Delivering your Message to an Audience
Whether we are presenting to our own clients or are invited to deliver a presentation, our goal is for the audience to hear our message.
How do we achieve this?
We need to start by building rapport with the audience – it’s about them, not you! Do an icebreaker or ask them what they are hoping to get from today’s session. They are there to listen, but they are thinking: ‘What’s in it for me?’
So, we need to address this by telling them how ‘XYZ’ (your message) will help them or solve their problem. Tell them:
- A personal story of a client of yours who struggled with a problem, and how XYZ helped;
- The benefits of XYZ;
- Some statistics of applied XYZ;
- Share some testimonials of people who’ve done XYZ.
Only then introduce yourself – because you’ve now made the session of real interest to them. Keep it super brief.
Once you’ve done this, you have the audience engaged to listen to more – they now know ‘What’s in it for me’.
Only now do you tell them how to do XYZ. Give them the specific details, step by step. Use practical examples and demonstrate where possible. It may be appropriate to get them to practice or to do a role play with another audience member (topic dependent). This is the core of your presentation and will take the largest portion of your presentation time – over half the allocated time. You may ask them as you proceed through the steps questions like: does this make sense? Does everyone get why we do this?
Then do a re-cap of the session: ‘We know that the benefits to XYZ are that……. a/b/c/d, and we now know how to do XYZ.’
Tell them you now want them to imagine that it’s been a month/ 3 months/ 12 months since they started doing XYZ? (You do this 3 x with the different time frames) What are you seeing in your business/ relationships/ work (whichever is appropriate for your audience). What successes are there? What’s the change? (They don’t necessarily answer aloud, it could be internal). If you have been doing this for 3 months, what are you noticing? 12 months?
This is called future pacing – getting them to see the results of XYZ in their situation. When they can ‘see’ this, there are more likely to engage in your XYZ product or service.
This plan is based on the ‘4Mat’ delivery.
Sonja Preston
Dunstan Baby Australia
E: sonja@dunstanbabyaustralia.com.au
