Sometime last year I had gone to a college in Jaipur with Rachit and Nakul to speak about the challenges faced by an E-Cell in a college and the work we had been doing. (Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership at BITS Pilani had turned 5 that year). A well known network for entrepreneurial activities was helping the college set up its own e-cell. People from various colleges in Jaipur had come for the event.
While the consultant of this organisation went about explaining the benefits of having an e-cell in your college using a powerpoint, which frankly speaking was a little too heavy on content, I noticed several yawns surfacing. Ultimately when the gentleman was done with his talk, he asked the audience if there were any questions that they would like to pose to him.
A girl stood up and with her head held high, walked up. With a look that clearly echoed “whatever”, she told the gentleman that his talk was very boring and frankly speaking didn’t make much sense. She was from an arts background and said the talk seemed overly technical.
I found this fascinating for two reasons.
Firstly, because she was being frank and secondly (and more importantly) she spoke for a lot of people there. The man from the network was in a fix, he clearly wasn’t prepared for this and probably wouldn’t want a mutiny of sorts. But I wasn’t particularly impressed by how he handled the situation. Instead of making it lively and interesting for this girl and trying to explain to her how an e-cell might be useful for an arts college; by probably doing those types of projets which might suit their core competencies and by reducing the jargon in his speech, he merely droned something like ” well, you probably were’nt paying attention”. This infuriated the girl and she stomped back to her bench.
I have realised many a times that a speaker has to size up their audience. Sounds highly cliched, I know. Many a times you go prepared with a game plan and things don’t come out as you expected. Agreed, you can’t afford to be monotonous to begin with, but atleast when someone else reminds you of it, the least you can do is take a walk in their shoes and match their wavelength.
After all, you’re the marketer at the end of the day.
