By: Bill Rosenthal

Some time ago, I wrote a post on audience analysis.

Shared: From your friends #*@TechAutoCareers.com®* the online resource for the *Automotive Sales Fraternity™*

It was a fairly detailed post, with suggestions on how to research your audience and guidance on what you need to know about them. I suggested that before you prepare your presentation, you learn your audience's:

• Age
• Level of subject matter knowledge
• Sophistication
• Education
• Demographics
• Cultural orientation
• Profession
• Job function

Everything I wrote in that post is true, and spending prep time on understanding your audience will always pay off. But I didn’t mention a crucial final step in audience analysis, which is to mingle with them. Show up early for your presentation, greet the audience members as they arrive, make friends, and spend time chatting with them.

It is always beneficial to make new friends, but making friends with audience members also has particular benefits for the effectiveness of your presentation.

1. Reduces nervousness.

If you have friends in the audience, you have support, and that support can be worth a lot. For one thing, they will be less intimidating than an audience of strangers would be. This should help you manage stage fright because you will be less nervous about speaking to them. You’ll give a much more relaxed presentation to a group of friends than to a group of strangers, and a relaxed presentation is a more engaging presentation.

2. Enhances audience respect.

Standup comedians will tell you they are almost never heckled by their friends. By meeting members of the audience, you become a human being rather than “our speaker for today.” This makes you “one of us,” and the audience will naturally feel more benevolent toward you.

3. Gains names and information.

Chatting with people will provide you with their names as well as facts that could be useful in the presentation. Dropping the names of audience members during your presentation increases your connection with both the members whose names you drop and anyone who is connected to them. It can also help your credibility to be able to say something like, “Joe, you mentioned before we started that you have a problem with turnover.”

4. Makes for a more tailored presentation.

You researched the audience during the prep phase of the presentation so you could ensure your presentation meets their needs. You can often learn more about those needs when you meet them personally. Then you can adjust the presentation “on the fly” to focus even more directly on those needs, which is bound to increase your presentation’s effectiveness.

5. Provides a welcome distraction.

What do we all do just before giving a presentation? We obsess about it. Sitting in a corner looking scared and talking to yourself is not a good use of your pre-presentation time and is unlikely to gain the support of the audience. Use the time before your presentation getting to know as many members of the audience as you can, and you will give yourself a goal that distracts you from the task ahead. This can help to relax you, but more importantly, it will keep you from imagining all the ways in which the presentation can go wrong.

In other words, begin your audience analysis with research and complete it with personal meetings. To learn more about audience analysis, consider Executive Presentation Skills®.

I wanted to take a minute and THANK all the people that comment, like, and share my posts daily. I appreciate you all! From; TechAutoCareers.com® the online resource for the Automotive Sales Consultant™ "We aim to be the definitive single point of reference on the web for Automotive Sales Training"

P S. Now it's your turn. What do you think? Is this something you can benefit from or do you have a few tricks up your sleeve that are just as powerful? Make your voice heard by leaving a comment below. Don’t forget to hit the share button if you know others who will find this post useful.

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