Lunch and Learn Demos

Lunch and Learn demo meetings are terrific vehicles for securing renewals and driving expansion.  

For those who are unfamiliar, these sessions are typically presented by presales or customer success folks to existing user populations or to mixed populations of existing and new users.  They are organized after Go Live has taken place to serve as refresher sessions and to expose users to additional capabilities or use cases.

For your Lunch and Learn sessions, determine the nature of the attendees before the session, when possible.  How many are existing users and for what use cases?  How many are new to the product?  

If you aren’t already intimate with your customer’s use cases, consider doing a “Why Did You Buy?” exercise to gain clarity on the objectives targeted, problems faced, capabilities needed, and value returned through the use of your software.  

If you don’t have prior information, start your session with the following questions for attendees:

1.  What is your name?
2.  What is your job title?
3.  What are your objectives – and do you have any specific topics you’d like to explore?

The Menu Approach is a fabulous method for starting Lunch and Learn sessions.  Organize what you demonstrate in accord with the results of your Menu review and subsequent poll, starting with the use cases with the most interest (or highest-ranking job titles) and apply the Inverted Pyramid approach.  If you run out of time, schedule another session to complete the list!

Note that what you learn from Question 3 above can help to populate your Menu.  You can add items dynamically, as they are raised, and show the voting accumulations as well.

For new use cases, offer Vision Generation Demos – just enough to generate interest.  Your objective is to sow the seeds of expansion in these sessions.

Pro Tip:  You may want to use a slide to show the timeline of the relationship between you and the customer to-date, showing the purchase, implementation, and Go Live dates.  Use this to reinforce the value received by other users in the organization and describe how the current group can leverage the existing implementation to share the successes enjoyed by their peers.

Pro Tip:  Describe relevant Value Realization Events – and the time-to-value for those events that current users within the organization have enjoyed. 

For helping attendees with existing use cases and workflows, expect to do a bit of digging to understand their questions.  Use Illustrations when possible to show (and confirm) the desired end result – and apply “Fewest Number of Clicks” when executing any pathway.  Let the audience ask the “Can it do X?” and “How do I do Y?” questions to Peel Back the Layers as appropriate (and avoid the convolution of “if”, “or” and “also” – see our article Stunningly Awful Demos – Two Words to Avoid).

Lunch and Learn demos can be done face-to-face or over the web.  If face-to-face, there is generally an expectation that you, the vendor, will provide lunch – do so!  For web delivery, contemplate the same idea using DoorDash or similar, if possible.  As a user, wouldn’t it be a delight to have pizza delivered a few minutes before the session was scheduled to begin?

Most Lunch and Learn sessions are scheduled for an hour.  Note that these should not be positioned as training sessions, but you may be expected to help users with specific workflows or features.  Group sizes should be large enough to make your time investment worthwhile, but not so large that users feel uncomfortable participating or asking questions.

Lunch and Learn demos are fabulous ways of building relationships, increasing software utilization, and improving user experience – all great steppingstones on the pathways to renewals and expansion.

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