The difference between good and great speakers: 2 It's all about the audience

I listened to a presentation this week that was the result of a lot of work. As the presentation I attended was the fifth time it had been given, there was even evidence of practice, my first difference between the good and the great. But it was still awful.

The problem was simple. The presenters were keen to show us how much they knew.

They needn't have bothered. We were there because we respected their expertise. We didn't want to know how much they knew. We wanted to know something new, something that we didn't already know.

A presentation is a bridge between where the audience is now and where they want to be.

The presentation that I attended was about a new software application that the presenters had developed. Nothing magnificent. If you can imagine an Excel Spreadsheet where you put in values on the first page and the last page gives you calculated results then you are not far off the mark.

It was a complex design, but the people who have to use it do not need to know that. What they needed was how to put in the data, and how to get out the analysis.

This is the second big difference between good presenters and great ones.

The great ones never lose sight of the audience and what they want to know. The ordinary ones are focused on getting all of the content out there.

I saw this once when a speaker with a very interesting topic came prepared with 200 slides for a one hour session. This needn't be too many, unless you show them all.

What she did was work through the first four of five slides to get a discussion going, then when a question was raised she would divert to another section of her slide show and use that part to explain.

She had lots of information, and there was no way we could have absorbed it all. But by deftly moving between sections, at the audience's prompt, she made sure that we walked out knowing a lot more than we walked in.

Where is your focus - the content or the audience?