Product Overview Presentations - Like Having a Brochure Read to You

Many demos are preceded by 1) a corporate overview presentation and/or 2) a product overview presentation.  Leaving the horrors of typical corporate overviews aside for the moment, it just struck me that watching many product overview presentations feel a lot like having someone read a product brochure you…  A recent product presentation I watched took over 30 minutes (before the demo) and reviewed the company history and mission statement (again, even after it was introduced in a corporate overview presentation!), then walked through the history of the problem/shortcomings of the existing technology, technology Bottlenecks, the product technology itself (how it works) including details of architecture and environment, typical numeric results, security, integration options (SDK and API’s) and finally deployment. 

The customer was quiet throughout the entire 30 minutes – no interaction.  It struck me that this was like having the product brochure being read to us!