Who I Am = What You Say
How much of what you say do you think your audience listens to?
- I’m a user experience designer. I’m going to notice that you never mention user testing or user feedback as you talk about your product redesign.
- I’m a business development stakeholder. The longer you wait to put ROI numbers behind those impressive-sounding features you’re talking about, the more suspicious I will become.
- I’m an operations engineer. I’m going to hear that one offhand comment about “having to do some refactoring to improve performance” when you talk about your roadmap.
- I’m a product manager. I’m going to see that bullet point about expected marketplace adoption and wonder how the heck you’re going to do that since you don’t seem to have a plan.
- I’m an investor. I see those inflated Forrester “market cap in 2010″ projections all the time, I don’t take them seriously, and I wonder how you can say them to me with a straight face.
When you’re presenting to prospects or customers, it’s not about what you want to say. It’s about what your audience needs to hear.
Everyone in the room is waiting for a cue – something that will let them know, will this person (and product) make my job easier or harder. If you can pre-empt peoples’ concerns, they’re a lot more likely to relax and actually listen to the rest of what you have to say.
(Don’t know what worries engineers, or marketers, or QA testers? Take some out to lunch and find out. Don’t know who the stakeholders are at your prospect or customer company? Shame on you – you haven’t been on good enough terms with your salesperson, have you?)
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Tags: audience, Communication, Presenting
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November 12th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
Great advice, Cindy!
I try and remember to apply the “so what” filter. I imagine the audience of my presentation, conversation, or document absorbing my message and saying “so what?” I wrote a couple tips a couple years ago about the “so what?” filter. http://tynerblain.com/blog/2006/04/03/targeted-communication-three-tips/. I think a quick scan of that article would compliment what you’ve written here.
December 2nd, 2008 at 7:20 am
Good points! As a product manager, I find that we also do a lot of translating–translating high concepts into specific features and requirements for engineering; translating functionality into concrete end-user benefits for marketing; and translating market needs while using resources–and imagination!–to stay a few steps ahead of the target market so you aren’t creating products that are out of date by the time they launch. In addition to talking about what your audience thinks is important, it’s critical to communicate that information in a language that they understand. And never underestimate the importance of being concise, clear, and brief!
December 2nd, 2008 at 11:17 am
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