You walk into the presentation confident about your slides. You know your talking points. You’ve practiced your delivery. But three questions in, you’re stumbling. Someone asks about market trends you hadn’t researched. Another person wants details about implementation you hadn’t considered. A third raises concerns about budget implications you can’t address.
Your credibility evaporates in real time. Not because your core idea was wrong, but because you weren’t prepared for the depth of knowledge in the room.
I learned this lesson during a technology recommendation presentation to a manufacturing company’s leadership team. I had a brilliant solution: a cloud-based system that would streamline their operations and reduce costs. My technical analysis was thorough, my ROI calculations were solid, and my presentation was polished.
Five minutes in, the CFO asked about data sovereignty requirements for their international operations. I stumbled through a vague answer. The operations director wanted to know how the system would handle their seasonal staffing fluctuations. I hadn’t considered that. The IT director asked about integration with their legacy inventory system that I didn’t know existed.
Each question revealed another gap in my preparation. I could see the room losing confidence in my recommendation, not because the technology was wrong, but because I clearly didn’t understand their specific business context well enough to propose appropriate solutions.
That presentation failed not because I lacked technical expertise, but because I’d prepared like a presenter instead of a consultant. I knew what I wanted to say, but I didn’t understand what they needed to hear.
Here’s the principle: always know more than your audience. Not just about your specific topic, but about the context, implications, and connections they care about.
Most people prepare for presentations by focusing on what they want to say. They know their content, their data, their recommendations. They think that’s enough. But your audience isn’t just listening to your content. They’re evaluating your understanding of their world. They want to know if you’ve considered the factors that matter to them. They’re testing whether you understand the broader context of what you’re proposing.
When you can only answer surface-level questions, you signal that your thinking is surface-level too. But when you know more than your audience expects, you’re not just making a presentation. You’re providing consultation. And consultants get treated very differently than presenters.
The goal isn’t to show off everything you’ve learned. It’s to use that learning to provide insights that are genuinely valuable to the people you’re trying to help. Because when you understand their business, their challenges, their priorities, and their constraints, you can connect your expertise to their specific reality in ways that create real value.