What is the right amount of detail to have in a presentation, especially if your audience is mixed in their level of expertise?

August 12, 2011

You want to make sure you never lose your audience during your presentation. A lost audience will feel stupid and angry and will want to take that anger out on you, the presenter.

So in a mixed group, you need to be clear on what the goal of the session is as well as knowing who the key players are for achieving that goal. These are the people you need to direct your information to.

If you are selling technical equipment and in the room you have the CEO, the CFO, and technical engineers as well, you would need to decide who are the key players. Usually in this instance the CEO and CFO will be making the decision on whether they make the purchase, and then we’ll be looking at the technical engineers to validate this decision.

So in this case the goal you might use would be, “We’re here today to look at how this equipment can help your hospital and then how we would get it implemented.” This would allow you to share more general information at the beginning and then become more technical in the implementation process.

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