Matt lays out a piece of advice he gives to clients about “seeding,” or “planting,” questions during the presentation, and Alper gives some feedback on whether Matt’s is a good piece of advice or not.

Episode transcript:

Matt Krause
Alper before we get into the subject for today’s podcast. If you don’t mind, I would like to take a moment of silence, just because you know, we’re we’re both connected with Turkey. I live in Turkey. You’re from Turkey. And so I would like to take a moment of silence for the people that were hurt in the earthquake. Is that okay?

Alper Rozanes
I would like that, too. Yes.

Matt Krause
Okay. So yeah, let’s, let’s have our moment of silence now.

Matt Krause
Okay, so I’m going to switch into podcast mode now. Are you ready?

Matt Krause
So the a couple weeks ago, we were talking about something. I think it was the we were talking about the the q&a slide. And I made a suggestion. Instead of saving instead of saving up audience questions for the end, distribute the audience questions throughout the presentation. And that’ll make the presentation…

Matt Krause
Yeah, that’ll make the presentation more of a two way conversation. And you’ll avoid this awkward silence at the end where, you know, you ask for questions. And then everybody has questions, but everybody’s silent. And it’s awkward.

Matt Krause
And so when I make this suggestion, clients often ask me, Well, that’s a great idea. But how do I do that? And it’s not easy, because, you know, people have been trained, they’ve been to, you know, 1000 presentations where the q&a is saved up for the end. And so people are trained to hold on to your questions until the person is done speaking. And then you can either dump all your questions at the end, or you can just sit through the awkward silence. And so, yeah, and so clients asked me, Well, okay, well, your suggestion to distribute questions throughout the presentation is good, but how do I do it? How do I overcome this training that people have?

Matt Krause
And so I’m going to tell you what piece of advice I give. And then you give me some feedback on whether you think it’s good advice, because I want to know, am I telling people the right thing? Or am I telling people? Am I giving bad? Am I giving people bad advice? So So you give me some feedback on that? Okay?

Alper Rozanes
I’ll do my best to be as unbiased as possible. That sounds good.

Matt Krause
Okay, here we go.

Matt Krause
Okay, so what I tell what I tell people, in order to distribute questions throughout the presentation, is, you’ve got to seed the questions. Throughout the presentation, you’ve got to distribute the questions when so when I say the word seed, it’s like seed as in, you know, plant a seed, S, E, E, D, not cede defeat, not none, C, E, D, E.

Matt Krause
So you’ve got to seed plant a seed, you’ve got to seed the questions throughout the the presentation.

Matt Krause
And one way that you can do that is, while you’re making your presentation, go around to some of the people who are going to be in your presentation. And often, you know, if you’re doing if you’re making a presentation for work, you know, the people who are going to be in your presentation in the audience are probably going to be like, you know, nearby, they’re going to have an office nearby, so they’ll be close by.

Matt Krause
So go to some of the audience members before the presentation. And just tell them what you’re going to say. You know, all you need to do is, you know, take an outline into the office with you. Tell them what you’re going to say, show, give them a preview of the outline of the presentation, see what questions they ask.

Matt Krause
And when they ask a question that you would like them to ask in the presentation. Just say, That’s a great question. Can you ask me exactly that in the presentation? And so you will know that on slide three, for example, on slide three, George is going to ask a question about ABC.

Matt Krause
And since you’ve had a preview in the question into the question, you have a chance to prepare ahead of time how you’re going to do the answer. And then you find like, you know, Oh, three, three other people or two other people who will do that, who will, you give them a preview of what you’re, you’re going to say, and then they ask a question you just say to them? That’s a great question. Can you ask me that question during the presentation?

Matt Krause
And so now, let’s say that you’ve got an audience of 10 people, or 20 people, or 50 people, or 1000, people, whatever. And your audience now sees a few people asking questions. You know, somebody asks a question on slide three, somebody asks a question on slide five, somebody asks a question on slide seven, they know that it’s okay and expected that whenever you have a question, just raise your hand or speak up.

Matt Krause
So that’s the piece of advice that I give to people is that in order to overcome this training that your audience probably has, that you’ve got to save up your questions for the end, basically just kind of handpick about three or four people who are basically going to demonstrate they might not know that they’re doing it. All they’re doing is is thinking, Okay, I got a question about the subject. And now this guy is talking about the subject, I should ask my question.

Matt Krause
But the audience sees that it’s okay to raise your hand or just speak up and ask your question during the presentation.

