Another (Delicious and Fulfilling) Cooking Analogy for Demos

Yes, here’s another great cooking analogy that can be applied to the wonderful world of demos…  Consider how we choose new recipes that we want to try from cookbooks:

First, we typically browse the pictures of the completed dishes to find something that looks good.  This idea of “Does it look good?” is often done unconsciously as we page along.  Note that anything that does NOT look good will not be chosen – we make a rapid, unconscious assessment of dishes (“Yes, No, or Meh…”). 

Interestingly, the same principle applies to the world of demos.  Our customers apply a similar unconscious process when viewing screens of software – “Does it look good?”  Unfortunately, most software is rather boring (wait – don’t tell me:  rows and columns of text and numbers followed by the frequent and rather pointless pie chart…).  Our job when presenting demos is to make each important screen as attractive and appetizing as possible. 

In Great Demo! Workshops we teach how to use pointing and words to accomplish this for Illustrations and other key screens, like a waiter in an elegant restaurant describing the dish he has just placed in front of you.

Back to choosing a recipe…

After we review the picture, what do we examine next?  We likely explore the recipe itself.  There are typically two sets of questions we ask ourselves as we are doing this:

1.       Regarding the list of ingredients, is this recipe affordable vs. expensive; do I have all/some/most already?

2.       As we read the recipe, we are asking, “Can I do this – how hard is it?  How long will it take?  Do I want to do this?”

The first set of questions only plays a small role in demos (“Do we have the necessary infrastructure?”), but the second set maps wonderfully to customer perceptions at demos!

“Can I do this?  How hard is it?  Does it look like something I want to do?” 

The longer the recipe and the more steps involved, the less likely we will want to execute it.  The same principle applies directly to the world of demos.  The more clicks, steps, and screens involved in any particular task, the less attractive it will appear to your customer. 

Solution?  In Great Demo! Workshops we teach the idea of the “Do It” pathway and the constant reminder to complete all tasks and pathways using the “Fewest Number of Clicks”.  Less is more.

So, we can apply the same ideas to demos that we use when choosing new recipes from cookbooks: Present your software screens like a waiter in an elegant restaurant and keep the list of steps in your software “recipe” as short as possible!