The key building block for Audience Advocacy, and a way to focus on benefits rather than features, is to constantly ask the key question: What’s in it for you? It’s based on the more common axiom “What’s in it for me?,” but we’ve shifted the ultimate word to “you” deliberately, to shift the focus from you to your audience. This shift emphasizes the ultimate need for all communicators to be focused outward, on the needs of their audience (“you”), rather than on their own needs (“me”). This is the essence of Audience Advocacy.

In referring to this key question, let’s use the acronym WIIFY (pronounced “whiffy”). By constantly seeking the WIIFY in any persuasive situation, you can ensure that your presentation stays focused on what matters most: getting your audience to move from Point A to Point B, because you’ve given them a very good reason to make that move.

The WIIFY is the benefit to the specific audience in your persuasive situation. Usually there will be one overarching, grand WIIFY that unites the entire presentation and is at the heart of your persuasive case.

For example, when an entrepreneurial CEO and his or her management team launch an IPO road show for potential investors, the WIIFY is, “If you invest in our company, you’ll enjoy an excellent return on your money!”

On the other hand, when a corporate headhunter makes a job offer to a sought-after young recruit, the WIIFY is, “If you join our firm, you’ll be starting an incredible career with great pay, fascinating challenges, and the prospect of some day becoming the company president!”

When a partner in a marketing consulting firm makes a new business proposal to the Chief Operating Officer (COO) of a Fortune 500 company, the WIIFY might be, “If you retain us, the expertise we’ll provide will improve your promotional plans, which can increase your market share and boost your profits!”

In addition to these grand WIIFYs, there will usually be many smaller WIIFYs . . . more-specific, but still significant, audience benefits that give meaning to each element in your presentation. In fact, every element in your persuasive presentation must be clearly linked to a WIIFY.

There are six key phrases that can trigger a WIIFY. They are designed to remind presenters about the necessity of linking every element of their presentation to a clear audience benefit, or, a WIIFY. When I coach my clients’ presentations, if I hear an idea, fact, story, or detail without a clear audience benefit, I interrupt to call out one of these WIIFY triggers:

Get to know these WIIFY triggers. Use them on yourself the next time you’re preparing a presentation, as reminders to link every element to a WIIFY. (You might want to copy this list from Appendix B, “Presentation Checklists,” and tack it on the wall for continual inspiration.) When you work on a presentation as part of a team, use these triggers on your colleagues, and encourage them to return the favor. By the tenth time you pull a WIIFY trigger, you may catch a nasty look or two, but the quality of the resulting presentation will make it all worthwhile.

Here’s an example of how important it is to constantly translate your ideas into WIIFY terms. Jim Bixby was the CEO of Brooktree, a company that made and sold custom-designed integrated circuits used by electronics manufacturers. (The company was later acquired by Conexant Systems, Inc.) In preparation for Brooktree’s IPO, Jim rehearsed his road show with me. I role-played a money manager at Fidelity, considering whether our mutual fund might invest in Brooktree. During the product portion of Jim’s presentation, he held up a large, thick manual and said, “This is our product catalog. No other company in the industry has as many products in its catalog as we do in ours.”

Jim set down the catalog and was about to move on to the next topic when I raised my hand and fired off a WIIFY trigger. “Time out!” I said. “You say you have the biggest product catalog. Why should I care about the size of your catalog?”

With barely a pause, Jim raised the catalog again and replied, “With this depth of product, we protect our revenue stream against cyclical variations.”

The lights went on. This was an immensely important factor in the company’s financial strength, yet one that could easily have passed unnoticed, simply because Jim had forgotten to ask himself, “What’s the WIIFY?” Always find and state your WIIFY!

In any presentation, before you make any statement about yourself, your company, your story, or the products or services you offer, stop and ask yourself: “What’s the WIIFY? What benefit does this offer my listener?” If there is none, it’s a detail that may be of interest to you and your colleagues (a feature), but one that has no significance to your audience. But if there is a benefit, be sure you explain it, clearly, explicitly, and with emphasis, just as Jim did when I pulled the WIIFY trigger on him.

At this point, you may want to protest, “Wait a minute. My audiences aren’t stupid. They can figure out the benefits of whatever I mention. They might even feel insulted if I spell it all out for them!”

