Demo Don’t #2 Present a Long, Linear Demo That Saves the Best for Last: “Where is this going…?”

  

Have you ever been watching someone else’s demo and after a few minutes you start wondering, “Where is this going…?”

  

You can ensure the same awful fate for your prospects by delivering long, linear demos that show how to set up the system, then comprehensively plod through a workflow, taking forty, fifty, or sixty minutes (or longer!) to finally reach the end with the big pay-off screen. This tactic ensures that:

• Your audience is half asleep by the time you reach the important take-away message and pay-off screen. In some cases, 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 navigation features.
• The prospect is so mentally numb by the time that you do reach your big “Wow!” moment that they cannot remember it after the demo is over.

Could you make this worse? You bet!

• Invest liberally in showing Set Up Mode tasks that are only done once (and often by the vendor during implementation) to squander more time with unimportant items.
• Include all the latest features to consume remaining time.
• Every ten or fifteen minutes ask, “Any questions so far?” The “Nope, we’re good…” responses will encourage you to continue to drone onwards!

Solution? Do the Last Thing First! and apply the Inverted Pyramid approach to structure your demos. Both of these Great Demo! methods have been validated in studies of thousands millions of demos! 

 

 

This is #2 of The Stunningly Awful Demos Top Ten List – you can find all ten (plus a bonus) here!

https://greatdemo.com/stunningly-awful-demos-top-ten-list-of-demo-donts/