Great Demo!

21 Clicks Is Too Much – Stop the Demo!

2012-01-30T09:21:00.001-08:00

Yes, people do count clicks during demos – and this is the true,brief horror story of too many clicks (I heard this from a recent Great Demo!Workshop participant):

During a demo – and not very far into it, the head of agroup of National Account Managers suddenly said, “Stop the demo – 21 clicks istoo much!” And that was the end of thatsales opportunity…

His point was very simple: any task that takes 21 clicks to complete is probably going to be toodifficult and too complicated to do for the average person (and in thisparticular case the audience and expected users were sales people…). For this senior manager, 21 clicks was(beyond) his threshold for an acceptable number of steps for this particulartask.

The moral?

Take that path that is the fewest number of steps to complete the task.

“Before I demo to you, why don’t you demo to me…?”

2012-01-22T09:34:00.001-08:00

“Before I demo to you, why don’t you demo to me what you arecurrently using?” If a customer has anexisting software system, this can be a wonderful way to understand the strengths,weaknesses and gaps in their current system – particularly from the customer’s point of view. They’ll tell you what they like, what theyhate, what’s missing and a range of other delightful Discovery information.

Additionally, this also inverts the traditional process of thevendor presenting to the customer, to one of the customer presenting to the vendor – an experience often rememberedby the customer as remarkable and interestingly different!

Practice Your Mouse Movements… All The Time!

2012-01-16T12:03:00.001-08:00

For some people presenting demonstrations, moving the mouse smoothlyand deliberately occurs naturally. Forothers, it can be a real challenge! Here’sa quick tip: practice moving your mouseas if you are delivering a demo allof the time. The “muscle memory”associated with constant practice will reward you when you are in the heat of atough demo – and can’t invest time to think about how best to move yourmouse.

When we are mousing for ourselves, our mouse movements tendto follow the motion of our eyes. So, ifwe are hunting for a specific command or tool, as our eyes flit back and forthacross the screen so does our mouse! Instead, think (first) about where we want the mouse to go, then move itsmoooooothly and deliberately to that specific location. And don’t move it again until you’veidentified the next specific destination…!

A Novel Thought About Screening Candidates For Presales Positions

2012-01-04T07:50:00.001-08:00

How do we assess theskills and competence of candidates for presales positions? I look carefully at resumes, but there is awonderful expression that “you are perfect twice in your life: once when you are born and the second time onyour resume…” References are important,of course, as are typical interview questions. However, I like to ask candidates for three additional opportunities toevaluate them:

1. Ask them to do apresentation on a subject near and dear to their hearts to evaluate theirability to “tell” (many hiring managers do this today).

2. Ask them to perform aDiscovery session with you, on a topic they know intimately such as their currentcompany’s offerings, to evaluate their ability to “ask”. This is rather novel, I think, and may helpto uncover presales people that are particularly strong at doing Discovery.

3. As them to present a demobased on what they learned in their Discovery session with you, to see how wellthey listened and incorporated what they learned into their demo – and to evaluatetheir demo-specific delivery skills (extra points for structuring their demo ina Great Demo! format, of course!).

This strategy gives youan opportunity to evaluate candidates’ ability to “tell”, “ask”, “listen”, and “show”.

Early January Is Demo Skills Assessment Time!

2012-01-02T11:43:00.001-08:00

The start of the New Year… what a terrific time to perform anassessment of your own or your team’s demo skills! Doing an assessment now establishes abaseline for measuring change and improvement during the course of the year –and it only takes about 10 minutes per assessment.

For Yourself: Do anassessment of yourself. Have yourmanager do an assessment of you. Haveyour peers do assessments of their perceptions of your skills. Then compare…

For Your Team: Do thesame process, essentially – have each team member do an assessment of their ownskills; do assessments yourself of each member’s skills; and consider havingpeers do assessments of one another.

In addition to establishing a baseline for the year, gapsthat are uncovered between individuals, peers and managers can be quiteilluminating and represent opportunities for discussion, coaching, mentoring orother skills development possibilities ([warning: shameless self-promotion alert!] e.g., Great Demo! Workshops, Master Classes,Coaching, etc.).

When should you do your next assessment? I’m glad you asked that question… Next year? Far too long between assessments to be of sufficient value. Twice per year? Still too infrequent. I’d recommend re-assessing skills every 2, 3,or 4 months and setting small, incremental goals for improvement accordingly (bythe way, there is nothing sacred about quarters for skills development –sometimes picking an interval that is NOT tied to quarters can be much moreeffective!).

Where can you find a good demo skills assessment template touse (or to use as a starting point)? Feel free to send me an email at PCohan@SecondDerivative.com and I’llsend you ready-to-use (also new and improved!) demo skills assessments forindividuals and/or for teams. You arewelcome to use these directly or edit as desired.

‘Twas the Night Before The Big Demo

2011-12-21T16:03:00.000-08:00

‘Twas the Night Before The Big Demo

(with apologies toClement Clarke Moore)

‘Twas the night ‘fore the demo and all through the house

Not a creature was stirring, ‘cept my SC and his mouse;
I’d proposed a big licensing deal with great care
In hopes a big order soon would be there;

Management was restless and not in their beds

As visions of bonuses danced in their heads;
And my VP with his forecast and me with my own,
Had just started a long EOQ roam,

When out from my mobile there came a great ring-tone,

I sprang from my chair to answer my phone,
What could it be? Wasit good news or no?
A last-minute order? A contract? PO?

Greetings, said my assistant, who spoke on the line,

It was someone to see me, offering help at this time!
Who could it be at this late eleventh-hour,
To make the deal sweet and avoid something sour?

Away to the door I flew in a flash,

And swept it open in my quest for fast cash,
When who to my wondering eyes should appear,
The DemoGuru! And standing so near!

He came in my office and, while dusting off snow,

Said, “I have some news that you’ll want to know.”
He drew up a chair and asked for some tea,
And said to my VP, SC and to me:

“Your deal is in trouble and I’ll tell you now,

Your demo’s confusing, complex and lacks ‘Wow!’
It’s riddled with features and functions and more,
And too many cool things, mouse clicks galore,

Don’t flog them with features and other neat stuff,

Stick with the substance, stay away from the fluff,
The more that you show is not always nice,
Customers may say, ‘Please lower the price!’

The Buzzword-Compliant Vocabulary list,

Are words, I’m afraid, that are better-off missed,
Not Flexible, nor Powerful, nor Easy-to-Use,
Not Robust, nor Seamlessly Integrated abuse,

And no corporate overview, please don’t do that,

After ten minutes they’re grabbing their hats,
Present as a team, so if things get hairy,
Sales folks aren’t lost in the back with Blackberry.

Your customer’s queued and ready to go,

They love the vision you’ve built with them so
They want Technical Proof in the demo you’ve planned,
Just the key capabilities, everything else banned.”

“But how can we do this?” I heard myself cry,

“We’re victims of momentum, we’re nervous to try,
Another approach, a new way to go,
We have to admit we’re just a bit slow!”

“Do the Last Thing First!” he said with a smile,

“Then peel back the layers, and Do It with style,
Peel it back in accord with their interest,
Stay focused and execute, and you’ll find it best,

Your customer’s Situation is a great way to intro,

Their Reasons and needs, from CBI flow,
Review these and check – is this still the case?
Are we aligned or are we off-base?

Start with the end, that big pay-off piece,

Illustrate and describe, those are the keys!
Capture their interest, compel their attention,
Make sure it aligns with their mode of consumption.

When it clicks and they’re hooked, they’ll then ask for more,

There’s absolutely no way that they’ll head for the door,
They’ll say, “Please show us, prove that it’s so,
Show us the rest, please do demo.”

Then Do It, just Do It, with no extra clicks,

To return to that Illustrative image that sticks,
Make it simple, make it fast, make it easy and clear,
Then they will realize they’ve nothing to fear,

Encourage their questions, most are not new,

Good ones and Great ones and Stupid ones too,
Treat Hostiles with courtesy, use your Parking Lot so
Those mean, nasty folks can’t damage your flow,

Peel back the layers, Do It Again,

Show only what’s needed, put nothing else in,
Let them drive the demo, let them think they’re in charge,
While their Vision Solution you work to enlarge!

Summarize, summarize, tell them again,

‘Cause adults do learn by repetition,
And when you show a key take-away screen,
Leave it up, let it linger, so they’ll know what they’veseen!

“I get it – I’ll do it!” exclaimed my SC,
“This is all so obvious, it’s way clear to me!”
And he sprang into action, his mouse flew like lightening,
(Frankly, his speed was a little bit frightening!)

And with that the DemoGuru smiled and he said,

“Your way is now clear, put that baby to bed,
Your deal’s now on track, your order secure,
You’ll make your numbers at the end of the year,

Then he strode from my office in a blink of a pun,
Turned ‘round and he said, “My job here is done,”
Ere he drove out of sight, I did hear him say,
“Great Demo! to all and to all a Great Day!”

