Audiences: The Basic Rule

Of all the points that make up getting your message across, probably the most important is audience. This is simply because if you don’t know who you are trying to reach, how can you know what you want to tell them?

Telling your best friend you deserve a pay rise feels good, but telling it to you boss would be more effective. That said, your best friend will probably accept at face value your statement, so your message is short and sweet (if rather useless). Your boss, on the other hand, may want you to provide some valid reasons.

Whenever you want to put forth a message you must decide what audience it will be for, otherwise you are wasting your time. This seems like an obvious point, but in fact people forget it all the time.

I recently worked with a manager of the consulting arm of a technology company to plan a message for the sales force. When I asked him how his consulting differed from normal pre-sales activities (determining customer needs, configuring the solution to propose, etc), he replied “because the sales people get commissioned on it.” I pointed out to him that the sales person would need a better argument than that in front of the customer. “Buy this service rather than that free one because I get paid for it” is unlikely to meet with much success!

Aiming at the immediate audience rather than the ultimate audience, as this manager had done, is a very common mistake. It is easy to say “I am talking to sales people so I'll tell them what is in it for them: money.” That is fine as far as it goes. But it doesn’t follow the basic rule of audiences:

Put yourself in the audience’s shoes

What do they know? What technical level do they have? What objections are they likely to have? And most importantly, what does your audience really care about?

For the consulting manager, putting himself in the position of the sales people might lead to an internal dialog something like this:

Speaker: “Sell my consulting rather than free pre-sales because you earn big commissions!”
Sales person’s thoughts: “Don’t be ridiculous, why would the customer buy something he can get for free? You’ve obviously never sold anything.”

Game over. Message did not get through.

Let’s try again.

Speaker: “The consulting we are talking about will provide the customer with a detailed evaluation of his current situation, an analysis of his future plans, a variety of options for getting from here to there. It goes far beyond simple pre-sales configurations. And my staff can help you explain all this in front of the customer.”
Sales person’s thoughts: “Now that is something my customer needs. I can use the consulting staff to help sell it so I won’t embarrass myself. And I’ll get commissioned on it!”

Bottom line: Package your message so it responds to what your audience cares about, and so it overcomes any objections even before they come to mind.