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Stories can be one of the most effective mechanisms in demos to
help your customers remember – and recommunicate – the use cases and value of
your offerings.
Stories engage, illustrate and are remembered in ways that facts
and features cannot. We are wired for stories – most people can retell
stories that resonate with them days, weeks or even months after initially
hearing the story.
Immortality
for the Boring?
Contemplate the following punchline: “Slow and steady wins the race.”
What is the name of this story and who first told it – and when
did the author live?
“The Tortoise and the Hare1”, one of Aesop’s Fables,
was first captured by Aesop in 600 BC.
Let me say that again: that story
is now 2600 years old.
And what is the take-away message from the story? “If you simply persevere, my son/daughter,
you will do well…”
Frankly, this message is boring. By itself, that message would not last (do
the experiment: tell a teenager that “if
you simply work hard and persevere, you will do well in life” – and watch the
reaction, “Yeah, right, whatever…”). The
message would disappear and be forgotten in moments.
However, when you wrap this boring message inside a story that
includes several key storytelling elements, that message gets told and retold –
and in the case of Aesop, for 2600 years (so far!).
“Tell me the facts and I'll learn. Tell me the truth and I'll believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.” – Native American Proverb
Storytelling
in Demos
It is fascinating to watch an audience’s reaction when you offer
to tell a story. When you ask, “Are
you interested in the true story of how this happened?” people
lean forward in their seats and their attention level rises markedly.
So how do you use stories in software demonstrations?
Use stories to underscore and illustrate key ideas and important
concepts.
During a demo, you present a capability – you describe what it
does and outline the business value for the customer. You may also use a metaphor or analogy to
develop the ideas further – that helps.
But to make it truly memorable, wrap a story around that capability– and make it live for millennia…!
What
Makes a Good Story?
Good stories get retold; others don’t. If stories you relate in demos aren’t retold
by your audiences then they weren’t successful.
Similarly, if your audience is not actively engaged while you are
relating your story, it is not getting the job done.
We know good stories when we hear them – they often cause us, as
audience members, to respond with a “Wow…!” or “Hmmmm…!” reaction. A good story often triggers us to tell one of
our own stories in response.
Here are five key elements of a good story as a starting point for
analysis:
Simple Message: The concept or message needs to be clear
and easy to understand
Real Experience: It has to be believable and perceived as
being true
Element of Surprise: An
unexpected twist, event or outcome generates interest and tension
Evokes Emotion: The best stories are those that generate
an emotional response
Relevant: Good stories relate directly
to the subject or key point
[Note: Read Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by
Chip and Dan Heath – this terrific book outlines the elements above and
develops other important principles of storytelling.]
Simple
Message
In Great Demo! Workshops, we use stories to illustrate the concept
of the Specific Capabilities needed
by a customer to solve a business problem.
There are typically tons of features and functions available in most
software offerings, but it is just the few Specific
Capabilities the customer actually needs to complete the desired tasks. The idea of Specific Capabilities is a simple one.
Unfortunately, if we simply said, “Remember, it is only the Specific Capabilities that the customer
needs…” our Workshop participants would likely not remember this idea very well.
However, by wrapping it inside one or more stories2 we give the idea of Specific Capabilities greater longevity.
Real
Experience
Why do customers go to users’ group meetings? (In addition to the free drinks, of
course…!) They go to hear how other customers have addressed
challenges or solved problems using the software.
The stories shared by other customers are perceived as real, based
on actual experiences, and are therefore highly valuable and believable.
Along the same lines, stories presented by vendors need to be
perceived as real to have solid impact in a demo meeting. Often, the best stories are (therefore) those
about how other customers solved
problems that are the same or similar to what the current customer is
facing.
Accordingly, some of the best
stories to use when presenting software demonstrations are customer success
stories. These are often shared
anecdotally in typical use, “Oh, I remember working with another customer who had the same problem…”
The skill here is to capture and plan to reuse that success story when delivering demos for other,
similar customers.