How Many Slides Long IS It?

2011-12-20T07:57:00.001-08:00

As someone starts up PowerPoint (or Keynote) and opens theirpresentation, have you ever noticed that you rapidly scan to see how manyslides long it is? And what is yourreaction when you realize that the deck is 30, 40 or more slides long, and theindividual slides look rather thick with text, data and charts? Terror? Denial? Acceptance and preparationfor boredom?

Morals:

If you are the presenter, don’t let them see your slide deckin any preview mode that shows the length – or (much better) trim it down tothe actual number of slides that are really needed (and/or that can be consumedby your audience).

If you are an audience member and the presentation isscheduled for an hour or more, prepare yourself accordingly! (E.g., think of synonyms for “boredom”; writehaiku poems on painful presentations – and don’t forget the “seasonalreference” required in real haiku; have a smart-phone ready and out of sightfor some surreptitious web browsing, etc…)

The Words We Choose To Use...

2011-12-14T16:49:00.000-08:00

We should be cognizant about our audiences’ backgrounds,training and educational/cultural experiences and perceptions, because thewords we use in our demo delivery (and Discovery conversations) can have strongimpact on perceptions of our offerings and solutions.

In a study done on potato chip bag labeling, it was foundthat there were two general types of packaging, with respect to vocabulary:

The first used 8^th grade vocabulary and focusedon appearing to be “plain-speaking” and “genuine” – these packages were forlower-end chips (Lays, Utz, etc.) and targeted buyers of same.

The second packaging used 10^th-11^thgrade vocabulary with phrases like “hand-raked” and “crafted” – this packagingwas used for the higher-price chips (Boulder, Kettle, Terra, etc.).

Not surprising, perhaps, but fascinating in any case!

The study was done by Dan Jurafsky, at the Stanford UniversityDepartment of Linguistics.

Demos and Discovery – Interesting Metric

2011-12-12T06:20:00.001-08:00

For those who like to track things, here’s an interesting demosuccess metric to consider: compare theamount of Discovery done prior to a demo (in minutes) to demo length (also inminutes). One should expect the ratio ofthese will typically be >1 for successful demos – those that result in asale (or movement to the next stage in the sales process). For organizations that choose to track this,I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the ratio is actually >>1 (much muchgreater than 1) for demos that result in a sale…!

“Slide Number 37…”

2011-12-06T14:26:00.001-08:00

It fascinates me that in so many sales-oriented technical presentationslide decks, the biggest “pay-off” or “Wow!” slide appears about 7/8 of the waythrough the deck…

“Ask the Author” Office Hours

2011-12-02T09:10:00.001-08:00

I’ve found that providing question-and-answer sessions toGreat Demo! Workshop participants a few months post-event has been veryeffective in helping teams and individuals to implement the ideas and improvepersonal practices. I’d like to propose offering these to the broader GreatDemo! community.

Specifically, I’d like to suggest setting up regular conferencecalls that anyone in the community can join. We might schedule these to occur on a monthly basis, for example, andhave each call run an hour in duration. Participants could send me topics ahead of time or voice them during thecall. I’d expect we would discuss andshare success stories, challenging situations, questions, tips and ideas ondemos and closely related topics.

These could be, essentially, informal users’ group meetings.

If you are interested, please send me an email at PCohan@SecondDerivative.com,along with any suggestions or preferences on how to make this work well. We can then look at specific timing andmechanics.

Insufficient Discovery – Great Doctor Examples

2011-11-30T07:18:00.001-08:00

Scenario 1:

Imagine walking into a doctor’s office and, before you canopen your mouth, the doctor immediately writes prescriptions for a broad rangeof drugs… The doctor then says, “Let meknow if any of these drugs seem to help address any problems you have.”

Scenario 2:

Imagine walking into a doctor’s office and (again), beforeyou can open your mouth, the doctor immediately writes prescriptions for abroad range of drugs… A few days lateryou come back, at which time the doctor says, “So what seems to be the trouble?”

How are these different from presenting a demo to a customerbefore doing any Discovery?

Discovery - It Shouldn't Be Surprising That...

2011-11-28T08:54:00.001-08:00

It shouldn’t be surprising that many sales and presalespeople are not be particularly skilled at doing Discovery… Why? Wheninterviewing candidates for new sales and presales positions, we don’t exploretheir Discovery skills nearly in the same depth with which we evaluate otherskills, such as the ability to deliver a credible presentation.

Consider the typical process for assessing a new sales orpresales candidate:

- We review their resume and cover letter(note: people are perfect twice in theirlives – at birth and on their resumes!). It is very rare that anyone claims to be proficient in doing Discoveryas a resume “bullet”.

- Next, we bring promising candidates in for aninterview, in which we ask many questions about them and allow them somequestions about us and our organization – this is typically as deep that ourevaluation of their Discovery skills ever goes – a handful of questions aboutthe position, responsibilities, objectives, the company, etc.

- Candidates that survive an initial interview areoften invited back to deliver a 30-60 minute presentation (on a topic of theirchoice) – we want to make sure that they have sufficient presentation skills,since it is an important skill for their role.

After a discussion with their references, we make a finaldecision, draft an offer letter and, once accepted, welcome the new hire onboard.

Our assessment of candidates’ Discovery skills was limitedto a few questions, mostly about the job and related topics. We never really explored candidates’ abilityto execute real Discovery. We are muchbetter at assessing candidates’ abilities to tell than to ask!

Here’s a recommendation:

For candidates that survive the interview (and presentation,if desired), invite the candidate(s) back to perform a Discovery session withyou as the customer. Let the candidateuse their current company/offerings as the basis (and candidates can tell youwhat role you should play in terms of job title and other situational information). This provides you with a direct method ofevaluating their Discovery skills and methods, giving you much clearer insightinto how each candidate may perform when working with real customers.

If you feel that strong Discovery skills are an essentialpart of your team members’ toolkit, then consider including a critical review ofthese skills during the interview process. [Note: if you have existing team members whose Discoveryskills are less than desired, that’s where I may be able to help!]

Improving Demo Delivery – Great Demo! Self and Team Coaching Tools

2011-11-22T08:49:00.001-08:00

A number of Great Demo! Workshop participants and theirmanagers have asked for help in improving their practices, particularly withapplying Great Demo! core principles to demo delivery. Accordingly, here are two tools to help individualsself-coach and managers coach their teams (in addition to the Assessment toolsalready available).

The first is a Great Demo! Demonstration Delivery ReviewSheet. This is a simple template thatenables individuals or managers to review the results of specific demos interms of the key Great Demo! delivery components. Tracking these over time can provide awonderful understanding of what learnings were retained and put into practice, whateach individual is doing well and where there are opportunities to improve.

The second tool is a Great Demo! Key Attributes listing,which roughly assigns relative importance to each delivery element and aligns withthe Delivery Review Sheet.

Send me an email at PCohan@SecondDerivative.com and I’llsend you these tools – I can also send the Assessment tools as well, if you don’talready have them.

Discovery - Burn Victims

2011-11-17T08:47:00.001-08:00

Customers that tried toaddress problems previously and failed are known as “burn victims” – and theytend to be very careful aboutsubsequent solutions!

“Have you tried to fix thisbefore?” Answers to this question canyield some interesting and sometimes surprisingly information.

A “Yes” response requirescareful follow-up questions. “Whathappened?” is a good starting point. Youwant to understand what actions were taken, what tools were purchased (if any),when this all took place – and what were the outcomes for the organization andthose who were impacted.

If the answer is “No,” yourresponse could be “Why not?” It might bethat the problem was never big enough to address (but now it is) or that priorsolutions were perceived as insufficient (in what ways?).

What’s in a Name? More Than One Might Expect – Consider “Discovery” vs. “Qualification”

2011-11-15T08:17:00.001-08:00

The process of gathering information about customers’situations is variously labeled “Discovery”, “Qualification”, “Analysis” andother terms. Interestingly, the name used by your organization mayencourage or discourage the effectiveness of the process.

Consider: “Qualification” is (often) about putting boundaries around a salesopportunity: “Is it adequatelyqualified?” This may yield a limited setof answers to questions such as:

-         “Does the customer have a problem – have theyadmitted “pain”?
-         “Is there budget allocated?”
-         “Is there a time-frame in mind?”
-         “Do we know the pathway to purchase – who willmake the decision?”
-         “What alternatives or competitors is thecustomer also considering?”

The answers to these questions tend to focus inwards ongetting the deal done for the vendor.

“Discovery”, on the other hand, is all about exploration,and suggests images of uncharted waters, novel vistas, new viewpoints andideas. Discovery is a process of askingquestions – that may lead to more questions. It should be perceived as a “Archimedean Spiral” of exploration,covering more and more territory (look it up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedean_spiral).

