In my previous post, I discussed getting after the who and why of your audience in order to figure out what to talk about. Today we’ll delve deeper into the who. Sometimes knowing your audience is as simple as asking for details from a coworker who is more familiar with the individual or team being addressed. Other times you may have to do a little digging to figure out who you’re talking to and what might resonate with them. Below are a few tips and tricks, excerpted from my upcoming book, So What? Better Briefs, Powerful Presentations.
Assess Organizational Talking Points
You know the company newsletter (that you auto-delete) with statements about “values,” “corporate culture,” and “vision statements?” Well, dig them out of your trash folder and actually read them. If you are more junior in position, it may all seem like corporate claptrap that only the C-suite cares about – and that should give you pause. If you’re briefing anyone above you, you can bet they are concerned with what’s going on above them. Like with the engineering material, your boss might be more concerned about her career than the product. Maybe this position is only a stepping stone for her. She needs to be seen as aligning to corporate values in order to parlay her current position at Gups Unlimited to a better one at Amalgamated Gups. Convince her that what is good for the product is good for the company’s bottom line, and she’ll be much more inclined to buy in. This is effective for leaders, especially those looking to climb. For peers and front-line supervisors, however, this might actually be better to avoid in order to not seem like a suck-up. The balance can be difficult. If you’re briefing an external organization or company, this could mean a visit to their website or calling to request some information.
Search Social Media
Say you’re talking to a mixed crowd and all you’re given is a vague department name like “Brand Initiatives” or “Product Development.” You could be presenting to anyone from a group of creatives working on logos and marketing to engineers inventing the Next Big ThingTM. If your company has internally available employee bios, i.e., on a SharePoint or intranet site, great. Otherwise, search a couple folks on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, etc., and get a feel for who you’re talking to. If it’s a creative crowd, focus on ideas, concepts, and synergy. If it’s an engineering crowd, lean more toward numbers, facts, and figures. Are you briefing a bunch of managers and directors? Stay in big-picture territory, and so on. This can be effective for a small audience (e.g., ten or less) and a highly targeted presentation. For larger groups, stick to the VIPs in the audience – anyone who can actually make a decision.
Call the Boss Whisperer
This must be done carefully to avoid perceptions of fishing or currying favor. Every leader has someone they trust, bounce ideas off or talk to. It may be a coworker, a subordinate, an executive assistant, another department head, a friend – the possibilities are varied. See who is always CC’d on their emails, who they take with them to meetings, who they trust to communicate in their stead. A mentor of mine calls such people “boss whisperers.” Especially if you’re dealing with a more mercurial personality, find the “whisperer” who can get through to them when others can’t. Now, don’t say “I want to convince the CEO,” or “How do I sell the VP on this initiative?” Instead, tell the whisperer something like, “I’m briefing Jones next Thursday, and I want to make the best use of his time. What are some critical action items he’s tackling right now so I can focus my material to his needs?” Again, this requires solid interpersonal skill to avoid coming across as bootlicking, so be careful in your wording and tone.
Obtain Internal Communications
I don’t mean eavesdropping on conversations or intercepting emails. This is about matching an organization or individual’s preferred style based on previous communication. If you’ll be addressing a different department and have the time, get an invite to their next team meeting before you speak. If it’s for a superior or VIP, get copies of previous slides or memos presented to them. If an organization records meetings or has dedicated notetakers, get minutes from past gatherings to both build toward their style and avoid repetition with what they’ve already heard.
The key is understanding your audience’s concerns by actions vs words. For example, if you ask someone to list their department’s priorities, they’ll probably regurgitate initiatives as dictated by the department head. Attend a meeting, however, and you’ll be able to read body language, hear insights into talking points, and possibly see where the “official” priorities get pushback from team members. I’m other words, you’ll see what they actually care about versus what they’re told to care about. Being an outside observer, you’ll be surprised how often you can observe patterns that team members, being too close to the situation, may have missed.
Likewise, if you get the last few internal memos, weekly updates, reports, and so on, you’ll be able to discern recurring themes, rates of progress on projects, and possibly identify synergies between your material and the other department or individual.
Just Ask
Particularly if the audience is a peer group, e.g., a team of colleagues who don’t fully understand your mission, just contact an individual in that group. If it’s an individual such as a departmental head or senior leader, approach them directly. What do you do? How do you do it? How does your work fit into the whole of the company? This must be handled with care, just like asking the exec or secretary, and it should always be a last resort. If you ask the VP of a department what they do when the material is easily available elsewhere, you go from driven to lazy in half a second.
Why would you use this approach? In the case of briefing another team, maybe they are newly formed and haven’t fleshed out their mission and vision, or maybe it is on them to determine how to fit into an initiative. For an individual, maybe they haven’t been in the seat long enough to publish policies or directives, or it’s a dynamic situation with constantly changing circumstances. There are functionally infinite possible combinations of what you do versus what others do, and there are as many ways to get info about an audience as there are audiences. What’s important is to find out what matters to them in order to select your topic accordingly.