You will be able to profile an audience and shape a talk around what they need.
Wei Ling runs operations for a logistics company with warehouses in Tuas and Johor. She has fifteen minutes at next month's management meeting to argue that new warehouse hires should do most of their training online. She knows the subject inside out. She has the training records, the cost of the trainers' time and a pilot she ran with eight new hires.
Her first draft opened with the history of the training programme, walked through the pilot week by week and ended with a table of module completion rates. It was accurate and it was built for herself. The people in that room would be the managing director, the finance head, two warehouse managers and someone from HR, and none of them needed the history.
Lesson 1.1, Say one thing your audience will remember, gave you a core message. This lesson is about the people who will hear it, because the same message lands differently depending on who is sitting there.
Before you write a slide, answer four questions in plain sentences.
Who is in the room? Names if you can get them, roles if you cannot. Wei Ling wrote down the five people above and added that the managing director chairs the meeting and usually speaks last.
What do they already know? The warehouse managers know the current training well, because their supervisors deliver it. The managing director knows it exists and roughly what it costs. The finance head knows the cost line and nothing about the content. This tells you what to skip and what to explain.
What worries them? This is the question people leave out, and it is often the one that decides the outcome. The warehouse managers worry that new hires trained on a screen will be unsafe on the floor. Finance worries about a new software bill. HR worries about staff who are not comfortable with online learning. Each worry is an objection you can meet inside the talk, or one that will meet you in the Q&A.
What do you want them to do? Not "understand the proposal". Something a person can do: approve a six-month trial at the Tuas site, release a budget, change a process from next month. If you cannot name the action, go back to your core message, because it probably has no claim in it yet.
Most rooms contain one person whose decision matters most and one person who knows the subject best. They are rarely the same person, and the mistake is to pitch the talk at the expert.
In Wei Ling's room, the expert on training is the warehouse manager who built the current programme. The decision sits with the managing director. If Wei Ling pitches at the expert, she spends ten minutes on module design and the managing director stops following. If she pitches at the decider, she covers the problem, the pilot result, the cost and the risk, and leaves the module design for anyone who asks.
The expert does not get ignored. You speak to their worry, and you show that the detail exists and that you have done the work. But the level of the talk follows the person who has to say yes.
Many talks in Singapore workplaces have a mixed room: senior and junior, technical and commercial, people in the room and people dialling in from the regional office. One talk cannot be pitched at every level at once, so build it in layers.
The spoken talk carries the headline: the message, the few points that support it, and the action. The detail sits one layer down, available but not in the way. That might be a handful of backup slides you only show if asked, an appendix at the end of the deck, or a short written handout sent before or after. Module 4 covers handouts properly in lesson 4.4, Your slide deck is not your handout.
For Wei Ling, the layers work out like this. The managing director gets the headline and the ask. Finance gets a cost comparison on one slide, with the workings in the handout. The warehouse managers get a slide on safety checks, plus an offer to walk them through the module content separately.
You can answer the four questions from your desk, but your answers will be partly guesses. The fastest way to check them is to ask someone who will be in the room, or the person who organised the session.
Keep it short and specific. A message such as "I'm presenting the training proposal at Thursday's meeting. What would you most want to hear from it?" usually gets an honest answer, because people like being asked. If you are speaking at an event, the organiser can tell you who registered, what the last speaker covered and what the audience complained about last time.
When Wei Ling messaged one of the warehouse managers, he replied that his real concern was not safety but the first week, when new hires shadow experienced staff. He wanted to know whether online training would replace that. It would not, and that one line moved from a footnote to her second slide.
Once the four answers are written down, read your core message again. Wei Ling's started as "online training would make onboarding more efficient". After the profile it became "an online trial at Tuas would get new hires productive two weeks sooner at no extra cost, without cutting floor shadowing". The pilot figures behind it are her own, and the new version answers the decider's question and the warehouse managers' worry in one sentence.
In the activity below you will write the same four-question profile for your own next talk, then test one of your guesses by asking someone who will be listening.
Complete a four-question audience profile for your next talk and ask one likely attendee what they most want from it.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).