One nearly consistent attribute of very successful salespeople (those who consistently make or exceed their numbers and are a pleasure,generally, to work with…) is their ability to perform broad and deepdiscovery. They ask “Why, who, when,where, what, and how” questions. Theyplumb for details and search for high-level drivers. To paraphrase a famous outdoors equipmentcompany (The North Face), they never stop exploring.

Interestingly, people who are known as Discoverers orExplorers are often perceived as heroes – those who opened new worlds orbrought new knowledge to light: CaptainJames Cook, Louis Pasteur, Madame Curie, Captain James T. Kirk (even fictionalexplorers may be heroes!). Contrariwise,the list of heroic people who were known for qualifying or putting boundariesaround things may be much shorter!

“Why” Questions – Uncovering the Drivers in Discovery

2011-11-11T07:58:00.001-08:00

“We need a new system…” says the customer. “Great!” says the sales person, “We’ve gotseveral possibilities for you…!” And thediscussion then proceeds to explore lists of features and functions, needs anduse cases. This is all wonderful, butwhat’s missing?

“Why do you need anew system?” is a key question to ask, when appropriate. The answer to this question may change theentire dynamic of the Discovery discussion and the resulting sales process.

For example, if the customer responds, “Well, we’ve beeninterested in a new system for some time…,” it may suggest that the customer isnot really serious and that solving the problems inherent in the old system isnot sufficiently important to change – it is not a Critical BusinessIssue. This sales opportunity is a goodcandidate for a “no decision” outcome.

On the other hand, if the customer responds, “Well, the COOhas mandated implementing a new system to drive down costs and she wants it inplace before we complete an upcoming acquisition…,” then you have identified aCritical Business Issue (“reduce costs”) and a Critical Event (before theacquisition takes place). This salesopportunity is much more likely to end with a completed order.

Discovery - Fail Early, Fail Cheaply

2011-11-08T08:11:00.000-08:00

Far too many sales opportunities run far too long, for arange of reasons. One simple example is not asking questions about“show-stopper” requirements early enough.

A show-stopper issue is exactly that – is it an issue orrequirement on the part of the customer that is:

1.      Absolutely required
2.      Non-negotiable
3.      Not available from you, the vendor (and there isnot reasonable work-around)

A simple example of this is a customer who absolutely,positively desires an in-house implementation installed on their own servers(and you only offer SaaS, with no possibility for installation on customers’servers). For some customers, this mightbe a objection that can be overcome, but for others their position may be fixedand unchangeable.

It is best to understand this early in the sales process,during Discovery, rather than later on, to avoid unnecessary investment by boththe customer and the vendor in demos, additional meetings and otherdiscussions. Imagine how the customerChampion would feel, after organizing a series of demo meetings for key playersin multiple departments, to learn that the solution simply won’t fit! (Very angry). And then imagine what that ex-Champion would tell his or her peers atthe next conference about that vendor…!

Contemplate making a list of show-stopper questions orissues to add to your Discovery documents and outlines – and be prepared to askthese questions during Discovery.

Provocative Questions – Starting Discovery

2011-11-07T11:56:00.000-08:00

Using provocative questions is a great way to startconversations and move a discussion into Discovery. A good provocative question causes yourcustomer to:

-         Rapidly qualify himself in or out as areasonable prospect
-         Agree that there is a problem to solve
-         Open up to further questions

For example, imagine you sell sales process management/automationsoftware and are at a conference with piles of prospects present. You join a table for lunch with 8 otherpeople and everyone introduces themselves briefly. Someone asks you, “What do you do?” Your response can range from boring tointriguing:

Boring: “We sellsales process automation software.” (Yawn…)

Typical: “We helpsales teams improve their processes.” (OK thanks, next…)
Intriguing: “Have youever seen a sales team document their opportunities consistently?” Hmmmm, interesting…!)

For the intriguing option, a “No” response (often accompaniedby a wry smile or wince) tells you that the prospect has that problem – and the prospect may immediately volunteer moreinformation, “No, in fact our sales people “sandbag” on deals they areconfident about and have “happy ears” on far too many opportunities that neverclose…!” At this point, you can comfortablylaunch into Discovery questions about the team, sales cycles, current process,etc.

The key to formulating strong provocative questions is totake a key indicator or qualitative measurement of what you do and rephrase inthe form of a question.

For example, in the world of demos, I love to ask, “Have youever seen a bad software demo?” If theresponse is yes (and it often is…), we are off and rolling comfortably into aDiscovery conversation.

Sales Manager Cognitive Dissonance

2011-11-01T15:38:00.001-07:00

Cognitive Dissonance is the uncomfortablesituation of trying to rationalize ideas that conflict with one another. Sales managers (and presales managers) are oftenhighly susceptible – particularly with regards to skills and methodologytraining. Managers are generally veryhappy to provide training for their teams – but often don’t participate, themselves,in the classes. In many cases, they believethey already know the material (even if they’ve never seen it!) – they may believethat since they are managers thenthey (somehow) already know it.

In my experience there is oftena gap between the actual level of understanding of concepts and the perceivedlevel of understanding, particularly with sales managers (this gap can often belarge; I’ve been victim to it myself when I was in sales management). Theresult is an inability for sales managers to assess, track and coach theirteams – leaving sales people to either subscribe to the ideas on their own or(quite often) go back to their old ways.

In the world of software demosand Great Demo! methodology, here’s a good example of this in action: if the number of demos done (or requested tobe done) in the absence of Discovery is uncomfortably large, this suggests thatsales people are not practicing the key ideas. If this number continues to be large over time, thisthen suggests that sales managers are not coaching their teams to improve theirsales people’s performance. I’ve noticeda fairly close correlation between these situations and managers not participatingin the Great Demo! training for their teams.

Similarly, if the team’s “nodecision” rate is uncomfortably high, this may (again) suggest thatinsufficient Discovery is being done, as well. Here’s a simple test: examine the opportunities that led to “nodecision” and then examine if Situation Slides were generated and if they werecomplete or sufficient. Specifically,was there a clear Critical Business Issue? Delta? Critical Date/Event? The lack of any one of these increases thelikelihood of a “no decision” result.

The moral?

Good managers provide trainingfor their teams. Great managersparticipate in training with their teams – and coach to reinforce, support andimprove performance for each individual.

Great Quote

2011-10-27T09:52:00.000-07:00

“The more you say, the less I will remember.”

Great Demo! and Stunningly Awful Demos Articles – What Have You Missed?

2011-10-25T10:22:00.000-07:00

Overthe past few years I’ve generated a fair number of articles on demos andrelated areas – here’s the listing in case you’ve missed any, organized bytopic.

I’dbe happy to send any of these to you via email. Alternatively, they arealso available on our website at www.SecondDerivative.com/Articles.html. Each article has its own page and a link to a downloadable PDF version.

Feelfree to forward them on to others, as well.

Great Demo! Core Concepts

ü The Great Demo! Top Ten List

ü Stunningly Awful Demo Evolution- Have You Ever Seen Demos GetShorter?
ü Why Should a Demo Be Like a News Article?
ü Competitive Demo Situations and "Bake-offs" – How toBias Towards Your Strengths
ü Stunningly Awful Demos – The Great Demo! Top Ten List of What NOTTo Do
ü Stunningly Awful Demos - Debilitating Demo Diseases
ü Stunningly Awful Demos - Debilitating Demo Diseases AdditionalAfflictions
ü Stunningly Awful Sales Prevention Demos
ü Why Don't They Get It - Are They Stupid Or What?
ü Attention Retention in Demonstrations
ü Too Complex - A Demo Disaster Story
ü Stand Away From TheMouse! - Letting Your Champion Drive

Demo-Related Topics

ü What Makes a Demo Truly Remarkable?

ü Demo Capital - Underutilized, Undervalued and Often Insufficient
ü Stunningly Awful SaaS Demos - Lost in the Clouds
ü Storytelling and Demos
ü Are You a Demo Expert? Why Experts Should Feel Uncomfortable
ü We Are Programmed to Forget - And Its Impact on Our Demos
ü Four Opportunities to Harvest- The Value of Informal SuccessStories
ü Transition Vision - "We Love It - But How Are We Going To GetThere?"
ü The Database Break-EvenPoint

Remote Demos

ü Stunningly Awful Remote Demos – The Top Ten List of InflictingPain at a Distance

ü Remote Demos - The Role of the Active Conduit
ü Remote Demonstrations - What Can We Do Better?
ü Demos to Mixed Local and Remote Audiences – Tips to HandleCombination Situations

RFP’s, Scripted Demos, POC’s, Trials and Evaluations

ü Stunningly Awful DemoSituations - The Horror of Scripted Demos

ü Stunningly AwfulSoftware Evaluations - A Strategy of Hope?

