Wrong Technique for Demos?

 

Michael Jordan once said, “You can practice eight hours a day, but if your technique is wrong, then all you become is very good at shooting the wrong way.”

The same is true for software demos…  How can you tell if your technique is wrong?  

• You fail to communicate business value;
• You pack as many features as possible into the available time;
• You suffer from Buying It Back;
• You are unclear about prospect needs when delivering any substantive demo;
• You equate presenting a demo with doing discovery;
• Your talk:listen ratio is too high (above 65:35);
• Your “overview” demos run 15 minutes or longer;
• Your average speaker-switch time is two minutes or more;
• People drop off or leave before you get to the “best stuff”;
• When you ask, “Any questions so far?” the response is, “Nope, we’re good…” or crickets;
• You have to deliver multiple “deep dive” demos to the same people;
• You spend any significant time in “Set-up Mode”;
• You let questions drive you into the weeds;
• You don’t confirm that you’ve closed questions;
• You don’t use a question Parking Lot;
• You suffer from Zippy Mouse Syndrome;
• You fail to use anything other than your mouse for pointing (e.g., annotation tools);
• You think that a “day in the life” is storytelling;
• Your corporate overview is longer than one slide;
• You don’t break your demo up into chunks;
• You don’t summarize.

This list is, of course, only a starting point…!  

If you’d like to improve or tune your software demo preparation and delivery skills, you might consider a Great Demo! Workshop for your team – or explore the methodology in an upcoming Great Demo! Virtual Public Workshop (information on the next two upcoming Public Workshops can be found here:  https://greatdemo.com/upcoming-great-demo-public-workshops/).