Engaging the ideal audience

- Congratulations, you've earned the right to present. When it's your turn to talk, it's a good idea to begin by considering how you want your ideal client to feel and respond to your presentation. This allows you to consider what to say and how to say it in a way that actually engages your audience. At the point when you're ready to present your ideas to a client, a small but significant change takes place in the room. The roles of listener and speaker are reversed. The client becomes a listener, and you and your team become the primary speakers. Now, as you know from earlier in this process, being a good listener is difficult. It's an active job. While you've been motivated to listen well and to hear what the client is and isn't saying, your client may not be as motivated to listen now that the roles are switched. Clients don't train for this role of listener, so we need to work harder to make listening easier. In anticipating that the client now needs to actively listen, and knowing that listening isn't an easy job, it behooves us to do everything we can to present information in a way that makes it easier for the client to understand, be heard, and perceive value in what we're saying. I like to begin by imagining what an ideal audience would be thinking, doing, or saying while I'm talking. This would indicate that they're engaged and tracking with my presentation. They'd be making eye contact, nodding, maybe taking some notes. They'd be asking intelligent questions and verifying details with me. They'd be thinking to themselves, wow, these guys really know what they're talking about. And they'd be perceiving value as in, I'm beginning to see how this might work for me. Of course, coming into your presentation, you already have two key things going for you. Firstly, since you and your team have chosen to follow a proactive, collaborative approach throughout the client interaction, you've set yourselves up for success. Remember that a big part of your success in presenting is based on how ready and willing your client is to listen to what you have to say. Bravo on the effort that you invested to establish the trust, run a good meeting, listen to their story, distill their stories to suss out their needs and to get them to be on the same page with your insights. Secondly, now that it's your turn to talk, you get to be the expert and you get to speak about things that really reside in your area of expertise. Now's the moment to leverage the goodwill and the trust you built up and organize your presentation to help sustain the high level of attention your client is already teed up to offer. So, those two things are working for you. With this in mind, let's look at how to make the most of your time in the presenter spotlight.