CHAPTER 9

Answer Questions They Haven’t Asked, in Order

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.

— HENRY FORD

In 1999, I cofounded an Internet company that was accidentally successful with two people who were much smarter than I, Michael Sanchez and Andrew Shue. It’s now called CafeMom.com, and it gets more than a hundred million page views a month because of an amazing team. The company really took off when I stepped down, and I don’t appreciate the obvious implications of that fact.

In some early meetings while founding the company, when we were pitching potential investors and corporate partners, we would go into meetings with our PowerPoint presentation, but before we started, we would ask the people we were pitching, “Do you want to walk through the deck or just talk off the cuff?”

Can you guess what percentage of the time people wanted to go through the PowerPoint presentation, and what percentage just wanted to talk, have a conversation?

It was about 60-40 in favor of the deck. Most people are wired to prefer a more structured approach.

How do I know what the audience will prefer?

Ask.

Oh, please, don’t tell me I paid all this money for a book that tells me to ask the audience what it wants.

Yep. Every member of every audience is unique. Every time you give the audience members choices and let them make decisions, their investment in your presentation increases. Every time they put a little more money in the poker pot, they care more about it.

When I was going through the PowerPoint, I would say, “Feel free to kick me under the table whenever you want me to speed up or slow down, or if you want to skip something or dive deeper.”

These techniques are part of a senior approach. A junior person focuses too much on her content, determined to get through it at all costs, no matter what. The audience wants to know about X, Y, and Z; the junior person plans to get to that, but first she wants to talk about A, B, and C. What is the problem with this approach? The problem is that the audience members’ questions about X, Y, and Z may block them from hearing the things you want them to hear about A, B, and C. A senior person focuses first on the audience (or at least references them and sets them up), and then chooses an approach from a range of good options.

For your next presentation, ask yourself what decisions you can let the audience make. Here are a couple of simple ones:

Decisions regarding time. “Folks, we have 20 minutes set aside for a break. Do you want a couple of 10-minute breaks or one longer one?”

Don’t drag this out into a discussion, but determine it by a quick vote, if there is not an obvious consensus within the first few seconds.

I will also, just to change it up, pick on a person.

“Okay, guys, we are going to take a short break. How long the break will be, will be determined by Judy and only Judy. So, if you have an opinion on how long it should be, send Judy a telepathic message. Okay, Judy. How long is the break?”

Decisions regarding order. “We have the following three topics to go through. It doesn’t matter to me, so does anyone have a strong preference on which to start with?”

This decision engages everyone quickly because they have to think about all three topics to even form an opinion, which helps you get them interested in the topics.

Decisions regarding logistics. “We need to order food. Any preferences? Who wants to handle this? Roberto? Great! If you have input, share it with Roberto during the break and let’s get back to the agenda.”

Put Yourself in Their … Chairs

There is a concept in psychology known as high and low self-monitoring. We are being high self-monitors when we are attuning ourselves to what others are thinking of us. We are low self-monitors when we are oblivious to it.

In your continuous efforts to keep your focus on the audience, and to remind yourself that your presentation is about the audience, consider what you would think if you were physically in your own audience. Walk over to a chair where your audience was or would be seated, and look up at where you were standing during your presentation. The more you see yourself as the people in your audience see you, and ask yourself what they might be thinking, the more breakthroughs and improvements you will discover in your presentation and speaking skills.

Keep asking yourself, “If I were in the audience, what would I be thinking?”

This is not the same as worrying about what the audience thinks of you, or how it is judging you. Now that we know we are being judged, we just don’t care.

Audiences often have questions that they just won’t ask the speaker for a variety of reasons. When you figure out what those questions are and answer them without being asked, you look smart. Answer the questions the audience members do not ask, in the order in which they are not asking them.

Wait, what does that mean?

If you are pitching or selling something, people may wonder:

“Why does your product cost what it does?”

“How are you better than your competitors?”

“What do you get out of this sale?”

Your audience members are not going to ask these questions out loud, but they will be thinking about them, and this will block out some of what you are saying to them.

Almost all audiences are asking some form of just three simple questions:

What? (What is this about?)

So what? (How is this relevant to me?)

What’s next? (What do I do with this?)

You can use your audience members’ unanswered questions to your advantage as you see their filters going up.

Let’s say you are presenting, and you were supposed to stop at noon for a one-hour lunch. It’s 12:10, and you’re still yapping. What question would your audience not be asking?

(“Uh, when are we stopping for lunch?”)

(“Man, when is this person going to stop?!”)

These are completely natural questions for an audience to have. Politeness prevents folks from asking you these questions, but their filters are high because those unasked and unanswered questions are blocking them from really hearing you.

If you recognize this, you can turn it around to your advantage. You can say, “Guys, I know we are ten minutes over. If you can give me five more minutes, we can finish this whole section and still take one solid hour for lunch. Is that okay with everyone?”