Element
of Surprise
Memorable movies have numerous plot twists and turns – stories
that offer one or more non-obvious surprises tend to engage and are more
effectively remembered. Stories that are
too predictable may be less interesting.
In Aesop’s The Tortoise and
the Hare, we all expect the rabbit to win the race (with ease). But because he takes a nap and oversleeps,
the turtle is able to beat that bunny. (Note: in the Warner Bros. Bugs Bunny version of the
story, the careful observer will note that the turtle is cheating at the start
of the race – with his feet beyond the starting line. This is an additional element of surprise –
we didn’t expect that terrapin to cheat…!).
Elements of surprise can come from a range of possibilities:
-
Turning a well-known phrase upside down: “Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.”
-
Presenting an unanticipated result: “Resulted in the loss of $245K annually.”
-
Offering an unexpected process or approach: “Turn traditional demos upside-down.”
When using stories in demos, find stories that have a similar
twist or unexpected turn. For example,
“He was about to spend 6 weeks and tens of thousands of dollars to
build a tool on his own – but in a conversation with another customer at a
users’ group meeting he learned about an unsung and unknown product that was
the perfect fit. As a result, he was
able to beat the schedule and came in under budget with his project…!”
Evokes
Emotion
To connect strongly to a story, the audience needs to feel an
emotional impact – it should resonate with them as a shared experience or
situation.
A child comes home from school and reports to his parents,
“Everyone did really poorly on today’s math test…” Most parents immediately respond, “Well, how
did you do?” The parents don’t care about the balance of
the class – there is no emotional connection – but how their child performed is critical.
To introduce the idea that “We Are Programmed to Forget” we offer
an example situation in the form of a short story: “Have you ever arrived at the end of a drive
that you take frequently – to the store, to school, to the office – and you
suddenly realize that you have no
recollection of the drive itself? We
think, ‘I must have been on autopilot’…”
For many people, this evokes emotional responses of recognition, wonder,
self-aware surprise, and a certain degree of discomfort. At the same time, the realization that this also
appears to happen to everyone else is reassuring.
An emotional connection makes the story that much more meaningful and
personal.
In a software demo, we want to use stories that have a similar
emotional “hook”. One way to accomplish
this is to begin with, “Have you ever had the following experience…?” followed
by a story that has a high-probability of having happened to this customer as
well.
In Great Demo! Workshops, we ask questions like, “Have you ever
had a demo go poorly…?” The answers are
nearly always, “Yes…” followed by a stream of descriptions of what
happened: no Internet, wrong audience,
not enough time, etc. – all of which evoke head nods of agreement from the
balance of the participants who have suffered through similar situations.
Relevant
Stories need to be perceived as relevant or their impact drops
precipitously – stories need to resonate with your audience.
A customer in the manufacturing industry won’t consider a demo
that uses data from a commercial banking scenario as credible – he perceives it
as too distant from his situation.
Similarly, stories need to be aligned with how customers view themselves
and their situations.
When discussing Remote Demos, we often offer a story in which a
rather embarrassing email preview message appeared during a webinar to a large
audience. The message described plans
for a date that evening – in rather graphic and embarrassing terms!
While the specifics may be different, many people have seen or
suffered from similar situations – and the story resonates and has strong
relevance.
Leveraging
Well-Known Stories
Relating ideas in your demo to well-known, existing stories can be
simple and very effective. Using stories
taken from popular media such movies, TV and famous YouTube videos offer good
examples:
-
“These are not the droids you seek…” [The movie? Star Wars. This line is often offered
immediately after a bug appears in a demo…!]
-
“One miiiiiillion dollars” [The
movie? Austin Powers. Usage?
Ah – so many possibilities!]
-
The slow-motion cliff-hanger scene in Deadpool [Usage? Explaining In Medias Res.]
-
“A Conference Call in Real Life (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNz82r5nyUw) [Usage?
Illustrating the frustrations of using conferencing technology…]
-
The “Rockwell Retro Encabulator” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXJKdh1KZ0w) [Usage?
