You Ask, I Answer: Customizing Speaking Presentations?

In today's episode, Kathy asks, so you're a subject matter expert, but your audiences, seniority, and industry geography from gig different from gig to gig differ. How do you go about customizing presentations while maintaining your core message? So this one's pretty straightforward. Um customizing a presentation is something that you do to provide value to the audience, right? Um rule of presentations uh is uh an old sales guy tell me this uh back in the early part of the last decade.

You know, the radio in the customer's head is permanently tuned to one station, W I I F M. What's in it for me? So depending on the audience, what's in it for them? If you're doing a talk on, say uh you know, digital photography, uh, what's in it for an audience of artists, what's in it for an audience of plumbers, what's in it for an audience of industrial concrete specialists. If you don't know the answer, you probably shouldn't be on stage, right?

Because the audience cares very much about what's in it for them. So a big part of customizing presentations understanding what the audience is there for, what do they want? And that may mean you have to do a hefty amount of research on their industry to ask what are the problems they face and how does what I'm about to talk about apply to them. I did a talk on um truck driving uh recruiting uh a little while back, and I had to do an actual research project to understand the needs of what it is that recruiters are trying to do. Uh, when I did a healthcare talk, okay, what are the data challenges that you know AI is helping address in healthcare?

So you're gonna spend a lot of time, you should be spending a lot of time researching the audience, the industry, um, the challenges that they have, uh, understanding some of the language, understanding some of the culture, uh, all these things go into speaking. It's one of the reasons why uh public speakers, good ones cost so much, because it's not the hour that you spend on stage, it's the 40, 60, 80 hours you spend up front doing the research. When I was uh talking, um, I did a keynote in Poland. I spent three weeks spending a whole lot of time with uh Duolingo and other things just to get basic ability to uh you know basic customer uh mannerisms and and and and phrases in Polish, so that again I I could I speak Polish fluently absolutely not. Um could I at least do you know basic hellos, goodbyes, and show that I had some level of awareness of the culture?

Uh yes. Um I uh absolutely spent time it was uh presentation on AI. You know, what are the major challenges that that particular part of Poland was facing? It wasn't even all of Poland, it was a particular section called Pomerania. Um what were the challenges that they were having there?

One of their big challenges was business development, trying to attract more businesses to the region. So we talked about uh ways to do that, um, looking at influencers, looking at how to do um network graphing and natural language processing in Polish, because Polish is a the sl it's a Slavic language with a Western language character set, so that presents some real interesting challenges for people who are building natural language models. So you spend a lot of time doing research up front to figure out what is it that this audience desperately needs to hear, and how do the the core techniques or the ideas apply to them? You gotta put yourself in the audience's seat. What's in it for me?

When they're on stage, when they're in the audience listening to you, whether it's in in a room or on on a uh virtual connection, that person's going, What's in this for me? What am I going to get out of this? Um another thing that is, I think so powerful and so underrated is QA. The more QA you include, uh, the more every presentation is customized to exactly that specific audience because you can give some ideas and people will say, Well, I don't understand how this idea applies to me. And that's when uh as my uh my friend uh Gary Vaynerchuk says, that's when you separate the adults from the children.

Because if you are up there giving a canned talk, you know, you're on the 50-minute webinar, it's pre-recorded, you just go you push the play button, and then you're done. Um you've given no time to the audience for QA, and they don't necessarily have got uh know how to apply your message, especially if your message is in any way, shape, or form, even slightly technical, right? Even slightly detailed in terms of techniques. Now, if it's just you know motivational stories like, hey, I bicycled to to the North Pole, right? And and you know what a great challenge it was.

There's fewer questions the audience is gonna have about that type of talk, but if you were doing any kind of typical marketing or business talk, um, there should be QA. If there isn't, you might not have done such a good job because people don't know how to ask more questions to apply what you said to them. I personally see it as a failure of mine. If I give a talk and there isn't QA. If there aren't a whole bunch of hands up, uh, or a little hand-blinking things in in Zoom when I've talked, right?

Because it means that I probably went way over people's heads and they're like, eh, I don't I don't get it. So QA. What's the right balance? I would say up anywhere from a third to a half of the time you've been allotted for QA. So deliver the make the big idea uh in 20 minutes, right?

If you can deliver the big idea in 20 minutes, this by the way, actually really helps with uh what uh my friend Tamson Webster calls fire hosing, where you just pour a whole bunch of data on someone's head. Um because in 20 minutes you really only have time for one big idea or one big concept, and then the remaining 20, 25, 35, 40 minutes left for QA. People can ask, how do I do this? How do I apply this? What's in this for me?

Where do I find this? Um, do you know people who can help me with this? All the questions that are valued based questions, that's when the audience is going to come out and say, I need to know how to do this. Um, I need to know how to implement this. And when you do QA, that presentation is as a whole completely unique.

Because yes, I mean you'll always get the the a few of the same questions, and maybe if if you keep getting those questions, it's a sign that your talk needs to be adapted to answer those questions implicitly. Um after that, every talk is custom to the people who are in that room. It's not even what industry you're in, it's to the people who are in that room that day that had those questions that you were able to answer. Leave a ton of time for QA. Leave a ton of time for it.

Let people ask their questions, and you will never have trouble customizing. If anything, uh, you'll have the opposite problem. You will uh you the audience may go down some rat holes that you may or may not want to go down because it does it's not relevant. Uh I remember giving a talk on uh applications of AI for marketing, and there were a few questions on you know the the implications of a in a political and legal and societal context. And I answered them at a surface level, but like, look, that's not necessarily the focus of this presentation.

The focus was on the applications for marketing. Yes, absolutely there are legal uh and moral implications. Um but that's a separate talk. That's a separate talk entirely. Sometimes that's okay.

If the audience is like if someone asks a question, everybody leans forward, like, oh, okay. Um, you know, if you're on Zoom and suddenly like every head comes up and everyone's watching all of a sudden, like, okay, I we're gonna spend some time on this. But again, that's a sign of a really engaged customized uh talk that everyone is paying attention raptly to figure out what it is you're about to say. So customization of the talk, adapt your ideas by spending a crap ton of time up front doing the research that you need to do to make a really good custom talk for that audience, and then let the QA run as long as you have uh the ability to do so, leave a ton of time for it so that you can demonstrate your actual subject matter expertise by answering quite specific questions people have. Speaking of which, if you have questions about this video, leave them in the comments box below.

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