Adapt your speech to the audience

Introduction

Starting an entrepreneurial project means entering a thousand battles. One of them is communication. Whether to attract the attention of investors, potential partners or even the press, entrepreneurs are often faced with the challenge of having to briefly present their project.

And the first mistake to avoid is to use the same prepared speech on all occasions, it is very important to adapt your speech to the audience you are addressing on each occasion, although the basis of the speech is the same, we will not use the same approach to speak with a investor, than to present the company to a potential partner, or even to present yourself to a jury for a business award. Not the same vocabulary either.

Resource: alchemycommic

Once this lesson is completed and approved, learners will be able to:

1. Detect the expectation of the audience.

2. Adapt their presentation to these expectations.

In this lesson, we will learn how to use different approaches and types of messages for different purposes in a pitch.

1. Adapt your speech to the audience

Here are some basic tips with to do and to don´t  to adapt your message to the audience you are addressing on each occasion:

- Seduce those who listen to you. You must make them curious about your project, that they want to know more about it once your speech is finished.

-The first seconds are the most important to engage your interlocutor. “9 out of 10 entrepreneurs think they seduce the investor, but only one succeeds. In fact, the most important are the first five seconds to convince him” (Mora, 2014).If you fail to involve your interlocutor in your speech, it will be very difficult for him to get hooked in the middle of it.

- Body language and modesty. It does not only matter what you say but how you say it, your non-verbal expressions will be essential, show confidence without arrogance, the posture of the body and the gestures have to accompany the speech and enhance its passion

- Show your passion. "You have to feel passion, they will buy it for you because of the illusion you awaken. If you do not feel illusion, the others will not feel either", In fact, he adds, "the feeling you give off when you talk about your product can be seen very quickly: in five depending on whether you are passionate about it or you are there because you don't know what to do with your life and it's a job". (Mora, 2014).

- Connect at all times with the public. Your interlocutor must have the feeling of having a conversation with you even if only you speak. If there is more than one person directing several sentences of your speech to each one looking them in the eye, generally they will show you that they are listening

-Jargon/acronyms. Treat your audience like an educated layperson. You don´t know if they know the jargon of your business or sector. If you use too technical words they will consider you a rude person, in case you have no alternative, explain in one line what the word means without seeming that they are giving a lesson to the interlocutor.

-Don't read notes or the slidesAs we said look into the judges’ eyes.

-You are always learning. Remember you don’t know everything. Think that you can always learn something new from the person in front of you.

Conclusion

As we have seen in topic 3 that the pitch can address different types of audience, it is important, at the time of preparing a pitch, to think at this audience characteristic to better reach them through our presentation.

Bibliography

Book “El pitch ganador: cómo seducir a un inversor Sergi Mora(20214)

Here you have the contents of the lesson in PDF: