Know your Audience, as a Speaker
9 December 2011
This may sound like an obvious point, but it is the most common mistake new speakers make. How can you attempt to share skills with people you don't know? They may be at a more advanced level than you think, and they think the company is playing a joke on them when you are on stage. If you are a sales guru, you cannot talk about marketing strategies to the cleaning staff.
If your message is partially new age and based on the laws of the universe, the local Christian ladies club won't receive you very well! Got it? No matter who books you, you need to find out as much as you can about the group of people you are speaking to. If you know it's the entire staff of a company, across the floor and they are looking for general inspiration, fine. But, if you specialise in strategic planning and will be speaking to a group of sales reps, you need to know whether they are part of this planning process, or spend most of the time on the road.
Are they MBA students? What is their age group? Younger people may just have completed their studies, are well informed and eager to please. An older group may be more set in their ways and not open to changing their way of thinking. Or it could be completely reversed - the older group may be brilliant futurists with a track record second to non and be lecturing at the local college part time, while the youngsters are still wet behind the ears.
If you get this wrong, your talk can bomb. Beside speaking to the client and finding out as much as you can, do a search on the internet and read up on the company, their history and their vision. This gives you important insight into their corporate mindset. I find it a good idea to get to the function a bit earlier, even the day before. Meet with the delegates and get to know them. This gives me all the insight I need into their current knowledge base, how they think, what they think of their company, etc. This even allows me to personalise my keynote and go that extra mile.
Often you may be the last speaker on the bill. If you can arrive at the venue earlier, sit in on a few internal speaker sessions by the marketing director, financial director, etc. This gives you so much insight into who the company is and where they are heading. 99% of the time you can refer back to what the financial director said and build on points he/she made. Guess who is going to be on your side and give you a good endorsement? Stay away from any humour or issues that can offend someone.
Remember, you only need to offend one person in an audience of a thousand people. This could be the wife of the CEO. No one will talk about the good points you made, but about how you angered the boss' wife! Get my point? Some politician may just have appeared on the front-page headlines of the newspaper for corruption and deserves to be bad mouthed, but for all you know it's the brother of someone in the audience.
The best lesson I ever learnt was in the USA where people are very conscious of this. A comedian friend told me to never tell jokes about a certain group, religion or culture. Rather tell an 'idiot' joke, because no one will complain that they are an idiot! In many respects it seems quite complicated as to what you can and can't say. I always follow the rule of thumb that if anything can be hurtful to anyone in any way stay clear from it. It is way to easy to pick on someone or some group of people and speakers let it slip all to easily. The safest for me is to turn everything on myself. If I am going to criticise someone, or pass a sarcastic comment, I always turn it on myself. Why? We have all done stupid things - use those as examples.
Firstly,
I don't offend anyone.
Secondly,
I come across as more human.
Thirdly,
others can then see those traits in themselves and relate to it. And best of all, it teaches me to laugh at myself too!
