Profile an audience and shape your talk around what they need.
Take the core message you wrote in Lesson 1.1, "Say one thing your audience will remember". Before you build a single slide, write plain answers to four questions about the people who will hear it: who is in the room, what they already know, what worries them, and what you want them to do. Those written answers are your audience profile. You need one because the same core message lands differently depending on who hears it. A talk written without a profile usually follows the order in which you did the work, and your listeners may need a different order.
Wei Ling runs operations for a logistics company with warehouses in Tuas and Johor (an invented example). 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 well. She has the training records, the cost of trainers' time, and results from a pilot with eight new hires. Her first draft opened with the history of the training programme, went through the pilot week by week, and ended with a table of module completion rates. It was accurate, but she had written it for herself.
Who is in the room? Get names if you can, and roles if you can't. Note who chairs the meeting and how they behave, such as who usually speaks last. Wei Ling's room has five people: the managing director, who chairs and usually speaks last, the finance head, two warehouse managers and one person from HR. None of them needed the history of the programme.
What do they already know? The answer tells you what to skip and what to explain. 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.
What worries them? People often leave this question out, and it often decides the outcome. Each worry is an objection you either deal with during the talk or face in the Q&A. Wei Ling's first guesses were these: the warehouse managers fear that hires trained on a screen will be unsafe on the floor, finance fears a new software bill, and HR worries about staff who are not comfortable with online learning.
What do you want them to do? The answer has to be a concrete action, something a person can actually do. "Understand the proposal" does not count. Approving a six-month trial at the Tuas site, releasing a budget, or changing a process from next month all count. If you cannot name the action, go back to your core message from Lesson 1.1, because it probably has no claim in it yet. Put a claim into it, then name the action again.
Most rooms have one person whose decision matters most and one person who knows the subject best, and they are rarely the same person. Call them the decider and the expert. A common mistake is to pitch the talk at the expert. The level of the talk should follow the person who has to say yes.
In Wei Ling's room the expert is the warehouse manager who built the current programme, and the decision belongs to the managing director. If she pitched at the expert, she would spend ten minutes on module design while the managing director stopped following. Pitching at the managing director means covering the problem, the result, the cost and the risk, and leaving the technical detail for anyone who asks.
You still need to speak to the expert. Deal with their worry, and show them that the detail exists and that you have done the work behind it.
Many talks in Singapore workplaces have mixed rooms: senior and junior staff, technical and commercial people, and colleagues in the room alongside others dialling in from a regional office. You can't pitch one talk at every level at once, so build it in layers. The spoken talk carries the headline layer: the message, the few points that support it, and the action. The detail sits one layer down, where people can reach it if they want it without it getting in the way of the talk. You can hold the detail in any of these:
a few backup slides you show only if someone asks an appendix at the end of the deck a short written handout sent before or after the talk
Module 4, lesson 4.4, "Your slide deck is not your handout", covers handouts properly.
Wei Ling gives the managing director 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 and an offer to walk them through the module content separately.
Answers written at your desk are partly guesses. The fastest check is to ask someone who will be in the room, or the person who organised the session. Keep the question short and specific, for example: "Before Thursday's meeting, what's the one thing you'd want me to cover about the training proposal?". People usually answer honestly because they like being asked. If you're speaking at an event, the organiser can tell you who registered, what the last speaker covered, and what the audience complained about last time.
Asking can show that the real worry is different from the one you guessed. Wei Ling messaged one of the warehouse managers. He said his real concern was the first week, when new hires shadow experienced staff, and safety was not the issue for him. He wanted to know whether online training would replace that week of shadowing. It would not, so that point moved from a footnote to her second slide.
Once your four answers are written down, reread your core message and revise it. 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 two-week figure comes from her own pilot. The new sentence answers the managing director's question and the warehouse managers' worry at the same time, and a good revised core message should do both 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.
Fill in the four-question audience profile for your next talk. Then ask one person likely to attend what they most want from it.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).