We're too often getting lost in the technology. Business execs are looking for presentations, demos and ideas that are in tune with them, speak to business or customer benefits and are brought to life in visual and exciting ways.
What they're not looking for is technology specific naming, phrases or an excess of jargon. When a CMO is talking to a CMO, there is some language that they both understand. However, if you're presenting to a multi-disciplinary executive team, they only share business language. Sure, they might all understand at a high level what attribution means, but they won't all understand what you mean when you start talking about Google Analytics custom dimensions. You'll immediately start losing significant parts of the room.
All presentations need to be built from the audience up. Everything from the number of slides, details on each slide, whether there are slides at all, how interactive the session must be, the people in the room, people presenting, meeting length, the lot: it all must be based on the audience.
There is one thing that, as a consulting partner helping businesses with technology, is always true: the people in the room will know their business and industry more than we do, especially at exec level. It's our job to allow that knowledge to flourish and meet our technical, platform and industry knowledge to make business outcomes together. The longer the relationship, the better each side understands each other, and the easier it is to vibe and create these outcomes. The closer to the start we are, the more we need to lean in to be curious, understand their organisation.
So, before we go sounding off AI this, revenue cloud that, take a beat (or ten) to understand your audience. Two ears, one mouth: for a reason.
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