Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Stunningly Awful Demos – Debilitating Demo Diseases

In my next several posts, I'll offer a compendium of debilitating demo diseases that commonly afflict sales, presales and marketing teams when preparing for and presenting demos. I'll identify the major symptoms for each disorder, provide one or more examples to aid in diagnosis, and suggest steps to a cure for each.

Here's the first one:

Conjunctionitis

Symptoms: Chronic overuse of “and” and “or” in the midst of demos.

Examples:

“…and the next thing I want to show you is…”

“…and another really cool thing in our software is…”

“You can do it using our wizard, or this second way, or you can do the same thing using the menus, or…”

Cure: Breathe... Pause... Summarize after each demo segment. Hold back from showing everything; ask first before showing. Peel back the layers in accord with customer interest.

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