Outlining the Audience Journey

This is my second in the Over-The-Shoulder series, where I look at how I would approach a speaking opportunity. In the first issue we looked at what to speak on. In this issue, we will start outlining the journey.

Now, in my framework, at this point we would be defining your target audience, but I have sort of spread that step between the last issue and this one. But it is important to make sure that you understand your two audiences.

Your Two Audiences

I have talked about the two audiences before, but it never hurts to go over it again.

You have your target audience. These are the people you want to engage and have to take action on what it is you are talking about. If you have a business, your target audience is likely to be the people who might do business with you.

Knowing your target audience is critical for crafting your talk. You need to understand what their problems are and what they want in terms of the problem and solution you offer. Writing a talk without being clear on these things is like trying to map out a journey when you don’t know the starting point or the destination.

But wait a minute, what is the other audience?

The other audience is everyone else in the audience that doesn’t meet the criteria of your target audience. For example, if your target audience is women over 40, then everyone in the audience who is male or under 40 is this second audience, which I call your Viral Audience.

For your target audience, you will have a specific call to action based on your goals. The journey planning we are about to go through will need to give all the information to support that call to action. But things are different for your Viral Audience. The worst thing you can do (which many do) is ignore your Viral Audience.

Ignoring your Viral Audience will make them restless and lose interest. In a live venue, this can significantly impact the feeling in the room, which will impact your Target Audience. This can also impact virtual presentations if attendees can see other’s cameras or chat.

But if you follow my framework, you can turn the Viral Audience into a powerful asset, which is why I refer to them as your Viral Audience, to drive home the fact that you can use a different call-to-action to this audience to help them spread your message or introduce you to their friends and family who meet the criteria of your Target Audience.

For today, though, we will focus on outlining the journey that you will craft for your Target Audience.

Starting point

The first thing you need to determine for any journey is your starting point. In the case of your talk the starting point is how your audience currently sees your topic.

What do they know?

What do they think they know?

What are the common misconceptions?

What competing ideas or solutions are they aware of?

You need to understand where your audience is starting from in order to plan your journey.

End Point

Obviously, when planning a journey, once you know where you are starting out, you need to know your destination. Fortunately, this was covered in the previous issue. Because getting clarity about your strategic objectives will determine what your desired outcome of this particular talk will be.

Sometimes, the outcome of the talk is just to get people to take a small action to reach out, effectively raising their hand to let you know they are interested in knowing more. Sometimes, it is to the other end of the scale where you want the audience to invest in your company or your products or services.

Objection Gates

Now that you are clear about your starting and ending points, you must plan the route. In a journey of ideas, you need to answer your audience's unspoken objections and concerns.

If they had no objections, they would already share your point of view. But if they have a different point of view, which you have hopefully identified, then you will need to list all the things that stand between where they are now and where you want to take them.

Once you have that list, you need to put it in order. Some of those objections will be more pressing than others, and addressing them in order is important. Because if someone has an objection in their head while sitting there, they will be distracted from what you are saying until that objection is addressed.

In the worst case, you could address every other objection and then answer theirs last, and at that point, they might say to you. “Oh, right. That makes sense. Yeah, I can see that. Now, what was all that other stuff you said?” 🤦

Your Outline

So once you have these objections in order, I call them objection gates that you need to take your audience through. It is time to match your stories and anecdotes (which I call chunks) to these objection gates. Some stories may overcome several objections. Focus on overcoming the biggest objections first.

This is the outline of the logical journey of your talk. This journey will support the call to action. But to truly have the impact you want, you need to layer in the emotional journey. We will look at that in the next issue of this series.

Snippets is a section where I take some interesting text I have come across in the previous week and comment on it.

This week’s snippet is a little different I want to share an experience that I had at the Strategic Alliance Summit this past week. I am writing this out partly for myself to remember what we did and how it worked out, but I hope you will see something in the exercise.

Don’t fixate on our idea. As much as I appreciate the process and the exercise that made it happen, this is an exercise that energised the 60+ people who took part in the last part of the last day of three 8-9 hour days.

First, some context. The Strategic Alliance Summit (SAS) is an online virtual summit for entrepreneurs around the globe, with a focus on collaboration and building businesses with one another. It is a great bunch of people. Unlike most summits, you are not just sitting and listening to presentations for the three days of the main event. In fact, you will be engaged in discussions in breakout rooms for the majority of the time, helping solve others' business issues as they help solve yours.

SAS happens three times a year in March, June and November. Each is in a different time zone. I was the only New Zealander this week because it was a central European time zone, so it started at midnight for me and went through until 8 or 9 am (at which time I started my day job). As a result, I missed a couple of hours of the first couple of days because I dropped out as fatigue stopped me from thinking straight. -The first week of June will be in the NZ/Australian time zone, so I look forward to that!!

