When faced with a public speaking or writing assignment, fear is often the first response. “I don’t even know what to talk about,” people say. Whether addressing your department, speaking at a dinner, pitching to clients, or negotiating with vendors, determining a topic can be a daunting challenge. Is it the right thing to discuss? Can I talk about it in the right way? Will they be interested? Will I know what to say about it? There are three crucial questions to ask when selecting a topic, in order: who am I talking to, why am I talking to them, and what will I talk about? That sequence is immutable. Too many speakers get stuck on “what” without ever considering who or why, and the surprising truth is that if you focus on the first two, the third will often fall into place on its own.
There is a prime example of this in the TV series Mad Men, a show about ad agencies on Madison Avenue in the 1950s. In the third episode, a marketing team meets with the owner of a department store who is seeking to become a fashion powerhouse. They recommend implementing personal shopping, private fashion shows, and developing designer collections to attract the desired clientele. “And yet,” the owner replies, “my store already offers a personal shopping service.” She criticizes the team for not actually visiting the store, where they would have discovered it for themselves.
The marketing team technically wasn’t wrong. The services they recommended were effective strategies, hence why the client and other department stores were already doing them. In this case, the what was absolutely correct, but the marketing team missed the who and why, without which their recommendation was useless. It seems like an obvious mistake from the outside, but we are all guilty of this at some point. When someone approaches us at work with a problem, how often do we start with offering a solution instead of asking clarifying questions to ensure we’re offering the right solution? Let’s take a look at how to get there.
Who
Who is the simplest question in this three-step process. Demographics like age, gender, title, experience, background, and even personal details like favorite sports team or music genre all work to shape the individual and can impact how they perceive any given message. How you talk about a new product will look very different addressing an engineering team versus a sales team. The engineers will want to know about tolerances, materials, requirements, integration, and a host of other criteria, while the sales team wants to hear about price, features, customer use cases, and the like.
Within those teams, though, specific people may receive information different ways. The mid-fifties veteran engineer will process specifications very differently from a twenty-something college grad. The older engineer’s experience allows for lines of questioning and clarification that would never occur to the recent graduate, but the graduate might be more up-to-date on technological developments and novel techniques.
A good rule of thumb is to identify who among the audience will be most impacted by your presentation. Who can make a decision or implement the information in some way? Who benefits the most from it? Whether you’re addressing ten people or ten thousand, figure out what your target should be. Sometimes it’s as easy as identifying the senior-most individual. Other times it’s harder, especially if you don’t fully know who you’re talking to ahead of time and don’t have any reasonable way to find out.
In the latter case, where you’re going into a presentation blind, the best course of action is to generate the audience in your mind – and be specific. Don’t just say, “I’m presenting to a group of engineers.” Get down to individual details. For example, “I am addressing a mid-level engineer with some experience in the field and passing familiarity with my company’s product line. He has been tasked with managing a small team to design a specific component for one of our new products, but details thus far have been vague, and there are no documented requirements.” It may feel like such a narrow scope would hamper your approach, but it will actually help focus your work and result in a more useful end product.
Now, maybe the actual audience ends up being different, but that’s okay. Having a target in mind gives you a deeper understanding of why you’re covering the information and gives you a plan to deviate from. Let’s talk about that next.
Why
Imagine asking a travel agent to plan a trip without providing a destination. You can’t be upset when the agent crafts an itinerary that doesn’t meet your needs if your needs were never expressed. Many people approach public speaking the same way, being content to draft endless slide decks and talk about a given topic but never consider why they’re talking about it. We only have so many hours in the day, and we never want our time wasted. If we’re going to hear someone speak, we want it to be worth our while.
Consider that few of the attendees at a TED conference will personally benefit from the information received. At the time of this writing, the cheapest in-person price to attend a TED conference is over $6,000 – not including accommodations and airfare. Despite the price tag and high likelihood that an attendee will gain no material return on their investment, thousands of people apply to attend every year. Likewise, TED talks are viewed online millions of times, but the average YouTube viewer likewise stands to gain little practical value from the talks. What separates a TED talk from your quarterly update meeting?
