Getting Feedback from Your Audience

How can you get feedback from your audience after you've tried to communicate by giving a speech or presentation? Well, this may sound blindingly obvious, but few people do it. Just ask them. Here's how. If you give a presentation, a PowerPoint, a speech, keynote, and there are more than 20 people in the room, stick around. When you're done, people will come up to you, want to meet you. They may have a question, but quite often they'll say something like, hey, good speech today. Thanks for your speech, wonderful speech. Most of us in that situation just say, oh, thanks, thanks a lot, appreciate it, glad you enjoyed it. And that's it. Wasted opportunity. Now, I still want you to say thank you and be gracious. But then follow up, say thanks. Tell me, what do you remember what stands out? Do any stories, examples, slides, anything stand out? And then listen. What you're about to hear is wildly valuable focus group research and you don't have to pay a penny for it. I do that all the time after speeches. And if people say, well, tj, you were just articulate and wonderful and fun, great movement, real professional, then I know I was a complete, utter failure. I don't want someone commenting on my style. You don't want that. You want people talking about the messages you put out there that are going to be useful to them, helpful to them, things that they can do. So ask people who come up to you. They say they liked it. Test them. If they come up to you with a question, answer their question. But then it's your turn to ask a question. And your question is, what did you take away from today? How would you describe this to a colleague who perhaps wanted to be here and couldn't be there? Listen, if you have messages that are coming back that are what you want and what you plan, that's great. It means you succeeded. Now, sometimes people will latch onto something you said in an offhanded comment or in an answer to a question, and it was a really important point, perhaps one of your most important points. But an examp story you gave that wasn't planned is what is remembered. Use that the next time you give a speech on that topic. Use the comment, use the example, the story that came out in the Q and A part, and build it right into your speech. One of the tips of great communicators is that they use every single speech, every presentation, every talk as a mini focus group to make their next presentation a little bit better.