Your audience has agreed to do the hard work for you.
If you think that you can’t boil your talk down to a simple core message, your audience will happily do it for you.
After your talk, when someone asks them what it was about, they will gladly provide an answer. Let’s call it the pass along phrase.
Here’s the thing:
That pass along phrase is always short.
If you can’t decide which of the 10 features was most important, they’ll pick one for you.
If you can’t focus on what it’s actually for, they’ll pick a focus for you.
And if the talk was somewhat confusing, they might just choose that fact: “I honestly don’t know what the talk was really about. It was somewhat confusing.”
Also:
The pass along phrase is always in their words.
They won’t bother with fancy language, tech jargon and the likes. They will choose language they are familiar with.
Let’s say it straight: You might not like their choice.
Which means that you might want to make your audience’s work of figuring out a pass along phrase as easy as possible.
You might want to pick a focus and use language your audience is familiar with.
Now, how do you make that task easier for your audience?