Matt Krause
And of the people that I give this to that I have the people that I give us advice to, I would say that probably about 70% of the people say this sounds like great advice, I’m going to do exactly this.

Matt Krause
But I get pushback from about 30% of the people, about 30% of the people they’ll say this feels dishonest. And they’re thinking what they seem to be thinking is that when I walk into the room to give my presentation, if I know that on slide three, George is going to ask me question XYZ, and I’m going to say ABC in response, if I know that when I walk into the room, that’s dishonest.

Matt Krause
So and I don’t want to feel like a liar. I don’t want to feel like I’m being dishonest. So I’m not going to do that.

Matt Krause
So about 70% of the people that go along with this advice, they think it’s great. But 30% push back and say no, this technique feels dishonest. So I want to ask your opinion. Do you think in your opinion, am I giving good advice? Or is this bad advice?

Alper Rozanes
I’m going to start from the last and I’ll make a comment about the 30% who may think that this would be dishonest.

Alper Rozanes
I can identify with the reasoning behind why they might feel this to be dishonest. But I don’t think it would be a deal breaker. I don’t think it would be like scamming the audience or lying to them.

Alper Rozanes
I think it’s I think the whole thing about distributing seeding the questions is to make the presentation more conducive towards understanding, right? For people under be able to understand it better.

Alper Rozanes
So as long as you’re not dispensing, as long as you’re not dispensing wrong information with which, which would be through bad intentions, I don’t think honesty should be questioned, but I can definitely understand the sentiment behind feeling that way.

Alper Rozanes
But beyond that, I also want to ask you, this is a situation where you know that you will have some of the audience members before so they will be people who you know. So you will be able to interact with them before the presentation. And you will plant them, so to speak, into the presentation and on cue, they will ask the questions that you want them to ask. What about do I understand correctly by the way?

Matt Krause
Yeah, you do. They, you know that, for example, you know that George in the audience is going to ask a question on slide three. George is not sitting there thinking. I am a participant in this presentation. My job is on slide three to ask a question. It’s just that George has a question. But But still, he is basically planted. So yeah, I am I am giving people advice to plant plant questions into the audience.

Alper Rozanes
Okay. What about in situations where you will not know people beforehand, you will not get them to ask questions in a predetermined way.

Alper Rozanes
What is your take on for example, you’re delivering a presentation to a group of people for the first time. They will have questions. What is your advice on waiting till the last or saving them throughout the presentation the way that you just described.

Matt Krause
In a case like that, the suggestion that I make is, it’s basically the same except it’s sped up.

Matt Krause
I tend to tell people, okay, before your presentation, there’s probably a coffee break or something. During the coffee break, talk to a handful of people or, or maybe like just in the couple minutes before the presentation, because all you need is two or three people to demonstrate this question asking style.

Matt Krause
So go up to a couple people in the moments before the presentation, tell them what you’ll be talking about and see what kind of questions they ask.

Matt Krause
All you have to do is say, I’m going to be talking about XYZ. What would you like to know about XYZ? And then during your presentation, you can kind of point to that person, you know, you could be talking blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, Darya, you have a question about subject ABC. Is that correct? Okay, so let’s talk about ABC, because your question is blah, blah, blah, right?

Matt Krause
And so, now the audience sees that, you have kind of a two way conversation going with Darya. So it might not be as intentionally planted, as if you have more time to prepare, like if you have a 24 hour cycle to prepare.

Matt Krause
But it’s still, you’re still basically beginning the presentation, kind of anticipating the first couple of questions that people are going to have on their minds. And you’re using a couple people in the audience to demonstrate that two-way conversation. So that’s, that’s how I would handle that situation.

Alper Rozanes
I like that. And I liked how it would allow the rest of the audience members to see that… It’s okay to ask questions. They don’t maybe have to wait for the end of the presentation.

Alper Rozanes
And it usually takes even the even in the beginning of the q&a, if you have a separate one towards the end. It’s interesting how it usually takes one or two people to break the silence to ask the first couple of questions. And then you have a rush of questions coming in your…

Alper Rozanes
Yeah, to take that away from a specific moment, all the way to the end of the presentation and distribute it throughout the entire speech, I think that’s great advice. And I would definitely encourage that.

Matt Krause
Okay, cool.

Matt Krause
All right. So we’re about out of time. And so I will talk to you again next week then.

Alper Rozanes
Okay, sounds good.

Matt Krause
I’ll talk to you. Alright. Thanks, Alper. Bye bye.

Alper Rozanes
Take care. Bye bye.