Question and Answer Session

Preparing for a Q&A Session Know your topic: you have knowledge or experiences that someone else felt would be beneficial for you to share with a group. If you’re speaking on a topic that you haven’t recently kept up with, then brush up on it.

Know your audience: It’s especially important to for Q&A sessions because your audience may be looking for information about your topic, but from a particular viewpoint. Understanding what your audience expects to gain from listening to you will clue you in on the types of questions they might ask.

Anticipate questions: Being able to anticipate the questions you’ll be asked will help in you in the long run. Even if you never really get asked the question, your self-perception of your knowledge in your topic increases.

Use questions to identify potential questions from the audience. What do I expect to learn from listening to this talk? What are some of the things I can take away from this presentation? How can I apply this material to my own situation? What do some of the technical terms or industry jargon mean? Write down the questions and the answers and use it as a cheat sheet that you can refer to during your speech or to review prior to giving your talk.

Tips for Handling Q&A Sessions Always repeat the question. You ensure that you have correctly understood the question. You ensure that everyone in the audience hears the question. You give yourself a few extra seconds to formulate your answer.

Don’t be afraid to say that you don’t know the answer. Honesty is the best policy. If you try to fake your way through an answer (or even worse, make something up), you’ll lose credibility with your audience.

Dealing with difficult questions. It’s not unusual to get someone that asks a question for a less than honorable reason. Your goal is to get the other person to take the conversation off-line. Don’t be rude or unprofessional, but be firm. The person is trying show off his or her knowledge. The person disagrees with you and is trying to prove you wrong. The person is bitter and angry and chose to take it out on you. The person is interested in only his / her needs and doesn’t care that there are other people also trying to learn.

“You’ve asked a lot of great questions “You’ve asked a lot of great questions. Would you mind if you and I chat when I’m done so others in the audience can ask some questions?” “I’d like to think about that a bit more before I answer it. Could you and I talk afterwards?” “I appreciate your position on the issue. Perhaps you and I could discuss it in more detail later on.” “You seem like you know a lot about this subject. Perhaps you and I can compare notes after my talk is over.”

Preparing well will give you confidence!! A good Q&A session can help you build rapport with an audience, so don’t overlook this important part of a speech.