Why You're Losing Your Audience (And How to Fix It)

In order to be better at presenting or selling any type of thing, whether you're pitching to a team or a team of investors, then you want these three things. You want greater audience interest, greater speako ethos for yourself and a more receptive audience. And the only way to get there is to know the audience. So step one, if you're new to this series, it's pitch, a 10-p part series on how to sell anything to anyone. And step one was know thyself. It was know who you are and what your edge is. Now, step two is to know the audience. Before the pitch, during the pitch, your audience has the most leverage because they have options. And your goal is to take an audience with options to only one option, and that's you. But in order to get there, you have to have strategy. The best speakers, the people who crush it, they're not thinking about themselves. They're thinking about themselves less. They're thinking about what does the audience want to hear. So, we are going to walk through this part. Last time we talked about the speaker on the rhetorical triangle, aka we call it getting to know Sam, but this time we're going to talk about the audience. The audience is what people say the biggest part of the equation for any communication situation. And sometimes you may even have multiple audiences. If you're a CEO, then more than likely you're not only pitching to stakeholders, but you're also pitching to your employees. You're pitching to investors. You are pitching to community members. You are pitching to customers. There are many different audiences. So, your ability to not only know an audience, but also know several audiences and speak to them all at once, but differently is going to set you apart. Overall, what we believe is that great communication creates great outcomes. If you can invest in your communication and you pair that with your mastery, you pair that with your role and your leadership, then you are going to be better. You're going to have better outcomes. You're going to see more rewards. So, I'm going to give a shout out up top to Stephen Clean. He's a director of undergraduate studies at Missou. And Missou just beat us down. Missou just played KU in football. And I live in Lawrence and I work for KU. So whenever we got beat down, I was like, "Dang, that's my employer." So I took it really hard, but they beat us down. But over in Missou, the director of undergraduate studies and communication, he answered the same question, too. And he said, "How do you analyze an audience?" So a lot of this I took from him, but I also took from this guy right here. His name is Kenneth Burke. And think back in the day, this is a old philosopher, but he also thought a lot about words. He's seen as one of the rhetoricians, the people who study rhetoric, analyzing effective means of persuasion. We think back often to Aristotle. But there are also people who less than 2400 years ago, a lot more modern, also answering these questions. And what Kenneth Burke said was that everybody has this thing called substance. And substance is a mixture of knowledge or experience, stories, beliefs, values. And your goal as a speaker, and here's the audience, both of this substance. Your goal is to be right here. And it's what we call substantiality. And that's where you are one with the audience. So you are getting to know your audience so well that it doesn't seem weird. Rather, it seems natural to them. and they will accept you as a speaker. They will be more likely to believe what you're saying, act on what you're telling them to do and to buy into for this setting a pitch because a pitch is deliberative rhetoric, right? We're telling them different stories. Now, how are we going to do it? We are going to do it by reading the room. Last week, we talked about a different acronym and that was case. That was building the case for why you. And if you remember, if you don't, you can always go down below. I'll put a link to that first one in the description. But the C was credibility, the A was alignment, the S was your stories, and the E was your edge. Now, read is a little different, but it's similar because it's four different letters. And if you can remember these in order then you're going to do a lot better whenever you are pitching because the first part the first component of read is being able to know the role in particular knowing the decision makers. Who are the decision makers in the room? Are is everybody making a decision? More than likely the answer is no. And decision makers are going to have different values. They're going to make decisions differently. There's going to be some people who are based completely on numbers and some people who are based completely on trust. So you need to know who the individuals are who are actually making those decisions. What's the role? Oftentimes we pitch to a room full of people, but really we're only pitching to one or two people. I'm going to take a minute away from the whiteboard. If you are growing a business and you have an opportunity to pitch to investors, to clients, or partners, then you need to know what you're doing. So, down below I have my 10-step guide of how everything works in my head and a method you can use to approach every pitch to feel a lot better about it. That's what this series is about. But if you want it in writing, if you want to be able to download it, you could even upload it to AI and say, "Hey, help me walk through my pitch." I mean, I can work with you to walk through it even better. AI is average, but it's better than nothing. But you can use it. So, download it in the link below my guide to how you can sell anything to anyone. Okay, back to the video. A good way to think about this is everyone in the room could have influence, but not everybody's going to make the decision. So, who are the decision makers in the room? The second part is expectations. Everybody more than likely has been sold to. We know the pitch. It may be the commission breath pitch where you can tell people just want to sell to us not because they have our best interest in mind, but because they have their best interest in mind. And when we know that, then we need to do everything we can to divert from their expectations. In communication theory, we would call this expectation violation theory where we violate their expectations. In doing so, they pay more attention. Another way to look at this is audience exposure. How much has your audience been exposed to the certain topic? Are they super credible? Are they experts? Do they really know what you're talking about? If so, then you're going to approach it differently. Similarly, how often has your audience gotten this pitch? Have they gotten it a ton? If so, then you're going to want to deviate with a little bit of your own flare, a little bit of your own spice to make sure that it's more credible, but also to make sure that they're listening. So, who's the decision makers? What are their expectations? And then what are the aversions you're