EYN#036 - It's Not About You: Focus On Them And Raise Your Impact

When you present I bet you want to talk about your perspective. "I recommend this", "My company can do this", "This is my demo", "Let me share my story". We're all tempted.

Presenters are too quick to share their "ME" message rather focusing on helping their audience. But that "ME" message is irrelevant, forgettable and low impact.

It's not about you! It's about them. Your audience.

The most important part of any presentation is the audience. The people giving their non-refundable time to listen to you.

So if you want to raise your impact with stakeholders, persuade effectively and influence effectively, you need to get audience centric. You can be more influential, memorable and successful.

How To Be More Audience Centric

Move from:

• This is what we do.
• This is how it works.
• Bye

To:

• This pain exists for you.
• This is how the world could be.
• This is how you get there.

Empathy

To be relevant to your audience you need to understand who's is in your audience. You need to understand what's important to them and how you can actually help them.

Research the answer for these questions for each persona you need to influence:

• What pain are they are facing?
• What does success look like for them?
• How can you help them move from pain to success?

These answers will be different for each persona. Which means your presentation will be different for different personas. Take the perspective of your audience and then use that perspective to create and tailor relevant content.

Clarity

Create content that articulates the pain they face. Think how can you bring those problems to life? Think how can you create an emotional connection with your audience by empathising with their pain.

Then describe what the world could be like. Share stories of people that have reached similar destinations. Create hope for your audience that it's possible.

Then describe the process to the relevant level of depth for your audience. Make the complex simple and make it relevant.

Evolve Your Messaging

You're a better person than me if you nail your message first go to every audience. So get feedback on your messaging and constantly evolve.

Just this week I was working with a customer to help them create some customer facing videos. Our first draft script covered the customer pain enough at the beginning of the video. But some quick feedback from their customer account team highlighted we needed more depth and substance on the pain. A few quick changes, the video script updated and we had raised the relevance impact.

So don't worry that you need to perfect straight away.

There we go. Remember, it's not about YOU, it's about THEM.

Hope this helps

Ben