What’s in it for me?

The first step to being a great presenter is to stand in the shoes of your audience and figure out what they need.

Before a presentation, any audience anywhere in the world is always thinking two things:

1. How long do I have to sit here for?
2. And … what’s in it for me?

What your audience really want to know is: Why should I listen to this presentation?

At the end of the day people have their own self-interests at heart. They want to know what is in it for them!

You need to answer this question. You need to tell your audience why they should listen to you. You need to tell your audience the value of your information to them.

This is what is called a hook.

You cannot assume your audience will listen. You cannot assume they want to listen. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. There are a lot of maybes.

I have come across presenters who tell me there is no reason for their audience to listen to them as their presentation has no real value.

If you don’t have anything of value to say to your audience please stop talking and sit down.

It’s not about you

You need to stop talking at your audience about you, your company or your topic.

You need to start talking to them about them, their reality and how your company or concept will be of value.

The secret to great presenting is to talk to your audience about them rather than at them about you.

Why should they listen?

Are you funny? If you are, please do tell a joke. Are you charismatic? If you are, go forth and charm.

The good news is neither of the above has anything to do with whether an audience will hang on your every word or not.

Your audience will engage with you and listen to you only if there is a reason for them to listen, for example:

1. If they are sincerely interested in what you have to say.
2. If they know there is a benefit to what you have to say.
3. If they feel there will be a negative consequence to not listening to what you have to say.

What reason are you giving your audience to listen to your message?

The remote control test

I would like you to think for a second about the way you watch television. You are sitting on your couch channel surfing. You change to a new channel, you ask yourself: Is this interesting (interest), worth watching (benefit)? Do I need to watch this (fear)? Eh no. Next!

OK, now imagine every single member of your audience has a remote control in their hand. Now imagine they have ten other channels to switch to and if you lose them you will not get them back. How long do you think you have with your presentation in its current format before you lose them to another channel?

Introductions are important

Audiences make the decision to listen to you very quickly. Your audience will decide if your presentation is interesting, of benefit or if there is the fear factor in the first …

Stop talking about what you’re going to talk about and just talk about it.

A lot of presenters spend their introductions and the majority of their presentation telling their audience:

• what they are going to tell them;
• what they already know;
• what they don’t want to know.

This has got to stop right now.

You have to cut to the chase, get to the point and be direct. You need to inspire your audience, engage them, and let them know this presentation is worth listening to and fast. When it is your turn to talk please say something interesting straight away.

The key to a presentation is getting the beginning just right.

Getting the beginning just right

This is the way an engineer started his presentation to the board of management about the need to standardise the company’s processes:

‘As I was doing some research for this presentation, I read the city of Baltimore burnt to the ground in 1904. The tragedy is it didn’t have to.

Firefighters from nearby DC, New York, and Virginia all responded, but weren’t able to help because their hose couplings wouldn’t fit on the Baltimore hydrants – no standard had yet been set. The firefighters helplessly watched as the city burned.

Like Baltimore, our organisation will suffer if we don’t standardise our processes.’

This is the opening of a speech to a group of parents to raise awareness in a community about school security:

‘Tobacco, alcohol, a knife …

These items were seized in a random search of final year students’ lockers in our school last week.’

What about an agenda?

Imagine you turned on the radio in your car to your favourite station and the DJ was telling you what was coming up in the next hour. They began:

Have you switched over to another station yet?

They would never do this because they wouldn’t have any listeners.

A formal agenda would make for a very strange radio show indeed, and in a presentation setting it can turn your audience off almost immediately.

A radio station will pick the best bits coming up in the next hour and try and hook you in and keep you listening for as long as possible.

For example:

‘Coming up in the next hour, we will be playing our mystery voice and if you guess right this hour you win €5,000. We are going to play last night’s number one and of course, we are going to give you all the latest celebrity gossip.’

A lot of presenters begin their presentation with an agenda. ‘Thank you for the opportunity to talk to you today, and before I start, I would like to thank all of the following … (insert list). In my talk today, I would like to address the following topics … (insert list) and, of course, all of this will be written word for word on the slides.’

The problem with agendas is they are long and boring to get through for the presenter and can give the audience an option to decide not to listen at certain points, if at all. If you want people to know what’s coming up give them the highlights to keep them interested or tell them what value they will walk away with. They don’t need a list of everything you are going to talk about.

You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression

I cannot stress how important the beginning of your presentation is. The stronger the hook the more durable the audience’s engagement will be. It is not easy to get someone to listen to you, but if you make sure they really understand the value of your information and what it can do for them you will succeed in getting their attention.

You do not need to employ any out-of-the-ordinary antics like juggling or joke-telling at the beginning of your presentation to get attention. I have seen so many of these tricks go horribly wrong and the presenter doesn’t recover from the bad start.

All you have to do is answer one very simple question for your audience:

‘Why should I listen to your presentation?’