A beautifully produced, stunningly awful demo, with an emphasis on (avoiding)
the use of technobabble.]
Each of these (hopefully) references and draws upon our previously
stored memories of stories already in place.
This can be a great strategy, particularly when trying to draw analogies
or find examples.
Note: in the case of the
YouTube examples, they can be played at the time of use – presenting the story for
you that underscores the problems and behaviors.
The
Hero
An additional story-telling concept is the use of a hero – someone
(or something) that the audience can identify with. Traditional stories (e.g., sagas) typically
have a hero that encounters and overcomes trials and adversity before achieving
success. (Check out the Wikipedia entry
for “The Hero’s Journey - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey).
In demos, heroes can take a number of forms:
-
Customer (an individual): The customer can be portrayed as the
hero (very effective!), with the payoff being the timely and on-budget
completion of a project, accolades from colleagues or a promotion. In my own experiences, it was gratifying to
see customers I’d worked with over a period of years move from staff members to
middle managers to senior and C-level management, partly as a result of using
our software.
-
Team (a customer team or group):
The logical corollary to an individual, a team can be presented as the
hero in a story.
-
Customer’s customer: In
this case, the hero is the ultimate beneficiary.
-
Product: Your software can
be the hero, similarly, enabling a customer to achieve their objectives in
spite of (apparently) overwhelming challenges.
-
The Cloud: Interestingly,
the “Cloud” can be positioned and perceived as a hero – “when our own servers
went down, we were still able to complete the project thanks to the ability to
access the software and our data from the cloud…” I’ve heard a number of examples where the Cloud
is the hero, in addition to the one above:
access to key information via collaboration tools or capabilities, group
scheduling scenarios, and disaster recovery experiences (“and we were able to
get back up and running just in time for the opening…”).
“Wrap
a Story Around Your Demo…”
Many managers ask their teams to “wrap a story” around their demos
– and teams struggle to find and use stories that meet this requirement.
One unsuccessful tactic
is to use a “day-in-the-life” to bind together a range of tasks, functions and
multiple job titles. The end result is not really a story, but is simply an
organizational framework – and as such it fails to engage interest. How could it?
How exciting is it to hear about executing one’s day-to-day job?
It is unlikely that a good story can be wrapped around most demos.
Stories are most effective when used as punctuation, as reinforcement,
and as alternative mechanisms for making key ideas stick.
When
to Use Stories
Use stories when presenting your most important points, critical
concepts and key competitive capabilities.
Stories help make these ideas memorable – and enable the ideas to be
retold with high fidelity within the customer’s organization.
As an example, consider a scenario where you decide to present a
key competitive capability in your demo.
You should:
1. Present
the capability, describing what it does, how it works (if desired by the
customer), and the business value it delivers.
“Our SmartAutoRollback feature keeps you protected from disasters…” Those are the facts – important, but
uninspiring.
2. Draw
an analogy or relate the capability to a metaphor: “This capability is like having air-bags in
your car: you hope you never need to use
them, but if you actually have an
accident you’ll be glad they were present…!”
3. Wrap
the capability inside of a story (in this case, a customer success story): “Let me share what happened with another
customer, in a very similar situation to you.
She was struggling to complete the project when there was a terrific
rainstorm, the roof caved in and the server room flooded. She though all was lost, but because she had
just implemented our SmartAutoRollback capability, she discovered that all of
the files were already on the
machines at the backup facility – and she was able to complete her project
ahead of time and underbudget…!
Never
Tell a Good Story Only Once
Good stories serve to punctuate key points and help make your
demos remarkable and memorable. Collect them.
Try them out. Refine them. Repeat.
Practice and improve telling the stories that work. Experiment – try out various stories for a
range of situations.
Test and refine – and then share what works with your peers. After all, they’ll want to hear a good story
as well!
1 The title of the story, and the animals, may change from culture to culture, but the key elements and the take-away message remain the same.
2 For you who have survived a Great Demo! Workshop, you may remember the following stories:
“…You are riding a bicycle rather fast…”
“…A negative conversion of $245,000…”
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