One of the final challenges of the three days was the big idea. Remember that we have had three days in break-out rooms with many other attendees, so we are no longer entirely strangers. We were broken into 6 groups of around 10 people each. We had 45 minutes to brainstorm a business from scratch. It had only to meet two criteria. Generate $100m in three years or less, and do some good for people or the planet.

Forty-five minutes is not a lot of time! You need to decide on your business quickly and then put it together. Plus, you have the dichotomy of needing some structure to create a business within the time limit yet be flexible and open enough for real creativity to blossom.

Our room leader initially suggested that education around AI would be important for the younger generation and suggested we start there. I interjected that I didn’t think that would be a $100m business unless you owned the platform, and I argued that AI would end up being the course itself in future. In the next 5 years, I expect that most courses will be superseded by people having a dialogue with AI and learning everything they want to know that way.

But I agreed that AI was a mega trend and that we had a real shot if we could create a business that linked two megatrends. So, I suggested linking AI with Climate change. While a bunch of us from North America and Europe threw ideas together, Mona, in Germany, was researching flat out.

Ultimately, we determined that there would be a real market if we could create an AI process for catastrophe modelling and risk assessment to help agricultural insurance companies.

We ascertained that in the USA alone, agricultural claims averaged between $5-10 billion per annum, with 2012 featuring one drought claim that cost $7 billion in claims alone. Our business would be a consultancy model (think McKinsey) called Harvest Hedge Solutions, utilising AI modelling and risk assessment.

While this fit the first part of the brief, it didn’t quite hit the mark of the second part of the brief, which was about improving the world. So, we created a second entity, Terra Protect Alliance, which would use the same modelling to determine the most efficient and effective preventative measures to alleviate agricultural risks and implement them.

The idea was that we would identify and invite 20 agricultural insurance companies to come on board, paying $5 million each. With a commitment, they would pay a further $5m each to the Terra Protect Alliance when they recouped their initial investment in the first three years. They would also get some brand recognition and redemption from being involved with the work the alliance is doing.

The energy in the breakout room was palpable, the time limit was ticking away, and the creativity was turned to full. At the end of the 45 minutes, we returned to the main room, where each team chose a spokesperson to pitch to the group with a 3-minute time limit. The pitches were then voted on to find the winner.

I was chosen to pitch our business. I was nervous, which wasn’t helped by the fact I was first to pitch (and it was now 8am. I had gotten up before midnight to attend this thing). I did an okay job.

Ultimately, we didn’t win.

But it was interesting to see the variety of businesses that were pitched by the 6 teams. And it was certainly an energetic ending to the three-day event. The winning team is moving ahead with their business, and there was talk of combining two of the adjacent business ideas and making that a reality.

At the November SAS, I pitched the winning idea and that business is up and running. Unfortunately, I am not involved in that business as it is specifically US-based.

But I do have a bunch of people from around the world that I need to follow up with to see how we can collaborate in some integrated offerings or do some workshops, etc. so it was time well spent.

If you want to join the June event, put aside Wednesday through Friday for the first week of June and leave a comment. I will have a small number of discounted tickets available. I want to make sure we fill the Oz/NZ Summit with some amazing people so we can show the world what we can do down under!

Unpacking Wisdom is a weekly section where I dive into a famous (or not so famous) quote and explore how this can apply to the Compelling Communicator.

I am not sure I 100% agree with this quote from Wodehouse, although I certainly agree with the main thrust of his premise. If I were to try to interpret this for my implementation, I might adjust the first sentence to “It is a good rule in life never to apologise in words alone.”

I often see people apologising but doing nothing to change their behaviour or the results of their behaviour, which means the apology is nothing more than social convention at best or a salve to their conscience at worst.

The second part remains the same because we know that the right people are not so much interested in the apology but in the change that can remedy the issue. Saying you’re sorry is one thing. Making amends by fixing the problem you have taken responsibility for is another.

The people Wodehouse refers to as the ‘wrong sort’ are those who leap on the apology for more rhetoric, to apportion blame, and to try to leverage your apology in a way that serves their views. They are not interested in what you are doing to remedy your mistake but only in scoring points.

If you can effectively say, I made a mistake, and I am fixing it, you gain the respect of those worthy of respect. Those others will still take a potshot regardless. But their mudslinging comes to nought if you fix or resolve the problem.

What do you think?

Would you interpret this in another way? Let me know in the comments.

What I am up to this week…

Professionally:

I have a bunch of work to catch up with and deadlines to meet exacerbated by last week’s summit. I have also started working with my first client from my Joint Venture with the Canadian publishing business. 😀 

Recreationally:

I am looking forward to a session of D&D with the boys, it has been a few weeks and I am missing it.

What I am reading:

I am listening to an audio book on the Sandler method of selling. Specifically I am looking for elements that translate into speaking from the stage.

What I am watching:

I have started re-watching Ash vs. The Evil Dead. Mindless and fun!