Knowing Your Audience

An important part of any presentation is knowing who your audience will be. If your pitch is tailored toward finance and you walk into an engineering oriented group you will be in trouble from the start. A little advance scouting goes a long way. Scouting is even more important when the meeting is over the phone or internet and you have no way of knowing that you aren't connecting to your audience right away. This applies to both the consulting world and internal communications for any company.

There are presentations that you have to give on a regular basis that you keep updated and stay knowledgeable on. How many versions of those presentations do you have? The correct answer should depend on the types of audiences you will face. If you have to give a quarterly report to your superiors but brief your staff before hand, shouldn't these two presentations have different feels? Sure your staff cares what you are going to tell the people above you, but what they really want is the information pertinent to them.

We have a presentation for a service called Strategic Facilities and Operations Assessments. This presentation currently has about 6 versions that are kept up to date for use at any given time. We have a version for 3 different industries, a short and long version, and a detailed process version. With very short notice we can pull any of these out and have a very good starting point for a conference with a potential client. There is no need to go back through and create a new version. Flexibility was built in early to save time and keep the message consistent.

If you are like most businesses, you know who your target audience is. It is important to push to get that audience present for your presentation. Getting the right audience will make you more comfortable and make the message that much more effective. Making sure you are prepared for the times when you get a different audience is just as important.


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