If you do that, in what direction would the audience’s filters move? They’d go down.

When you are interested in an object, your pupils will dilate. This is a big cue for salespeople all over the world.

We may laugh at the classic stereotype of a car salesman, but we can learn from the techniques. You go to a car dealership and stand next to a red convertible. The schmaltzy car salesman ambles over, tugs on his belt, and asks …

“What do I have to do to put you behind the wheel of this shiny new car?”

It’s a brilliant question. Why?

Because your answer tells him your main buying criterion. If you say, “Well, it had better get good gas mileage,” what does he now know is your number one criterion? If you say, “Oh, I can’t afford it,” what does he now understand is your top criterion? Price point.

There is a difference between being smart and being wise. Instead of showing people how smart you are by guessing at what they care about, show them how wise you are by asking them and listening.

Let’s say you are doing a PowerPoint and someone raises a question that you know you are going to address five slides later. How do most of us respond?

“I will come to that later.”

Which is a polite way of saying, what?

“Shut up. This is my PowerPoint. I worked on it all weekend, so kindly don’t interrupt again.”

Sometimes we even try to use the Jedi mind trick.

We say, “Yes, we will come to that later,” or, “Ask that question again when we come to that slide.”

They nod, as if to say, “Great! That was my plan all along.”

“These are not the droids you are looking for.”

There are, of course, times when the order of our slides does matter, or when it is important to adhere to the specific format we’ve designed for our presentation, but in most cases, it matters less than we think it does, and much less than the chance to increase our engagement with our audience. In those times, you could respond to an “out of order” question by saying, “Great question; shall we jump there?” Then jump to the slide that applies to the matter and address the issue. You also want to stop and consider the fact that the question came up earlier in the presentation than you thought it would. That’s an important tidbit of feedback. You may want to move that slide up the next time you give that presentation, if you see a pattern.

You shouldn’t dread or be thrown off by interruptions or questions. In fact, you want to let the audience interrupt, and for a very good reason. Every time you allow the members of your audience to make a decision, you strengthen your connection with them. Think of it like a poker game. If the audience members get to put some money in the pot, then they become invested. Conversely, every time you block the audience members from making a decision, you weaken your connection with them.

It’s like a cell phone signal. If you have four or five bars, you have a great conversation. If you have between one and two bars (the average presentation), the connection is spotty. Imagine that every time the audience members get to make a decision, the signal strengthens a bar or two. When you block them from making a decision, it drops a bar.

Feeding the Alligators

A good general rule in public speaking is never to compare people to animals. That’s not nice, and it’s certainly not politically correct. But let’s do it anyway.

Smart people and strong leaders are like alligators.

Can you get alligators to line up and do what you want them to? No way. Alligators cannot be trained that way, and trying to control them just causes more problems. However, you can motivate them … if you know how.

What’s the point?

It’s natural to want to show the audience how smart you are. It’s normal! But when you let the people in the audience show you how smart they are, you’ve got them eating out of the palm of your hand.

This is a CEO’s secret for effective leadership and public speaking. When you give the audience members a meaty problem to solve, they can’t help themselves. They engage with you. Once they have the scent of a problem to solve, they begin to salivate over how good it will taste to fix it. They will not be able to raise their filters against the meat.

Unfortunately, this can work in reverse. If you have lost your audience members’ interest, if you are not engaging them, or if you are acting as if you are the only one with all the answers, then you become the problem to be solved. One of the first ways that your audience may “Solve” the problem of you will be to tune you out and stop listening.

The need to show how smart we are is natural and healthy, but let it go. Every once in a while, the boss is accidentally right. Let him be. The customer can actually have a decent idea. The people below you can improve on your strategies. Let them. That’s what you pay them for. Allow the audience members to upgrade your agenda. Let them give you feedback on the spot. When you let others show you how smart they are, you get promoted from smart to “Wise.”

You may be thinking that this all seems like a lot of extra work, and that engaging your audience this way will take a lot of extra time, or that you don’t want to waste time asking questions, telling stories, painting scenes, or tossing meat. You just want to get up there and get through the topic at hand as quickly as possible so that everyone can get back to work.

This was the concern of Andreas, an executive who approached me during a training session to express his concern that when he has limited time to get through a lot of content, socializing and involving the audience could waste much of that precious time:

Connect first. Send second.

All of the techniques and skills we have been teaching you to develop are simply some ways to connect to an audience: strong language; eye contact; using names; involving the audience. They don’t have to take a long time, but you have to create the connection so that you can get your message through.

SUMMARY

Answer the questions that your audience members are thinking but do not ask, in the order in which they are not asking them.

Allow your audience members to interrupt you and make decisions. It will strengthen your connection with them.