This is not necessarily true. Remember the Five Cardinal Sins. One is lack of a clear benefit. An essential truth about Audience Advocacy is that most businesspeople today are overloaded with information, with commitments, with responsibilities. When you make your presentation, you may have your audience’s undivided attention . . . but not necessarily. Even if it takes them just a few seconds to connect the dots between the feature you describe and the implied benefit, by the time they catch up, you will have moved on to your next point, and they probably won’t have time to absorb the benefit . . . or the next point. You’ll have lost your audience, perhaps permanently.

By stating the WIIFY, you seize an opportunity. Although your audience members are eminently capable of realizing the WIIFY on their own, when you state it for them, you lead them toward a conclusion . . . your Point B. In doing this, you manage their minds, you persuade them, and you instill confidence in your story, your presentation, and yourself. Plus, you accomplish something else. The audience may have just gotten to the Aha! themselves, a moment before you stated the WIIFY. By articulating it, you win their agreement. They react with nods, thinking to themselves, “Of course! I’ve never heard it put so succinctly and clearly!” Effective Management.

This is a variation on the Features/Benefits distinction. When presenting to potential investors, a CEO may explain the best features of a leading product: “We’ve built a better mousetrap.” But it’s not the quality of the mousetrap in itself that the investors care about; it’s the size of the market. The effective CEO presenter will then promptly move on to state the benefit to investors: “. . . and the world is beating a path to our doorstep.” There is a huge market for mousetraps. When the WIIFY is right, everybody wins.

In fact, the power of the WIIFY even applies in our personal lives. Consider this example:

Debbie runs a small but growing catering business. In the past, she has managed to keep most of her weekends largely free of work, which her husband, Rich, thoroughly appreciates. Now, however, she’s received the proverbial “offer she can’t refuse”: a request to cater a series of receptions at the local art museum that will keep her busy on weekends throughout the fall and winter. It will be quite lucrative as well as prestigious, but Debbie has to convince Rich to support her in this endeavor. Over dinner one evening, Debbie paints an eloquent word picture of how catering the receptions will put her company on the map, but she doesn’t tell Rich how he’ll benefit.

To win Rich’s support, Debbie should say something like this: “This contract could boost my profits from the catering business next year by over 50 percent. It’ll be enough to let me hire an assistant manager who can run the business for three weeks next summer . . . while we take that European tour we’ve always dreamed about.”

In this example, Debbie had to do more than simply reframe the idea to make the WIIFY clear. She also had to adjust her plans so that Rich will receive a definite personal benefit. One of the advantages of crafting a well-conceived WIIFY is that if you haven’t previously shaped your proposition to be a true win/win deal with benefits for everybody, then presenting the WIIFY will impel you to do just that. Improving your presentation can also help to improve the underlying substance.

The Duchess of Windsor famously once said: “You can never be too thin or too rich.” I amend her adage with “. . . or offer too many WIIFYs.”

One seemingly obvious aspect of the WIIFY principle that proves to be a stumbling block for many businesspeople is the danger of the incorrect “you.” Let me demonstrate:

One of my clients (let’s call him Mark) was the CEO of a company that manufactured dental instruments, wonderful tools of exceptional quality and precision to perform root canal procedures. Mark’s prior experience had been as a top salesman for another dental instrument company. Now, as CEO, Mark was preparing to take his new company public. I coached him through a rehearsal of his IPO road show by role-playing, as I usually do, a high-powered fund manager at Fidelity.

Mark eloquently presented his company’s strengths, focusing in particular on the high quality of their products. As an example, he described the special features of the new dental instrument his company had developed. Mark held up the actual instrument, looked at me, and said, “With this instrument, you can do better root canal procedures, more quickly and with less pain.”

I stopped him. “That’s fine,” I said. “But I’m an investor, remember? I don’t do root canals!”

“Hmm,” said Mark. He smiled, thought for a moment, then held up the instrument again, and said, “So you can see that the tens of thousands of endodontists across this country and thousands more around the world who want to do better root canals need instruments like this one, and they’ll have to buy them from us!”

Now that’s the correct you!

You can see Mark’s problem: In trying to formulate the WIIFY, he’d lost sight of his audience, the “you” of the question “What’s in it for you?” Instead, he devised a WIIFY that referred to the ultimate end user of his product, the endodontists, to whom he’d previously been selling. To hone his appeal to the investors who were now his audience, it was necessary for Mark to carefully focus on their concerns, which related to the size of the market for his instruments.

