10 minutes each–Here’s a link to a pdf of the Informational interview questions, specific to my presentation on presentation skills).
- Created slides with relevant quotes from each of the 6 interviewees (I also used a picture of the person, which I took from their LinkedIn profiles). I had one relevant quote introducing each of my 6 main points.
- Used a good example from their own website to illustrate a point. Remember to check out the organization’s website!
- Used organization-specific data to illustrate another point (in this case, my point was that poor presentations can be costly. From talking with the HR contact, I knew that there were monthly All-staff meetings. She gave me the average attendance, and the average salary, so I could calculate and show a slide with the cost of one meeting)
- Added a small piece of requested content based on a few different people mentioning a relevant need
- Added the organization logo subtly onto my opening and closing slides
Spending a couple of hours to tailor the content can pay big dividends in the effectiveness of a presentation for a specific audience.
Tailor YOUR presentation to your audience and hit it out of the ballpark!