The Simple Way To Find Out What Your Audience Needs To Hear

Most presenters focus on what they want to say. The ones who get results focus on what their audience needs to hear. That thing? It’s called the WIIFM: What’s In It For Me.

Here’s how to find it before you open your mouth.

An important element of presenting skills or influencing skills is giving your audience a reason to listen to you. This is often called the ‘WHY?’: the ‘What’s In It For Me’, also termed as the Key Message, or the Audience Motivator. It tells your audience how they’d benefit from your content: it’s the answer to their silent, slightly impatient question: ‘How do I benefit?’

The research behind this is robust – and if you want to dig into it, I’ve covered the science in depth here. But perhaps the most accessible illustration comes from Chip and Dan Heath’s book Made to Stick, which shows how the same ideas play out in everyday professional communication. Their central argument: messages that connect to what the audience already cares about are the ones that land, spread, and drive action. Everything else, however brilliant, tends to slide off.

If you can weave your audience’s needs into your talk, you’ll stand out from everyone else, winning over hearts, minds, and the occasional cynic. But how do you know what those needs actually are?

Let’s say your audience wants to know how to cut their carbon footprint down with your state of the art engineering tools, and you open with a detailed history of your company since 2015.

You’ve completely missed the mark.

If, however, you open by telling them exactly cutting their carbon footprint leads to lower costs and higher profits, you’ve got them. But first, you need to find out what they’re hungry for. And telepathy, sadly, is not something most of us can rely on.

How Do You Actually Discover the WIIFM?

1. Ask someone

This one sounds almost embarrassingly simple, but most people don’t do it. Before your presentation, find one or two people who’ll be in the room and ask them:

“If there’s one thing you could learn or take away that would make this hour worthwhile — what would it be?”

That’s it. One question. You’ll get more useful intelligence from that single conversation than from three hours of slide-tweaking.

2. In a process situation, reframe your ask

Sometimes you’re not presenting to a general audience but trying to persuade a specific team to do something. Think: telling the Product Team they need to change the UX. Here, the WIIFM isn’t just about what you want. It’s about helping them understand their role in the solution.

Nobody wants to feel like they’re being handed a to-do list. But everyone wants to feel like they’re part of fixing something important and no matter how technical they are, giving them the overall context so they understand the importance of their actions within a process is key to invoking their competence and motivation

So instead of walking in with “We want this changed,” try leading with the problem you’re both trying to solve, positioning them as the people best placed to solve it. You’re not issuing demands; you’re inviting them into the story.

3. Ask the conference organiser

If you’re speaking at an event, get the organiser on the phone. They’re usually very in tune with what the audience is struggling with as it’s literally their job to know. Give them a ring. Ask what pain their attendees are walking in with.

4. Run a mini pre-presentation survey

Asking the right questions before your speech or presentation is a crucial communication skill. As ex-speechwriter for Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s Administration in New York, Brian Rashid knows a thing or two about presenting. He shared with me some tips on how to discover your audience’s ‘WHY?’.

Brian advises asking these three questions:

1. What is your biggest current frustration around [topic] ?
2. If that frustration resolved itself, how would things be better?
3. What have you tried – and what happened?

If the organiser of an event can’t help, you can ask these – or any one of these – directly to an audience sample. In my experience, even if you had 2% of 40 people respond, you’d have discovered needs indicative of the whole group.

Answers to any of these will have your WIIFM wrapped.

5. Check social media and audience profiles

Event hashtags, LinkedIn discussions, forum threads — people are often surprisingly candid about what they need. And if the event has a portal or attendee profiles, dig in. I did this before my keynote at Product Tank on ‘How to Influence When You’ve No Authority’ — and it was gold.

6. Work the pre-event drinks

If there’s a drinks reception or pre-event meet-up, use it. Chat to five people. Ask what they’re hoping to get from the session, using any of the questions from item 4, above. Then weave those answers into your presentation. You’ll feel like a mind-reader. (You’re not. You did your homework.)

A Real-World Moment: The Engineer Who’d Never Thought to Ask

I worked recently with a Senior Engineer who was increasingly being asked to present, partly because AI is now handling a lot of the detailed coding work he used to do. More strategic conversations, more stakeholder rooms, more eyes on him.

His instinct was to share everything he knew. In forensic detail. Because that’s what a thorough, technically brilliant person does, right?

The problem was that he’d never once stopped to ask what his audience needed to hear. He was preparing what he wanted to say, which, as a detail-oriented specialist, was probably about four times more than anyone needed.

We worked on the WIIFM, leaping from “here’s everything I know about this system” to “here’s the problem we’re collectively aiming to solve, and here’s why you’re the ones who can solve it”. The change was immediate. His presentations landed. His listeners engaged. And he stopped losing the room halfway through slide forty five, realising that if he had the WIIFM and the data, he often didn’t even need slide one: he could use these approaches instead.

He now presents more voluntarily. (Which, if you know engineers, is no small thing.)

Your Action:

1. Got a presentation coming up?  Use the questions here to define the WIIFM for your listeners.
2. Here you’ll find ways that rephrase many of those WIIFMs very succinctly.
3. All the points you make will related to that WIIFM (or WIIFMs – sometimes you’ll have two, especially with a mixed audience). If you find points unrelated to those key messages, bin them. The WIIFM is the filter for your content.

So No Butt-Sniffing Required.

Ask the right questions, to the right people, before you walk into that room. A clear WIIFM completely changes how your audience listens to you – from politely tolerating you to actually hearing you.

You can learn more about this technique and many others in my presenting skills, influencing skills, and public speaking courses — all part of my communication skills training you can explore here.

Got your own tricks for sniffing out your audience? Drop them in the comments below – let’s get the discussion going.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

What does WIIFM mean in presentations? WIIFM stands for “What’s In It For Me?” — the unspoken question every audience member is asking. It’s the reason they should care about what you’re saying. Identifying and addressing the WIIFM before you present is one of the most powerful things you can do to make your message land.

How do I find out what my audience needs before a presentation? The most direct method is simply to ask one or two people from your expected audience what they’d most want to take away from the session. You can also survey attendees in advance, speak with the event organiser, check social media and event forums, or do some digging in audience profiles. The key is to find out what they need to hear, not just plan what you want to say.

What’s the difference between what I want to say and what my audience needs to hear? This is the gap that kills most presentations. What you want to say is usually driven by your own expertise, enthusiasm, or agenda. What your audience needs to hear is shaped by their frustrations, goals, and context. The sweet spot – and where the WIIFM lives – is where those two things meet.

How do I persuade a team to change something, like a UX or a process? Avoid leading with demands. Instead, open with the problem you’re both trying to solve, and position the team as the people best equipped to fix it. When people feel like part of the solution rather than recipients of a brief, they engage. The WIIFM in a process conversation is often about relevance and ownership – “you matter in this” – not just “here’s what we want.”

Why do technical specialists often struggle with presentations? Technical specialists tend to be thorough, detail-oriented, and deeply knowledgeable – which is fantastic for their work, and can be overwhelming in a presentation. The instinct is to share everything. But audiences don’t need everything; they need the right thing. Learning to lead with the audience’s WIIFM, rather than the full depth of your knowledge, is the single biggest shift a technical presenter can make.

This post was originally published in 2019, updated in May 2024, and expanded in 2026.