Demos Done Right - Audience Participation

This post will focus on a topic commonly used with smaller groups. I am going to talk through tactics to illicit audience participation during demonstrations. If you are a larger stage presenter experimenting with audience participation, please message me on LinkedIn. I am curious to know more about what has worked and what has not in your experimentation.

As an inexperienced presenter, I idealized a presentation without discussion or questions. Thinking that each time a question was asked, I had missed my communication goal or even worse, I had not prepared enough for the presentation. Once I stepped into a consulting role I would present to multiple clients in a week across a spectrum of topics. Quickly, I had to drop this idealism as it was impossible to anticipate all questions from a single client, let alone the three to five I was leading at any moment. After countless presentations to clients, I have completely reversed my thoughts on audience participation. Today, I use it as a key metric while determining how successful a presentation was received. Weighing this metric most heavily by the number of questions asked and by whom. Then, the feedback that was received during the presentation.

Before jumping into how to increase participation in a presentation. Let us take a brief moment to discuss why participation matters. First and foremost audience engagement in a presentation shows accountability to the presenter, the process, and the work. Those sitting with their camera off and silent throughout are not likely following along as closely as you, the presenter, would like. Resulting in a presentation that adds up to wasted time for all parties. As members participate in the presentation, you can easily see their perspective on a problem and their stance. This helps build empathy for their role within the organization. Laying the work for a solid foundation for the problems their business is looking to solve. Both are the start of forming a personal relationship with these people. Leading to an increased probability of successful outcomes. Which is what all parties want in a long-term relationship, success. Lastly, possibly most importantly, participation forces everyone to be more vulnerable. Proving that there is not one person who definitively knows all the solutions to the problems. This humility levels the playing field for all experience levels in the group.

The next obvious question is, how do we get more participation in our presentations? The first tactic was discussed in a previous post, the pacing and spacing during the demonstration. That is, by far, the essential step to progress. Next, is the amount of content planned for the allotted time. This is no trivial task, there are many variables in this equation. One of which is the amount of audience participation. Focus on changing one variable per demo to see how the outcome changes. Too much to present and the demonstration will feel rushed meaning you will likely want to rush through the content to confirm it all is demonstrated. Too short on the amount of content and the demonstration will feel under-whelming. This is a balance you only learn through diligent practice and experimentation.

While trying to determine the amount of content to present, you should be running experiments on how you present the content. This tactic has worked best for me in re-occurring demonstrations and less with single-execution demonstrations. One experiment I have run with all the clients I have served talking through how anticipated users would use the feature, varying the amount of detail needed for the audience to understand where the user is in the journey. This helps the audience see the tooling as a customer, this works even better when presenting directly to the end user. During the demonstration, the client (or customer) will highlight the flaws in the technology team's thinking about the intended use case of the feature. This often leads to a conversation about how the feature does or does not satisfy the needs. Resulting in focused audience participation.

In the majority of re-occurring demonstrations there will often be questions the technology team is not able to answer, after all, we are the technology experts, not the business experts. In these interactions, I often see engineers ask pointed questions that have a boolean answer or choose one path of two to N options. These questions do not yield the intended results as the business is not as clean as a simple boolean answer and the options are all technical and not understood, so the business representative does not know what a good choice is. Instead, try asking open-ended questions that are business-centric. The goal of asking the question is to get the business representative talking about the need. Questions such as: How do you think this should work? What are customers expecting to happen when this is clicked? What information does a user have at this point in the process? Then, you wait for a response. The waiting can get awkward however, someone always speaks up. Because they feel awkward silence too. Once someone starts talking, you switch to active listening mode and capture as much information as you are able, then engage in follow-up clarification questions. Repeating this cycle, until you have enough information to build the next increment of the feature.

The last tactic I use to get participation, but not too frequently, is a pointed question to a single person in the audience. I will only use this in re-occurring demonstrations and only after I have a strong relationship with the participant I am asking the question to. I never use it to call on someone that I know is not paying attention to the presentation while a managerial role is present. My goal is not to throw the person under the bus, my goal is to spark engagement. The types of questions I will use with this tactic are also open-ended, to get feedback while giving the target of the question the opportunity to wiggle free and not feel pinned for being distracted.

This post walked through tools to substantially increase participation during demonstrations. First, focus on pacing and spacing throughout your presentation. Keep the audience in the customer's mindset by presenting information on how the customer is expected to use the functionality. Continually ask open-ended questions to get the dialog flowing. Each step of this demonstration is to build confidence in the participants, the perception of you and your team's ability to solve the business problem, and to build a strong relationship. Much of this cannot be trained, you have to continually experiment to find what works for you. It will take time, but you will get it figured out.