Team Topics

ü Death By Corporate Overview

ü Stunningly Awful Demos Team Practices - Where 1 + 1 = 0

New Product Roll-out

ü Selling to Your SalesForce – The Toughest Customer of All - Product Launch Demos

Presentation and Delivery Tips

ü The Meaningless-FillerGratuitous-Phrases Vocabulary List

ü The Content-FreeBuzzword-Compliant Vocabulary List

Growth and Development

ü Demo Skills Assessment - Do It Now

Recorded and Website Demos

ü Auto-Demo Hell

ü More Auto-Demo Hell - A"Customized" Recorded Demo?

Trade-show Tactics

ü Trade ShowDemonstrations - The Menu Approach

Just For Fun

ü 'Twas the Night Before the Big Demo

Mynext article will likely explore Discovery issues and challenges (another inthe Stunningly Awful Demos series) – if you are not already on our emailinglist, please let me know if you’d like to receive it.

Additionally,let me know if there are other topics you’d like to see explored in an article!

RFP Responses – When to Pull Back

2011-10-24T16:47:00.000-07:00

Far too often vendors invest incredible amounts of resourcesin RFP responses and resulting Scripted Demos – even when they know they havelittle (or no) chance of success. Ifyour organization wins fewer than 50% of the RFP’s you respond to, you may wantto consider making a change to find better investments for your team’s time andenergy.

If you believe you are in a poor position in an RFP responseprocess and none of your requests for gaining access to the customer for a Discoveryconversation or re-ordering the script have been permitted, consider pullingback – saying “No” to the customer. [Gasp!]

Here’s why you might want to contemplate this strategy (particularlybefore investing additional time and substantial effort in a demo competition):

You may be on the customer or consultant’s list of vendorsto show that they covered a sufficient number of vendors before making theirdecision – even though the decision had already gone to the vendor who is firston the list. This is known as being“Column Fodder” (from Solution Selling). Corollary: Be First!

You may not have sufficient capabilities in your offering,particular in comparison with your competition.

Be honest with yourself – if you don’t have a reasonablechance, then don’t invest the resources. Don’t “live in the land of hope”…! If you don’t really have a reasonable chance to win the business, thendecline the competition – and invest your team’s time and energy in salesprojects that have a higher expectation of success. In these cases, it may bebetter to fail fast, fail early, and fail cheaply…

Consider Pulling Back When:

You are clearly not column “A” – the RFPwas clearly written for another vendor
You’ve had no access to the customer forDiscovery conversations – the resulting RFP is simply a list of features andfunctions without context
The RFP response time was too limited – this suggeststhat a decision has already been made for another vendor, but the customer’spurchasing process requires multiple vendors be “evaluated”
There was no ability to change or modify the RFP– again this suggest that the customer has already made a decision in favor ofanother vendor
There was no ability to change or modify thedemo script – this could be an effort on the part of the customer to establisha “level playing” field – or it may favor another vendor’s offering
These is no clear Critical Business Issue – the salesopportunity may like end in “no decision”
There is no Critical Date or Event by when thecustomer needs to have a solution in place - ditto

Many vendors report that when they do Pull Back and say “No”,customers often come back to the vendors to askthe vendor to participate!

Accordingly, be prepared to negotiate for what you want ifthe customer says, in response, “But we needyou to participate”. Define and knowwhat you want to ask for.

For example:

Access to the customer/business players/keyusers
Ability to rearrange the script
Adding rows to the RFP – that are included in asubsequent revision

Metrics – Why We Need To Include the Denominator

2011-10-19T17:41:00.000-07:00

In addition to earlier posts, here’s a simple idea: make sure to include an appropriate (or morecomplete) denominator in measurements. A richer denominator enables you to measure effectiveness; the numerator onlymeasures activity.

The example I love to use is to compare:

“Demos Completed per Quarter”: Measures activityonly (and often results in a negative spiral of “we need more demos so that wehave enough pipeline to meet our numbers…”).

Vs.

“Demos Completed per Quarter per $ of Revenue”: measuresthe effectiveness of the team’s demosin securing business.

Expanding on this:

“Demos Completed per Quarter per $ of Revenue on a per-salesperson basis”: measures the effectiveness of individual sales people in the use of demos intheir sales opportunities. This doesassume that other variables are largely independent, which may or may not betrue. There may need to be some level ofnormalization done to be able to compare sales people’s performance (e.g.,quota size, average order size, etc.).

Similarly:

“Demos Completed per Quarter per $ of Revenue on a per-presales-person basis”: measures the effectiveness of individual presales people in the execution ofdemos. Again, this also assumes that othervariables are largely independent. Similarly,normalization may need to be done to compare presales people’s performance(e.g., was discovery done adequately, quota size, average order size, etc.).

Tracking these kinds of metrics over time provides managers(and individuals) with tools to coach and tune the overall organization’seffectiveness, on an individual-by-individual, region-by-region, or overallteam basis.

Improv Comedians – and Demos

2011-10-18T08:14:00.001-07:00

I was told that only 2% of comedians can do improv comedysuccessfully… Everyone else practicestheir acts constantly – I’d say that the same principle applies to demos.

Remote Demos – Pause Sharing at End

2011-10-13T08:46:00.001-07:00

Here’s a simple safety tip: at the close of a Remote Demo or Webinar, “pause” sharing of yourapplication or desktop. This offers twoadvantages:

First, you minimize the risk or showing something you didnot mean to show to your audience – for example, flipping over to read email orupdating your Facebook page while still sharing your desktop(!).

Second, you can freeze the screen with an Illustrationshowing or other “payoff” screen (could be a Menu showing items completed inthe demo, could be an Illustration, could be a summary slide, etc.).

Simple Sales Process Metrics for Demos

2011-10-10T11:26:00.001-07:00

Here are a few sales process metrics to consider trackingthat will enable managers and individuals to understand where there areproblems or challenges (e.g., with the process overall and/or individual salesor presales staff). These same can beused to help drive implementation of Great Demo! methods after initial traininghas been completed:

For each sales opportunity:

- Was the opportunity the result of receiving an RFP? (If “Yes”, then treat these separately – seebelow.)

- Was Discovery done?
• Was a completeSituation Slide generated for each key player?
- Was a Great Demo! done?
• Or was the demoa “Harbor Tour”?
- What was the outcome (close, loss, no decision)? (A “no decision” could be defined, forexample, as an opportunity that did not close in the forecasted quarter…)

Tracking these over each quarter will enable teams todetermine, very rapidly:

1. The impact ofcompleting Discovery (vs. not), with respect to closed business.

2. The impact ofGreat Demo! demonstrations vs. Harbor Tours on achieving closed business.
3. Who is or who isnot doing Discovery.
4. Who is or who isnot doing Great Demos! vs. Harbor Tours.

For opportunities from RFP’s:

1. Were we “Column A”(were we first or the favored vendor)?
2. Were we able toperform Discovery?
3. Were we able tochange the order of a resulting Scripted Demo?
4. If “No” to 2and/or 3, did we “Pull Back”?

Similarly, tracking these will enable teams to determine,very rapidly:

1. When to say “Yes”vs. “No” to RFP response requests.

Methodology Implementation – Metrics Matter (Very Much!)

2011-10-07T11:02:00.000-07:00

6 to 1 – that’s the ratio of closed sales opportunities usingGreat Demo! vs. “Harbor Tours”, as tracked by one Great Demo! Workshopscustomer. More specifically, he reports thatfor business that closed during a 12 month period, 62 sales projects used GreatDemo! demo Discovery/prep and delivery methods vs. 9 sales projects where Discoverywas deemed insufficient and the resulting demos were Harbor Tours. Sales projects ranged from approximately $200K- $1.5M in deal size.

Equally interesting were the numbers reported for “NoDecision” outcomes: For those salesprojects that had a complete Situation Slide for each key player, No Decisions ranat less than 10%. For sales projectsthat had incomplete Situation Slide information No Decision rates were above 60%(ick).

How was this information used? There were two very interesting processchanges that took place, as a result:

First, it was mandated by senior sales management that adequateDiscovery information be uncovered prior to scheduling a demo – specifically includingassessment of Situation Slides prior to agreement to proceed with a demo. (There were some loopholes for extenuatingcircumstances, but the gross majority of demos are now preceded by what isconsidered to be adequate Discovery).

Second, sales pipeline measurements were changed. Previously, sales people were incented toschedule demos (as many as possible) as a key indicator of overall pipeline activity– which had resulted in a negative feedback spiral of doing more and moreunproductive demos, resulting in less closed business per demo, causingmanagement to increase the number of demos per sales person per quarter to tryto increase pipeline. After reviewingthe numbers from above, sales management changed “number of demos scheduled/completedper sales person” to “number of demos completed per sales person per $ of revenue” – a very clever way ofmeasuring the effectiveness of demo preparation and delivery.

The bottom line? Thisparticular team will be having one terrific “President’s Club/Sales Kickoff” ina wonderful location next January!

