Here’s a
collection of poor tactics, bad errors and faulty steps you can take to
increase the likelihood that your demo will be a failure. We recommend that
you avoid doing these things!
If your
organization’s demos are not as successful as you might wish, consider using
this list as an assessment tool. If
these items are occurring in your real-life demos then you may want to
contemplate making some changes…
The Stunningly Awful Demos (“SAD”) Top
Ten List:
1.
Be
unclear on the Customer’s Needs: “The Harbor Tour”
Offer and
deliver a demo in the hope that your customer will see something of interest,
eventually. This is a case of using Hope
as a Strategy…! Customers refer to these
long, tortured demos as:
· Show-up and throw-up
· Spray and pray
· Tech splatter
· The IKEA demo
· Living in the Land of Hope
· Whisky-Tango-Foxtrot, and, of course,
· The Harbor Tour (“Oh God, it’s the Harbor Tour Demo…” they board the
boat, get driven around the harbor for three hours while being asked, “Have you
seen anything you like so far?” – and they can’t get off the boat until the end
of the ride…!).
Inexperienced
salespeople often inflict these demos on their customers as a replacement for
doing Discovery. Jaded presales folks
offer these demos when they receive little or no pre-demo information from
their sales colleagues.
2.
Present
a Linear Demo from beginning to
end: “Where is this going…?”
Have you ever
been watching someone else’s demo and, a few minutes into the process, you start
wondering, “Where is this going…?”
You can ensure the same awful fate for your customers by delivering long, linear demos that start at the beginning of a workflow and take forty, fifty or sixty minutes (or longer!) to finally reach the big pay-off screen. Follow this tactic to ensure that:
·
Your
audience is half-asleep by the time you reach the important take-away message
and key pay-off screen. (In some geographies
your audience may actually be asleep).
·
The
most important people in the audience leave the room while you are still
introducing the module names and key navigation features…
·
The
customer is so numbed by the time that you do reach your big message that they
cannot remember it after the demo is over.
Bonus: Be sure to show how to set things up – tasks
that would likely only be done once (and are often done by a professional
services team during implementation) to ensure that you squander more time with
unimportant items…
Double
Bonus: With practice, you should be able
to consume all of the available time allotted to the demo with set-up and
workflow – and run out of time before you get to the “best stuff”!
3.
Start
with a Corporate Overview: “Death by Corporate Overview…”
Make Number
2, above, even worse by starting the meeting with twenty minutes of your
corporate overview. Regale your audience
with your mission statement (yawn), your company’s formation and history
(yawn), your revenues-over-time, office locations, markets, products, and that
smorgasbord of customer logos (yawn, yawn, yawn, snooze…).
This strategy
will ensure that (1) the most important people leave even before you can start the demo and (2) everyone is already bored and
losing attention when you do deliver your demo.
Doing this also sets you up nicely for item Number 4…
4.
Don’t
reconfirm the Time Constraints for
the meeting: “Sorry, we’re out of time…”
You’d planned
on two hours with the customer when you set up the meeting three weeks
ago. Is there any reason this might have
changed?
You arrive at
10:00 AM and dive into your agenda. Your
team delivers your Corporate Overview presentation followed (after twenty
minutes) by a long, linear demo…
Things are going
as planned when suddenly your host looks at his watch and says, “Um, can you
please wrap things up in the next five minutes?
We have an all-hands meeting scheduled at 11:00…” You have to end the demo without ever
reaching your big pay-off screen and have to ask to schedule another meeting.
Bonus: Similarly, don’t reconfirm the list of customer
participants or their objectives. It is
always a delight to walk into a room of 20 people when you were expecting 2
(and haven’t had a chance to do Discovery with any of the new folks). Which takes us back to Number 1, again…!
5.
Show
as many Features and Functions as
possible: “…And another thing you can do is…”
Want to make
your software appear as confusing and complicated as possible? Want more ways to bore and torture your
audience? Want to help your customer
reduce the price they pay for your software?
It’s easy: show as many features
and capabilities that you possibly can!
A simple way
to achieve these negative results is to present your demo as if you are doing
product training – “let me show you how to do this, and that, and this other
thing…” To really inflict pain, make
sure to show and explain all of the menu options, tabs, navigation tools and,
of course, all of the file types you can handle. Be sure to include all of the “if”, “or” and
“also” cases for each option. These
simple steps will make your demo truly Stunningly Awful.
6.
Show
the same demo, regardless of the Customer’s
Depth of Interest: “One for all…”
Ignore the
fact that the VP in the room only wants a top-level overview of your offering
and that the managers in the room are interested only in their portion of the
process. Instead, choose the lowest-level
users’ scenario for your demo, such as an end-user “day-in-the-life” saga – or
for more pain, start by walking through how to set things up – tasks done only
once.