Can you get away with the incorrect you? Will your audience be able to translate the benefit to another party into terms that are meaningful to them? Of course they can. But if they do, they will have to make a split-second interpolation to adjust to the correct you. During that interval, they may stop listening to you and start thinking.

Don’t make them think!

Consider those words as a guideline for Audience Advocacy. Make it easy for your audience to follow, and your audience will follow your lead.

What if the audience did make the leap themselves, translating the WIIFY into terms that are meaningful to them? In Mark’s case, he would still be missing a golden opportunity to manage his audience’s mind to Point B.

This problem of the incorrect you is a surprisingly common one. Many of us in business have to sell ourselves and our stories to multiple constituencies, each with different biases, goals, preferences, interests, and needs. It’s easy to lose sight of today’s audience and address another audience’s WIIFY.

Here’s another example of the problem of the incorrect you:

Reed Hastings is the CEO of Netflix, an online DVD subscription company that went public in the spring of 2002. I had worked with Reed back in 1996, when he headed another company called Pure/Atria Software. At that time, I taught Reed, as I do all my clients, the subtle but important difference of addressing the correct you. Nonetheless, when Reed emailed me the draft of his road show for Netflix, one of the first slides in the presentation described his core business as shown in Figure 2.1.

Figure 2.1. Netflix business description slide, first draft.

When Reed arrived for our coaching session, I assumed my usual role as a potential investor in Netflix’s stock offering. I said, “Reed, this presentation makes me really eager to sign up and become a loyal subscriber of Netflix . . . but you didn’t come here today to get me to subscribe. I can sign up on the Internet. Treat me as an investor.”

Reed smiled and said, “What do you suggest?”

On the computer, I revised Reed’s slide to read as it does in Figure 2.2.

Figure 2.2. Netflix business description slide, second draft.

Suddenly, the entire frame of reference changed from the attractiveness of Netflix’s consumer offering to how large the market opportunity was . . . a much more important consideration for Reed’s investor audience.

Reed smiled broadly and said, “How about tens of millions of movie lovers?”

“Great!” I concurred. “How about ‘tens of millions in the U.S. alone’?”

Reed accepted the revision, polished his presentation, and then left to begin his IPO road show. One month later, when Netflix went public, they offered 5.5 million shares for sale. They received orders for 50 million shares . . . oversubscribed by nearly 10 times.

On their own, the members of the investor audience could have readily deduced that “Rent All the DVDs You Want” really referred to the many millions of potential Netflix customers, but then the audience would have been doing the math for themselves. By providing the logic for them, Reed led them to a conclusion and, in doing so, built their confidence. Reed seized his opportunity.

Never take the “you” in the WIIFY for granted. It’s always necessary to give deliberate thought to who your audience is and what they want. If your WIIFY is designed for the wrong ears, it can fall flat.

Also note this: The problem of the incorrect you is a major reason to resist the temptation to create a generic presentation about yourself, your company, or your products. The generic presentation, or “the company pitch,” as it is frequently called, assumes that the same presentation can be used with few or no changes for a variety of audiences. However, the same story that excites and inspires your own employees may bore your customers and actually alienate and anger your suppliers, or vice versa. The same story that persuades technical customers to buy your product may confound your potential investors.

A perfect case in point comes from Alex Naqvi, the former CEO of Luminous Networks, whom we met in the previous chapter. Luminous, which had started in business in 1998, planned eventually to go public, but given the challenging market conditions in 2001, Alex and his team decided to take their show on the private, rather than the public, road to seek additional financing.

Although the title of this chapter is “The Power of the WIIFY,” it could also be considered “The Power of ‘You.’” “You” generates innumerable potent benefits, all of them targeted at persuading your audience. “You” is so powerful that I have developed a simple rule I apply to everything I write: books, articles, letters, and emails. Before dispatching any document, I do one final review to see if I can insert additional instances of “you.” In this chapter alone, “you” has occurred 76 times thus far, not counting its variations of “your,” “yours,” and “yourself.”

For example, if I met someone at a business function, I might send that person a follow-up email:

With the “you” rule applied, it would read as follows:

Try the “you” rule yourself. It will personalize the tone and heighten the impact of any book, article, letter, or email you write.