Using Salesforce.com’s Chatter To Support Great Demo! Implementation

2011-09-27T07:46:00.000-07:00

A number of Great Demo! Workshop customers report usingSalesforce.com’s Chatter functionality to reinforce and support roll-out andongoing implementation. For example,they report:

- Posting success stories

- Using and editing Situation Slides and Illustrations
- Posting tips and advice
- Discussing new and challenging situations
- Asking where to find or use specific pieces of DemoCapital

It is nice, simple mechanism to keep team members engagedand to share ideas.

Public Great Demo! Workshop

2011-09-26T16:02:00.000-07:00

An overview, agenda, location and pricinginformation are available here: www.skmurphy.com/blog/2011/06/08/great-demo-workshop-on-october-12-2011/.

“Clearly You Weren’t Listening…”

2011-09-20T09:53:00.000-07:00

I’ve come across an affliction that, untreated, can causeserious chronic trauma to sales teams and forecasts: Ignoremucitis. This terrible disease manifests with thefollowing symptoms:

1. Sales team does a great job in qualification anddiscovery, asking many excellent and thoughtful questions.

2. Sales team then presents a demo that essentiallyignores everything that was learned.

3. Customer chooses to purchase from a competitoror does nothing.

Additional collateral damage can include loss of sales teamcredibility, negative buzz from customers to other customers, and anever-increasing spiral of trying to increase the sales “funnel” with more leadsand more unproductive demos…

This horrible disease is curable. For individuals, a single application of theGreat Demo! book (applied topically,not to be ingested) has shown remarkable efficacy in studies done by the FDA (FamousDemonstrators Association). For team-sizedepidemics, the FDA recommends an initial dose of Great Demo! Workshops, followedperiodically by refreshers to maintain desired antibody levels against futureoutbreaks.

Demos - Measure What You Want to Impact

2011-09-16T08:01:00.000-07:00

Too many organizations measure the number of demos delivered – without exploring whether these demoswere needed or productive. In fact, anumber of sales organizations incent their teams based on the number of demosscheduled or delivered, under the belief that the more demos in the pipeline,the better the pipeline… This generatesa negative spiral of doing more unproductive and unnecessary demos, yielding forecaststhat are increasingly inaccurate and consuming valuable resources that couldotherwise be allocated to more profitable sales opportunities.

It is my experience that doing fewer, much more qualifieddemos results in higher close rates and more accurate forecasts. Great Demo! practitioners report measuring:

-         Demos per $ of revenue
-         Close rates
-         Sales cycle length
-         Cost of sales (per revenue $)
-         Free vs. paid trials and evaluations (POCs,POVs)
-         Number of trials and evaluations required
-         Deal size and breadth
-         No decisions
-         % follow-up calls
-         Internally-circulated demo success stories

Other measurements to consider?

We Are All In…Support

2011-09-13T09:47:00.000-07:00

Most of us have heard the phrase, “We are all in Sales”, but I recently heard an interesting twist on this: “We are all in Support”. This is a terrific flip from the traditional positioning that everyone in the organization is part of the sales team and selling process.

The idea that everyone in the company is ready, able (willing), and proactively working to help customers implement, use and get the desired value from the offerings is huge…! It can be a key competitive differentiator, particularly when the customer perceives that the functional capabilities of your offering vs. a competitor’s are essentially equal.

Public Great Demo! Workshop

2011-09-06T09:01:00.001-07:00

[Warning: Shameless Self-Promotion Alert!]

Our next Public Great Demo! Workshop is scheduled for October 12, 2011 in San Jose, California, co-sponsored by SKMurphy (www.SKMurphy.com). This is a terrific opportunity for individuals or small groups to learn how to put Great Demo! ideas into day-to-day practice. An overview, agenda, location and pricing information is available here: www.skmurphy.com/blog/2011/06/08/great-demo-workshop-on-october-12-2011/

Demo Capital – Underutilized, Undervalued and Often Insufficient

2011-09-01T09:06:00.000-07:00

[This is a rather long article for a post - send me an email at PCohan@SecondDerivative.com if you'd prefer a copy emailed to you]

Consider the sum of an organization's knowledge, know-how, tools, techniques, tips and success stories related to demonstrating one's offerings. As with other types of capital, how can this best be captured, developed, and leveraged? How is it valued (how should it be valued)? And is what you have today sufficient?

Use of your organization’s Demo Capital should yield competitive advantages and opportunities, ranging from sales successes, to productivity and efficiency gains, to attracting and retaining high-value employees. A first step is to identify what you have...

What is Demo Capital?

Interestingly, its existence is often assumed rather than truly recognized. Demo Capital is the aggregate sum of your organization’s demo infrastructure and know-how, ranging from laptop configurations to demo success stories swapped at the bar during kick-off meetings.

Here are some tangible elements of Demo Capital, as a starting point:

- Demo databases, data, and accompanying application scenarios

-          Demo virtual machine images
-          Specific demo support software and tools
-          Demo scripts
-          Recordings of demos and demo segments
-          Qualification, discovery and analysis forms and documents
-          CRM system forms and fields
-          Meeting preparation sheets and forms
-          Situation Slides
-          Illustrations
-          Defined and practiced "Do It" pathways
-          Similarly defined "Peel Back the Layers" pathways
-          Documented answers to typical questions
-          Formal Success Stories and reference customers
-          Documented Informal Success Stories
-          Market-specific data, notes, and materials
-          Competitive strengths/weaknesses tables and pieces
-          RFP response boilerplate (including "Adding Rows"); won/lost RFP’s
-          Documented stories, props and other tools applied in successful demos

One could define Tangible Demo Capital as any demo-related entity that can be accessed and used by the team as a whole.

There is likely an even larger collection of assets and know-how that can be classed as Intangible Demo Capital – these are any demo-related entities that cannot be accessed and used by the team as a whole. In addition to anything above that is simply undocumented or unknown beyond any specific individual, other intangible elements might include:

-          General best practices generated or evolved by individuals
-          Tips, tricks and techniques for face-to-face demos
-          Face-to-face presentation skills and techniques
-          White-boarding tips, methods and use scenarios
-          Tips, tricks and techniques for Remote Demos
-          Menu Approach super-sets and sub-sets for specific customer scenarios
-          Lists of probable or likely customer Critical Dates or Events
-          Particularly successful props, stories, and related presentation "nuggets"
-          Methods for handling specific questions and hostile audience members
-          Tactics for dealing with typical customer objections
-          Tips and proven methods for outflanking specific competitors
-          Successful Transition Vision development with customers
-          POV, POC and Evaluation success strategies and methods
-          Training techniques for new sales people and channel partners
-          Post-demo debriefing methods and tools
-          Other team-related tactics and techniques
-          Testing/retesting demo environments (particularly those with frequent releases)
-          Methods for surviving a full day at a trade-show booth – (and an evening at the bar)
-          Undocumented Informal Success Stories and related anecdotal success stories
-          Improvements and changes made to documented materials (but not documented)

[This last arena can be huge! Just consider the (likely) multiple versions of “standard” overview, corporate and product presentation decks that have been evolved by individual team members, for example…]

Clearly, these lists are not exhaustive – a brief brainstorming exercise should yield longer and more specific lists unique to your organization. The resulting lists should also alert you to strengths and weaknesses in the Demo Capital you have – and gaps associated with capture, cataloging and re-use of these resources.

What is the Value of Your Organization's Demo Capital?

Demo Capital only has value if it can be, well, capitalized upon. Let’s briefly examine the cost of not leveraging existing capital.

Could we have avoided losing opportunities to competitors or "no decision" if a team member had access to another’s experience or tools? (“For the want of a nail the shoe was lost…”). Similarly, could a specific tip or idea have eliminated the need for a second meeting or repeat demo for one customer?

Nearly all sales, presales and marketing teams complain that they don’t have enough time to get everything done. What is the opportunity cost associated with repeat work?

- Recreating materials or tools (that individuals could not find or were unaware of)

- Re-developing know-how (often through painful experience)
- Re-discovering applications of these (e.g., an effective white-boarding method)

There are approximately 220 “selling” days per year – it is extraordinarily painful to find that one or more of these days have been wasted (particularly if the impact resulted in the difference between achieving one’s numbers versus missing them!).

Yield From Investment

Here’s the payoff - and the challenge! There are a series of strategic and tactical questions that can help extract the best yield from your existing investment in Demo Capital – and to determine what might be missing or need improvement:

Tactically:

-          What do we have? What's missing? Is it sufficient?
-          Where is it? How is it organized and accessed? How do we use it today?
-          Are there tools available to help? Are there best practices that we can apply?

Strategically:

-          Can we shorten our sales cycles? Improve our sales processes? Increase revenue per opportunity? Reduce the number of demos per dollar of revenue?
-          Can we increase efficiency and productivity in our sales, presales and marketing teams? What would help the team achieve quota most consistently?
-          Can we improve our ability to attract, hire and retain top-performing staff? How do we further develop existing staff?

Assessing, capturing and leveraging Demo Capital can clearly be a means to address some of the critical business challenges faced by sales, presales, and marketing leadership - and at mid-management and staff levels as well.