This will
ensure that the senior members of the customer’s team grow bored and leave the
demo early (~fifteen minutes after the meeting began). They’ll never see anything that compels their
interest, requiring either a second demo meeting (unlikely), a loss to your
competitor, or a “No Decision” outcome.
Similarly,
the customer managers won’t be thrilled with what they see – your software will
look too long, too detailed, and too complicated for them to use
comfortably.
In the end,
you’ll have done a fair job training the target end-users, but the training
won’t be necessary since you won’t get the deal! An awful waste of time for everyone involved.
7.
Let
Questions interrupt and take control
of your demo: “But what about…?”
You’ve
started your demo and things are going well when, after five minutes, someone
asks a good question. You stop your
demo, take a few minutes to answer the question and turn back to your
laptop. The customer asks a follow-up
question which you dutifully address in more detail, taking another few
minutes. The customer considers your
answer, then asks for more details… And
you are now way off-track, lost in the weeds.
In the
meantime, what has happened to the rest of the audience? They’ve checked-out. They’re having side-conversations, checking texts
and email on their phones, or are leaving the room – and you’ve barely gotten
started!
Letting
questions divert your demo is an excellent way to ensure that you lose the
customer’s key players early in the meeting and run out of time before you’ve
gotten to your key points.
Another
terrific strategy for failure is to allow the Hostiles to take control of the
meeting – these are the people who don’t like you, don’t like your company, or
simply believe it is their purpose in life to torture the vendor. Let them take control and you’ll enjoy the
same negative results… They’ll consume
the time, bore the balance of the audience, and you’ll never get to deliver
your message the way you’d desired.
8.
Let
Bugs and Technical Issues consume
you: “Gee, it’s never done that before…”
Here are
three wonderful ways for you to show your software in the worst possible light:
·
First,
call attention to cosmetic bugs (poor screen repainting, cursor not changing,
“graphics garbage”, etc.). Make sure to
point out, “See that? That shouldn’t be
there…!”
·
Second,
when you do run into a bug, say “Gosh, I’ve never seen that before.” Then try the same operation again to ensure
that you run into the same bug twice! The wonderfully SAD result will be your
audience thinking, “Their software really doesn’t work and their best technical people don’t even know it!” Very convincing.
·
Third,
call out performance issues by noting, “It’s slow today because…”. Your audience assumes that your demo
environment must be severely hobbled – particularly in comparison to their
blisteringly fast network. Good thing
this won’t raise any concerns that might cause the customer ask for a POC, as a
result…
As an added
SAD bonus, when a crash or very serious bug has occurred that requires
re-starting your software or rebooting, make sure that the balance of your team
is sitting in the rear of the room texting or doing email on their phones – or
better, out in the hall making calls. This
ensures there is no way they can help manage the audience while the demo
machine recovers.
Double Bonus: For face-to-face demos, remember to leave the
projector cable attached to your laptop so that your audience can watch every
exciting moment of you rebooting your machine and troubleshooting the problem… Breathtaking!
9.
Limit
the time you show your big Pay-Off
Screen: “Ta-da… Any questions?”
You’ve been
demoing along for forty or fifty minutes and you finally get to your big
pay-off screen – the key message. You
present it for 50 milliseconds and then move swiftly to a PowerPoint slide that
says, “Thank you for your time – Questions?”
This is a SADly
terrific way to ensure that your audience never remembers your key
message. While you have likely seen that pay-off screen hundreds of times, this is
the first time your audience has ever
seen it. Showing that screen for a
fraction of a second puts your message in the long list with all the other 3000
marketing messages your customer will see that same day… Good luck!
Bonus: Include a huge rotating question-mark .gif to
completely mesmerize your audience (I’ve seen
this…)!
10. Avoid Summarizing: “And the next really
cool thing I want to show you is…”
Roll along
from section to section, through segment after segment, in a continuous verbal
assault. Leave no pauses, offer no
introductions and, by all means, don’t summarize after you complete an
important segment. You want your
delivery to be perceived as a firehose, furiously flinging features and
functions frantically at your audience (frightening, frankly).
This SAD
tactic contributes wonderfully to grow confusion, add complexity, and generally
bore the tears out of your audience.
For maximum
SAD effect, use this tactic in conjunction with long, linear,
non-componentized, multiple-player, multi-product, multi-hour demos. You’ll have your audience examining their phones
or the insides of their eyelids in no time!
Following
these “Top Ten” SAD guidelines will certainly increase the probability that
your demos will not help you achieve
your goals. When you do these ten simple
things, you should expect your audience to say, “Ugh… That was a Stunningly Awful Demo!”
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