The simple answer is perceived value. While a TED attendee may not benefit financially from the conference, there is an intellectual return on investment. Likewise, even with something as routine as a quarterly update, the meeting can be transformed from mandatory drudgery to true value added communication. Consider how you react when you see a calendar invite at work. We all do gain/loss analyses before clicking “accept.” Will it be worth my time? Will I get in trouble if I don’t go? Will I miss something by not being there? Oh, wait – Carol is running this meeting. Well, I don’t know what it’s about, but if she’s calling for it, I’ll be there.
That’s what why is all about. Like a TED talk, if you demonstrate enough times that your presentations are worth listening to, people will come to hear you speak regardless of topic. People commonly mistake the root of public speaking as conveying information or persuading an audience. The real root of public speaking is building relationships. Think about the building presentation as planning a party for a friend. You wouldn’t select a card at random or pick a restaurant based solely on price or location – you would peruse the card aisle until you find one suiting your friend’s personality, and you would select a venue fitting your friend’s preferences. Likewise, you shouldn’t select a topic based on what you think might be interesting – select it based on what you think will be valuable to your audience.
It should be apparent now why the who is so important. Without knowing who you’re going to talk to, you can’t use the above approach to figure out why you’re talking to them. Even if the CEO, a VP, a manager, and an entry-level employee are equally interested in your topic, they are all going to have very different relationships with the information, and it is incumbent on you to make it meaningful and worthwhile to them, regardless of who is listening.
What
If you know who you’re talking to and why you’re talking to them, what often becomes relatively straightforward, but that doesn’t make it a trivial step in the process. In my book So What? Better Briefs, Powerful Presentations, I talk about topic versus thesis, describing the topic as what you’ll talk about and the thesis as why you’ll talk about it. The topic of a job interview is the interviewee, but the thesis is why they should be hired. The topic of a sales presentation is a product or service, but the thesis is why the customer should buy it. The topic of a research proposal is the science, the thesis is its potential impact.
Here is the crux of the what: application. Any presentation, brief, essay, or speech should give the audience something they didn’t bring to it. That something boils down to one of two end states, either knowledge or application. Ask yourself, “At the the of this presentation, will my audience be able to understand something or do something they couldn’t before?” If the answer is no, you’re probably not talking about the right things. Even with the mundane quarterly status update, presenting numbers and charts can be dramatically enhanced by either elucidating potential causes behind the quarterly numbers (good or bad) or possible courses of action to improve next quarter.
Elmer Wheeler, a pioneer in modern sales techniques, once said, “Don’t sell the steak, sell the sizzle.” The exact same principle applies to all public speaking. Don’t talk about quarterly numbers – talk about their impact. Don’t just list specifications – tell the engineers how the product will enhance people’s lives. Don’t limit your sales pitch to general benefits – give a specific, personal benefit from another client. In short, build the relationship.
When marriages struggle, counselors often ask what either spouse used to do that made the other feel valued, encouraging the couple to return to those roots and rediscover the effort that first drew them together. Public speaking is similar. What first made you interested in a topic that led you to dig deeper? What about Carol makes you want to attend her meetings? Why should anyone care about quarterly earnings beyond the company’s ability to meet payroll? You pay attention to a speech if you know that you’ll get someone out of it, that you’ll enhance your knowledge, or that you’ll be able to take action you couldn’t otherwise. Healthy relationships are similar. Giving of ourselves encourages others to give in return. Give your audience value, and they will give you their full attention.
So What?
This all might seem like a lot of work, and the first few times you do it, that may be the case. That said, the initial time investment of figuring out who you’re talking to and why will help focus your work and result in a superior end product with greater results than you anticipated. Over time, as you get used to it, determining the who/why/what will no longer be something you have to do. It will become a way of thinking that informs your entire approach to public speaking, and the quality of your speeches will soar.