Is It Sufficient?

For a specific example of an addressable but often painful “gap” in Demo Capital, let’s revisit the “Is it sufficient?” item from the previous section, with respect to demo data. For many products, generating demo data that is satisfactorily broad for a range of markets yet specific for any one arena can be a tough challenge – especially when your offerings span multiple job titles, disciplines and markets.

Generating meaningful demo data (and corresponding application scenarios) to address customer situations that might range from commercial banking to manufacturing to retail typically require either an enormous effort or some very clever data design, or both!

The importance of relevant demo data can be exceptionally high. The ability for customers to see meaningful and realistic data as part of “their” solutions can be the difference between winning and losing the business. Data that is perceived as fake or unbelievable hurts your cause; data that appear to be real and relevant support your efforts.

Asking a customer to “pretend” with data that is obviously from an alien arena is a recipe for disaster. A few specific things to avoid include:

- Data that includes the words “test”, “demo”, or similar.

- Data that is obviously fake, for example that include famous actors or other people with well-known names.
- Ancient data – imagine describing “real-time access to up-to-date information” with screens that show the most recent records are from August 2006!

Have you ever felt you lost an order because of the quality of your demo data? If yes, then what might currently be perceived as “something we just have to live with” should be recognized as a real Critical Business Issue – and needs to be addressed with a tangible investment of resources (time, people, money).

What about your on-boarding process? How long does it take for a new presales, sales or marketing person to come fully up-to-speed? What if you were able to leverage existing (but currently unshared) success stories, demo strategies, tips and techniques that are already in use – but are locked in other team members’ heads?

In this example, the information is sufficient but the access to that information is not. One simple solution is to implement a series of “Demo Days”, where team members present demos they are particularly proud of or that were wonderfully successful. These sessions yield stories, tips, and new ideas that can be shared and used immediately within the team.

Underutilized, Undervalued and Often Insufficient

Demo Capital is too frequently taken for granted – both the presence and absence – resulting in what can be rather fearsome lost opportunities and unmet challenges. Review your existing investment and determine: are there major gaps that need to be closed; are there opportunities waiting to be harvested?

Passion – And Demos

2011-08-29T07:53:00.000-07:00

(This is a brief post – but a huge topic…) How do you keep your demos fresh, even after doing 5, 10, 20 or more demos in a month (or week!)?

The passion we feel for what we do serves both as a source of energy and as an engine to help us make every demo unique (as far as the customer is concerned), remarkable and engaging. The excitement we feel about our offering and the desire and ability to change the world is what often propels us, even after the 6^th hour of a scripted demo.

Harnessing and using this passion can make enormous differences in audience perception – the difference between someone simply “clicking the mouse to get the next screen…” vs. building a strong tangible vision of a solution in a customer’s mind.

Tactically, what can we do to tap into this passion?

- Avoid pre-answering questions (let the customer ask questions that we can respond to)

- Look for opportunities to learn something new in each demo

- View each demo as a performance (like a performance of music or play)

Other ideas?

Jobs Thoughts (Steve, that is…)

2011-08-26T07:47:00.001-07:00

I heard three ideas over these past few days with respect to Steve Jobs’ resignation from Apple that are particularly worth sharing:

First, Steve drives an ethos that is all about the experience rather than the product. This can be paraphrased, “Don’t sell me a product; sell me an experience!”

Next, and along those lines, one might say that Apple doesn’t have a VP of Products so much as it has a VP of Lust – that person’s objective is not to present a product to us but instead to make us lust after his or her offering!

And finally, Charles Revlon was famously quoted as saying, “In our factories we make cosmetics, in our stores we sell hope!” What is it that Steve Jobs has been selling these past 14 years? He’s been selling Confidence. The confidence of knowing that whatever you buy from apple it will be delightfully easy to use – truly intuitive – no risk, no worries about complexity, no concerns about being overwhelmed. Now that’s a Great Demo!

Completing Situation Slides at the Demo Meeting

2011-08-23T13:42:00.000-07:00

A number of Great Demo! Workshop participants report good success with the following tactic: While reviewing the customer’s situation using a Situation Slide, the sales team asks the customer to fill in any gaps before the demo itself begins. Showing the line item with blank data has had the effect, in some cases, of the customer actually volunteering the missing information! This has proven to be very useful when working to understand customer Critical Business Issues, the Delta, and/or Critical Dates, in particular.

Public Great Demo! Workshop

2011-08-19T10:49:00.001-07:00

Don’t Let Perfection Be The Enemy of Great

2011-08-18T13:40:00.001-07:00

Just heard this paraphrase of the classic Voltaire quote (“Don’t let perfection be the enemy of the good”) in a demo. The customer was very interested in the offering, which clearly offered terrific value, and asked about capabilities net yet implemented. The presenter responded, “Don’t let perfection be the enemy of great” as a way of telling the customer that the offering in its current form would make substantial improvements to the customer’s process and bottom line – and to move forward now rather than waiting (potentially forever!) for additional capabilities that might make it better…

“Stalker” Demos

2011-08-12T08:35:00.000-07:00

Just heard this phrase in a recent Great Demo! Workshop: “Stalker Demos”. Loosely translated, it amounts to “If you don’t agree to purchase after this demo, we’ll come back again – and again – and again – and we’ll keep delivering demos until you cave in…!”

This is amusing at one level, but it is based on situations where an initial demo didn’t go well – often because the initial demo was a Harbor Tour or Show-Up-and-Throw-Up Demo – causing the vendor to request doing another, “better” demo for the customer. Given that there are only about 220 “selling” days per year, repeating a demo meeting represents a large opportunity cost.

I suspect that many of us have or had parents who offered the advice, “Measure twice, cut once”. Insufficient preparation, especially with regards to performing adequate qualification and discovery, can yield these “Stalker Demo” results!

Story-telling and Demos: The Hero

2011-08-09T13:06:00.001-07:00

As I’ve remarked previously, story-telling can be an extremely effective method to communicate key ideas – and stories can be particularly “sticky” with respect to audience memory and retention. 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.

For 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.

- Team (a customer team or group): The logical corollary to an individual, a team can be presented as the hero in a story.

- Product: your software can be the hero, similarly, enabling a customer to achieve their objectives in spite of (apparently) overwhelming challenges.

- SaaS: 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 vendor’s software 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, disaster recovery (“and we were able to get back up and running just in time for the opening…”).

Any other hero types or ideas to suggest?

“Demo Day” Sessions

2011-07-29T08:26:00.000-07:00

Many Great Demo! Workshop principals and participants ask what they can do to keep the implementation process moving forward, after a Workshop completes. One simple (and surprisingly effective) tactic is to do a “Demo Day”. This is an extension of the role-play sessions practiced in the Workshop, where each person or team presents an 8-10 minute demo to the overall group, followed by feedback and discussion. This reinforces the key concepts and surfaces new tips and best practices – and is a highly valuable exercise whether or not the team has had the pleasure of participating in a demo skills Workshop.

I typically suggest allocating about 30 minutes per role-play to give sufficient time for the demo, feedback, technical glitches and break time. In a half-day session you present and review 8 demos easily.

A Demo Day is something that teams and principals can do on their own or [warning: shameless self-promotion alert!] have someone who is highly skilled in teaching and coaching demo practices facilitate – me, for example!

Having Your Champion Drive – Interesting Variant

2011-07-27T07:56:00.001-07:00

I often suggest having your customer (or more specifically your Champion) drive for portions of a demo. This changes the entire dynamic in comparison with traditional demo meetings, making things different and very engaging. I also recommend reducing any risks by working with your Champion and practicing beforehand so that both you and your Champion are comfortable.

A wonderful alternative to this is to have your Champion narrate while you drive – this may be the next best thing to having the customer drive, but with (substantially!) reduced risk. Try it!

Introducing the Demo - Like the Evening TV News

2011-07-05T17:00:00.001-07:00

A number of Great Demo! Workshop participants have enjoyed good success in positioning “Do the Last Thing First” by drawing an analogy with the evening TV news. They tell their audience that “We are going to start, like TV newscasters do, by going you the headlines for each “story” so that you have an outline of the overall demo. Then we’ll go into each “story” section in more detail.”

Customers apparently understand and appreciate this analogy – it resonates!

Testing Web Collaboration Tools – While Doing Discovery

2011-06-28T11:36:00.000-07:00

Many sales teams find that their customers are (still) unfamiliar with web collaboration tools (e.g., WebEx, GoToMeeting) or have not tested the tool before a scheduled vendor demo – resulting in fumbling, lost time and (sometimes) having to reschedule demos. In addition to the several other ideas already offered in this forum, here’s another (very clever) one:

One Great Demo! Workshop participant recently noted that he sets up a web session for his discovery calls. In addition to having the session open and available for any discovery needs (e.g., Menu Approach, Workflow Analysis, etc.) this is a subtle way to test the technology before any demo is scheduled. Very clever!