walking into? Aversions could also be seen as objections, but really this idea of what's the potential no. What are all of the potential nos? No, I can't do it because of this. No, I can't do it because of that. This is the preparation and strategy part. When I'm working with teams, oftent times we're doing a Q&A. We're answering these softballs. Boom. Over and over again. What are the questions? What could we say to them? How could we turn them in a way to where we are answering the question, we're not ducking the question, but we're also answering it in a way to where it comes back to the case that we're building to our credibility, our alignment, our stories, and our edge. But what are the aversions? And good ways to think about this honestly is using something like Claude or Chat GPT. I was recording a master class recently and one of the tips I was given was go to Claude, type in the master class you're recording, type in who the target clientele are and then ask Claude what are 10 beliefs that would prevent someone from purchasing the product that I was promoting in my master class. Then it gives you 10 beliefs and doing that your job is to go through address those beliefs so that they're no longer aversions. Aversions aren't only objections though. Aversions may also be someone's in a different part of the area than you are. For instance, if you are pitching something and they're not used to it at all and honestly they're not people who are adaptable to new experiences, that's aversions. Personality types are aversions. Having being having been burned in the past is an aversion. So, our goal is to be able to think through what are these aversions. And then lastly, one of my favorite things, but it's getting to know the desire of the audience. People make decisions on three things. One, they make decisions on things that have happened in the past that they've learned from. Two, they make decisions on values they have currently. Values that guide the decisions they make. Values are really cool. Values will determine your path for you. As soon as you pick a value, that's going to close some things down and open some things up. But we make decisions based off mistakes in the past, current values, and then future visions. If we have a vision, if we want to become someone, if we have a dream to become something, that's going to determine the decisions we make. If you have a dream to become an NBA player, then you're going to make certain decisions. That's someone who has a dream to become a Twitch streamer is not going to make. The Twitch streamer is not working on their vertical. Meanwhile, the NBA player is not trying to get better at talking to a camera. they're working in the gym. What are the dreams of the audience? Typically, you can tell this. For instance, if I put on a podcast and it's titled, "How to grow your business with a podcast." More than likely, they have a dream of taking the business they currently have and growing it in a way that doesn't require a whole bunch of effort or attention from them, but gives them outsized returns with something that's kind of fun, a podcast. And also, not only long-term, but short term, what's the desire of the room? Does your audience want recognition? If so, then you go in there and you're able to say, "I understand what you all are dealing with, and I see the business opportunity, and here are the ways that we can do it." And they say, "Thank you. Someone else is there." Do they just want a quick win? Do you want to show up and tell them, "Hey, this is something you don't want to lose out on. Here's the math. I'm showing you all of my work, and you can get a quick win if we partner together." Do they just want safety? Do they want to know that you are not being too crazy, not being too pie in the sky? If so, then you emphasize here, here's my calculated method. Here's how it's worked in the past. Here's why it's not too aggressive. And it builds returns that we can then build upon, get compound interest. There are different ways to do it, but what's the short-term desire that your audience has? Do they want recognition? Do they want safety? Do they want a quick win? Do they just want to throw everything out and completely try something new? If so, then you're going to want to have a bit more revolutionary rhetoric, right? Let's get beyond what we've tried in the past. It's time to completely flip the script, blank canvas, tab, laorasa, and try something new that would excite them. What's your audience's desire? Who's the decision maker in the room? Once you know the decision maker, you are writing their names down and you are writing what makes them make decisions. What are the driving forces with their decision-m? What's the audience expectations? Have they sat through pitches like this? Are they pitched too often? Do we already know that there's a general rub of uh I don't like this or I don't like that? What are their aversions? What could be their fears? What could go really wrong that we need to address? And then what are the natural desires of your audience in the short term, but also in the long term, you can speak to all of this. So imagine not only are you a credible person who's aligned with them and their values, who also has great stories to share, and you've answered the question, why me and not anybody else? And then you show up with this work. You've already analyzed the audience. You know why they make the decisions they make and who makes the decisions. You know what's happened to them in the past and how to deviate from those expectations so that they're more openminded and their ears are open. You also know what aversions they have and how you can address them throughout your pitch. And then you know their desire and how you could use the pitch to make them excited about the future but also make them feel heard and make them feel one solidarity. And then we get right here consubstantiality. We are one substance. Audience, speaker, let's make them one. That's what makes a great pitch. If you do this, I promise you, just take 10, 15, 20 minutes working on reading the room. You will have the best pitch in your life. And what's great about this is the work that you put into one pitch is going to carry over and compound to the next pitch. The next pitch, you're going to show up and it's going to be easier. the third pitch, the fourth pitch, the fifth pitch. Before you know it, it's this is great that you're getting all of these pitches. You are going to be better than you ever were. And it's all about great communications creates great outcomes. Episode three, the next s next episode of this series right here is going to be all about now that we know who we are and we know who our audience is. How to truly understand what the mission is at hand and how to start crafting our messaging. This is the stuff people love. How do we make it sound right and how do we make it land? All right, remember life is better when you talk to people. Subscribe to the channel if you haven't already. And um I'll see you next time.