No matter how much effort you put into preparing a presenation, if you fail to focus on the needs of your audience, your presentation will not achieve anything and the audience will leave your talk dissatisfied. If the audience do nothing differently as a result of listening to you, why bother to put yourself through all the stress of delivering your presentation?

In my 20 years of training people in presentation skills, the most common mistake made by presenters is not thinking through properly what they want their presentation to achieve.

Before you even start to think about writing down what you want to say, you need to consider the following three elements to effectively focus your talk on the needs of your audience.

Objective

All talks have a purpose, there's a reason for giving it, there's something to achieve...but unfortunately, not many presenters consider this fully. They tend to be more concerned with what they are going to say, rather than what they want to achieve.

Think through your objective carefully and think in terms of 'final objectives'. What do I mean by 'final objectives'? A good example is a marketing talk. If you ask most people what the objective of a marketing seminar is, they will say something like that it is to make people generally aware of their product. If you think about this, no one ever got rich by making people aware of their product. You get rich by selling the product. Your shallow objective may to be to make people aware but your real final objective is to get them to buy your goods. May sound obvious but identifying the right objective changes what you say and how you say it.

Good presentations always have a strong objective. It's the thing that drives the rest of the process. Use very positive language when thinking about your objective. Don't say, 'I'd like to make my audience aware of my product', say instead, 'by the time I've finished my talk, these people will have no doubt that my product is the best on the market and they won't be able to resist buying it'.

Audience

How are we going to achieve that objective with this audience?

What do we need to consider here? Potentially lots of things. For example, what is their level of knowledge of our subject? Do they know a lot or a little? How do they feel about the subject? Are they for me or against me? Have they a mind-set that it will be boring? How am I going to cope with that? What's their seniority? Are they senior staff, junior staff or mixed? How old are they...what are their prejudices...what strategy will hit the right buttons?

The list is endless but if you just ask yourself the question, 'who are my audience...what do I need to know about them in order to achieve my objective', then you'll come up with the list of things you need to know in those circumstances. The important thing is to ask yourself the question. Put yourself in your audience's shoes. See the world through their eyes.

Quite often, thinking about your objective and audience are things you can do whilst driving the car or standing in the shower, they don't always take time out of the working day. The thing to do is to think about them because it is only by doing this that you will do a successful talk that achieves something.

Material

Don't subject your audience to information overload. The gut reaction of thoughtless presenters is to cram their talks with far too much information. They endeavour to protect themselves with too much content. They cram 90 minutes of material into a 15-minute talk. They survive!

Get your material together however you want and then go straight back to your objective and your audience and hack the superfluous stuff out of there! Only include in your talk what you need to achieve your objective. Including unnecessary material will only cloud your objective; it will surround it with a fog and make it difficult for your audience to see it.

If it's a selling presentation, talk benefits not features. Make it customer focused not product focused. Don't list the features of your company or product without then making it clear why that feature will be of benefit to the customer. 'We have 50 offices spread throughout the UK (feature)...which means that we can provide you with a local service (benefit).

In fact, put all of your material through the 'So What?' test. Imagine you are a member of your audience and 'listen' to your talk. If you could say 'So What?' to anything you say, then cut it out or say it differently.

Check your material for abstractions. 'We have developed a methodology to highlight the risks in your processes and to increase the usability of customer focussed information from a strategic point of view.' I beg your pardon! Say what you mean...use examples if the words don't make it crystal clear what you are talking about.

By starting with a strong 'terminal' objective, seeing your talk from your audience's perspective and then only talking about what you want the audience to do and explaining why they should do it, you have constructed the foundations for a successful talk that actually achieves something.