Remote Demos – Who’s There?

2011-06-13T15:30:00.001-07:00

Consider typing the names of the audience members on the screen (use a white board, PPT, or Word document). This confirms who is actually present, engages the audience and gives you an accurate list as well – audience members will often correct any spelling errors for you!

Product Overview Presentations - Like Having a Brochure Read to You

2011-06-10T11:15:00.001-07:00

Many demos are preceded by 1) a corporate overview presentation and/or 2) a product overview presentation. Leaving the horrors of typical corporate overviews aside for the moment, it just struck me that watching many product overview presentations feel a lot like having someone read a product brochure you… A recent product presentation I watched took over 30 minutes (before the demo) and reviewed the company history and mission statement (again, even after it was introduced in a corporate overview presentation!), then walked through the history of the problem/shortcomings of the existing technology, technology Bottlenecks, the product technology itself (how it works) including details of architecture and environment, typical numeric results, security, integration options (SDK and API’s) and finally deployment.

The customer was quiet throughout the entire 30 minutes – no interaction. It struck me that this was like having the product brochure being read to us!

Stunningly Awful SaaS Demos – Lost in the Clouds

2011-06-06T14:13:00.000-07:00

What are the challenges of presenting SaaS offerings vs. “traditional” or “on-premise” software products? SaaS demos present specific opportunities for disaster – several of which are outlined in this installment of Stunningly Awful Demos…

It’s the Same, Only Better – Let Me Show You…

Many vendors work to differentiate SaaS from traditional offerings, in spite of often positioning SaaS offerings as providing the same functionality as their traditional behind-the-firewall counterparts. Many demos attempt to show these 1:1 comparisons in gory, boring, painful detail – with negative results (including but not limited to):

- Way too long, way too boring, ran into bugs, made the simple look complicated, opened the opportunity for damaging questions, key players left early, and on and on.

It’s Slow Today Because…

How often have you heard this phrase? Customers assume that whatever environment you use for your demos is better than their infrastructure (have you ever heard a customer say, “Our network is blisteringly fast?”). What they see in a demo is the best they typically expect the offering will perform in their own hands.

To add to this, customers are already concerned about performance when operating SaaS products over the web. Demos need to take this rather strongly into account to minimize clicks and other performance-related challenges.

No Plan “B”

And, of course, don’t capture screen shots of your key screens so that if you have no internet connection you are unable to show anything…! God forbid you’d have these stored in PowerPoint or Keynote as a backup plan…

iPhone, iPad, iCloud, iAndroid, iBlackberry, iSmart

Customers expect to see a broad range of devices supported by SaaS product vendors, including “traditional” PC’s and Macs, iPads and other tablets, and a range of smart phones. New practices need to adjust and reframe demos to address this.

Demos done solely on a laptop may lack sufficient depth of proof for many customers – and emulators are OK, but they miss opportunities to use iPhones and iPads (etc.) as props and to put the product in customers’ hands (changing, wonderfully, the whole demo dynamic).

Getting “Social”

“Social” is an additional challenge for some SaaS demos… Customers may want SaaS offerings to integrate with and/or feed a range of “social” tools (e.g., Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.). This adds more complexity in demo preparation and delivery. There is even an entire cadre of “social aggregator” tools designed to help address these efforts, including EventBox, twentyfeet, Flock, friendfeed, youmeo, ping and a pile of others.

[Some of the names of these tools are really fascinating, for example: Twitter Tools, Twhirl, TweetBeep, TwitBin, Twidget, TwitterBerry, and Twittalator Pro. Gad!]

Vendors that offer these capabilities are often only too happy to show them in their standard demos – is this a good thing? Perhaps – but only if the customer views them as Specific Capabilities they need to address their problems.

Vendor Vocab

If you want to confuse your customers, try verbalizing a variety of vendor vocabulary terms. Here is a set to draw from, as a start – be sure to add your own company-specific terms and acronyms to further increase the perceived complexity.

- Cloud, cloud-based, in-the-cloud, cloud-burst

- On-premise, traditional, installed, behind-the-firewall

- On-demand, hosted, ASP, multiple-tenant
- SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, AaaS

Ignore F11

Most SaaS software is accessed (and demonstrated) via web browsers. In day-to-day use of browsers, many demonstrators use a range of toolbars (Google, Bing, Favorites, Command Bar, etc.) to provide them with quick access to a range of capabilities. These toolbars, however, consume screen real estate and may confuse audiences. Stunningly Awful SaaS Demos ignore this…

Tapping F11 (in many browsers) hides these toolbars, devoting the maximum possible screen real estate to your application and reducing apparent complexity. Simple and effective!

The Latest (And Greatest)?

One advantage of SaaS offerings is the ability to deliver releases nearly continuously, as opposed to traditional processes of large, comparatively infrequent releases (often followed by “X.01” releases that address problems found with the last large release!).

The corresponding disadvantage for presales and sales teams is staying on top of this release flow. SaaS demos often show the latest, greatest releases and functionality – which increase the risk of encountering bugs, surprise when the “old” workflow has been changed, and confusion when capabilities have changed.

Stunningly Awful SaaS Demos ignore testing the latest release environments or doing a dry-run of the demo ahead of time. Feeling lucky?

Wait – Don’t Buy This Yet!

A dangerous corollary of the above is the knowledge or expectation that capabilities not yet released will be available shortly. How often have you seen a purchase delayed by a misspoken comment or promise along the lines of, “Oh, that capability will be in the March release…” – to which the customer responds, “Terrific, then I’ll hold off buying until March…!”

Mismanaged Migration

What about upgrading existing on-premise customers to SaaS versions?

Many sales teams assume that customers will want to make those migrations right away (and pay for the “added value” of SaaS). Stunningly Awful SaaS Demos occur when it turns out that the customer is perfectly happy with their current on-premise implementation and do not perceive a sufficient driving force to move to the SaaS offering – there is no compelling reason to change.

This is exacerbated when demos delivered after insufficient discovery show that key functionality, in heavy use today by the customer, is not available or is insufficiently implemented in the SaaS version. Ick.

Interestingly (and especially sadly), some of the key capabilities lacking in the new SaaS versions are often amongst the most important for customers – reporting tools and other output capabilities, for example. These are (sadly again) often the last capabilities to be implemented in SaaS release rollout. Double ick.

“Configure, Not Customize”

Have you ever heard this mantra chanted by sales teams? “Our offering is configurable and doesn’t require custom development to implement customer-specific needs”. That’s great.

However, vendors often spend the first 10 minutes of Stunningly Awful SaaS Demos showing the broad range of configuration options – well before getting to the end deliverables desired by the customer. Bear in mind that many (most?) customers configure the offering only once, when it is first implemented!

Hijacked By IT

The demo was going great… and then an IT person asked, “What browsers do you support?” The answer to that question prompted the IT person to follow-up with, “And Java? What level of Java is needed? Flash? CCS? HTTPS? SOAP? REST? Multiple tenant...?”

Instead of “parking” the question for later, the presenter answered each question in detail, getting dragged deeper into a hole and moving farther from the main issues that the key customer players were interested in – and then they left the meeting room…!

Input – But No Outgo?

Many new SaaS offerings focus on the operations a customer can apply to their data or the associated workflows. A typical weakness for newly released SaaS offerings is the lack of sufficient capabilities for reporting or exporting the results.

To paraphrase a terrible old TV commercial, “You can check the data in, but it can’t get out…”

Login Logorrhea

Many customers have concerns about the security of their proprietary information in vendor SaaS applications. Rather than address this as a part of Q&A (where it typically belongs), Stunningly Awful SaaS Demos consume the first few (key) minutes of a demo detailing the login process, security arrangements, and customer data protection provisions.

This is a great approach if the team is presenting to IT (alone), but bores the heck out of business users – and consumes the few minutes that high-level executives are willing to invest in a demo meeting. Unless it has been identified as a key issue by customer management, save it for later in the meeting…!

Interesting (Good) Examples of Online Demos

2011-06-02T09:00:00.001-07:00

The folks at Spotfire (Tibco) have created an interesting set of online demos at http://spotfire.tibco.com/demo/default.aspx worth exploring. Typical online demos often try a one-size-fits-all strategy, which fails in many situations (since we aren’t one-size-fits-all customers). Spotfire has created a flock of example demos (~60) for a range of industries and application areas, endeavoring to enable customers to focus on reasonably specific topics and challenges.

Further, the demos are not canned recordings, but are live (bounded) versions of the offerings, enabling customers to dynamically explore the demos and associated capabilities. There is, of course, some risk in this – that customers will not figure out how to navigate through the demos, but the use of some text descriptions (along with brave clicking on the customer’s part) largely addresses this issue.

Overall, an excellent job in providing appetizer-level examples of Spotfire’s capabilities – and potentially a great template of an approach for others.

Stories and Demos – Demo “Capital”

2011-05-23T12:23:00.001-07:00

I often suggest that presales teams get together on a regular basis to share tips, best practices, and new ideas (these gatherings are sometimes called “Demo Days”). The collection of knowledge, skills, and infrastructure is referred to as Demo Capital – an extremely valuable resource for a vendor.

One additional element of Demo Capital to contemplate is stories. Stories used in demos that have proven to be particularly successful should be shared – and reused – within teams. Consider including a “storytelling” segment in your next Demo Days event.

Remote Demos – Screen Resolution Statistic and Tip

2011-05-05T11:00:00.000-07:00

A quick survey of the people who browse our website (www.SecondDerivative.com) shows the following screen resolutions:

1280x800 – 28.80%

1440x900 – 21.76%
1024x768 – 19.74%
1366x768 –   9.47%
1600x900 –   6.88%
1115x697 –   6.06%
1920x1080 – 2.13%
1600x1200 – 5.17%

This suggests that the lowest common denominator for screen resolution for Remote Demos is (still) 1024x768…

And, of course, one can always employ the “can you see my mouse in the upper left-hand corner; can you see my mouse in the lower right-hand corner” method to confirm that you audience is seeing your full screen.

SaaS Demos – Getting “Social”

2011-05-03T08:23:00.000-07:00

Being “social” is an additional challenge for many SaaS demos… Customers often want SaaS offerings to integrate with and/or feed a range of “social” tools (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, etc.). This adds more complexity in demo preparation and delivery. There is even an entire cadre of “social aggregator” tools designed to help address these efforts, including EventBox, twentyfeet, Flock, friendfeed, youmeo, ping and a pile of others.

[Some of the names of these tools are really fascinating, for example: Twitter Tools, Twhirl, TweetBeep, TwitBin, Twidget, TwitterBerry, and Twittalotor Pro. Gad!]

Any thoughts on best practices in this regard?

SaaS vs. Traditional Software Demos

2011-05-02T11:24:00.001-07:00

What are the challenges of presenting SaaS offerings vs. “traditional” software products? I’ve been looking into this and note the following three major challenges (at least):

- Vendors are trying to differentiate SaaS from “traditional” offerings, in spite of messaging that says that the SaaS offerings provide the same functionality as the traditional behind-the-firewall products. Many of my (vendor) customers note that changing the way they demo has strongly helped SaaS positioning and uptake.

- Customers are concerned about performance when operating SaaS products over the web. Demos need to take this rather strongly into account to minimize clicks and other performance-related challenges.

- Customers more and more expect to see a broad range of devices supported by SaaS product vendors, including “traditional” PC’s and Macs, iPads and smart phones. New practices are needed to adjust and reframe demos to address this.

Other thoughts?

Storytelling and Demos: Imagine…

2011-04-22T09:38:00.000-07:00

Connecting with your audience is a key part of storytelling and, interestingly, the mode of delivery can have a large impact on the audience’s reaction.

For example, a story about the trials and tribulations of a 3^rd party can generate some empathy:

“He was so surprised when he didn’t get the order…!”

A stronger mode of delivery is to present in first person:

“I was so surprised when I didn’t get the order…!”

Potentially even more compelling is to present the story in the mode of “imagine this happening to you”:

“Imagine how surprised you would be when you didn’t get the order…!”

Storytelling and Demos

2011-04-20T08:07:00.000-07:00

Stories can be one of the most effective mechanisms to help your customers understand the use and value of your offerings.

Stories engage, illustrate and underscore in ways that facts and features cannot. We have a particular propensity to remember stories – most people can reasonably accurately retell stories that connect with them – days, weeks or even months after initially hearing the story.

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. We are somehow programmed to be interested in hearing stories and audience body-language reflects this.

“Wrap a Story Around Your Demo…”

Is there a “Grand Unified Story Theory…?” 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 may be unlikely that a real story can be wrapped around most demos (there may be no “Grand Unified Story Theory…”). Stories are often most effective when used as punctuation, as reinforcement, and as alternative mechanisms for making key ideas stick.

What Is A Good Story?

“I’ll know pornography when I see it…” This is a great example of how subjective “good” vs. “bad” can be. With stories and demos, however, you are working to communicate key messages. A “bad” story is anything that doesn’t get the job done.

Here is a simple test: 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 may trigger us to tell one of our own stories in response.

It is tough to dissect the key elements of a good story, but these five attributes can serve as a starting point:

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, which then demands release
Evokes Emotion:      The best stories are those that generate an emotional from the audience
Relevant:                  Good stories relate directly to the subject or key point

Simple Message

In Great Demo! Workshops, I often 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 uses to complete typical tasks. Specific Capabilities is (hopefully) a very simple idea.

A second example is embodied in the recent merger of United and Continental Airlines. Jeff Smisek, President and CEO, is presented in a brief video describing the status and advantages of the merger, immediately before the obligatory “Safety Video”. If you have flown on either airline in the past several months you’ve likely seen the video (perhaps many, many times!).

Towards the end of the video, he says, “We want to provide clean, safe, reliable travel, great customer service, and a broad range of flights and destinations.” His message is not simple; it is broad and unfocused, and is hardly memorable.

Conversely, when you think of Southwest Airlines, what do you think of?

[Hint: “The low-cost airline”]. Simple.

Real Experience

Why do customers go to users’ group meetings? (In addition to the free drinks from vendor sales people, of course…!) They go to hear how other customers have addressed challenges or solved problems using the software. The stories they share are perceived as real, based on actual experience, and are therefore highly valuable.

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.

Conversely, the weakest stories may be about the vendor sales team’s personal experiences.

Element of Surprise

Memorable movies have numerous plot twists and turns – stories that offer a non-obvious surprise tend to engage and are more effectively remembered. Stories that are too predictable may be less interesting.

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 excepted process or approach: “Turn traditional demos upside-down.”

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” I offer an example situation: “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? You essentially were on ‘autopilot’…”

For many people, this evokes emotional responses of wonder, self-aware surprise, and a certain degree of discomfort. At the same time, the realization that this appears to happen to most everyone is reassuring.

An emotional connection makes the story that much more meaningful and personal.

Relevant

Stories need to be perceived as relevant or their impact drops precipitously – stories need to resonate with audience.

A customer in the commercial banking industry won’t consider a demo that uses data from a manufacturing 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, I often offer a story in which a rather embarrassing email preview message appeared during a webinar. The message described plans for a date that evening – in rather graphic 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. For example, can you identify the movie from these 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…!]
-          “He chose…poorly…” [Movie? Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Usage? Ah – so many possibilities!]
-          “I…can’t…help…it…” Bxzzzzzzt! [A Bug’s Life. Usage? Explaining how and why the “B” key in PowerPoint works.]

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.

Example Story – Ease of Use

My old boss, the head of sales of a software company, was (surprisingly) such a novice with computers that he always typed messages with CAPS LOCK on because using the SHIFT key slowed him down and caused many (embarrassing) errors.

We used him for a demo of a new tool we were working to purchase, asking him to “drive”, as there was concern by some team members about ease-of-use. We walked him through the few steps it took to generate his forecast for the quarter. He then said, “Wow, if I can do this then I’m sure everyone else can as well…!”

What better way to prove ease-of-use?

[For the “analytical” types reading this article, I’m sure you just did a quick check of this story to see if it includes the attributes described above: Simple Message, Real Experience, Element of Surprise, Evokes Emotion, Relevant. How’d we do?]

Example – Painfully Boring

The following was related to me by someone who was present…

About 40 minutes into a particularly boring demo a customer (senior manager level) got up from the conference table, walked over to the wall and started to slowly bang his head on the wall – and continued to do so for several minutes until, at last, the person delivering the demo looked up and asked if anything was wrong…!

When to Use Stories

Audiences need to be “refreshed” frequently. Use stories to re-engage people when they begin to fade (e.g., after lunch or when someone gets up from the conference table and starts to move towards the wall…!).

Apply specific stories to reinforce or illustrate key advantages of your offerings. A quote I often hear is, “Facts tell, stories sell!”

Use stories as a transition tool to introduce a new segment or wrap-up a segment. Stories add another “thread” to an important point or idea to help embed it in customers’ minds.

Storytelling and Demos

Good stories serve to punctuate key points and help make your demos memorable and remarkable. Causatively collect them. 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!

Bonus: Share your most interesting, most painful, or most enlightening stories with us (send to PCohan@SecondDerivative.com) and we’ll reward the top three (in our humble opinion) each with a highly coveted and enormously useful Great Demo! laser telescoping pointer.

Taking Advantage of the “Dip” – To Hide the Ugly Stuff…!

2011-04-07T04:46:00.000-07:00

Several Great Demo! Workshop participants report applying the principle of the “Attention-Retention” curves (aka the “Primacy-Recency” effect and/or the “Serial Positioning Effect”) to hide portions of their software that aren’t as strong or don’t demo well. They realize that the ability for audiences to remember the middle portions of a segment is severely diminished in comparison to the first and last few items. Interesting!

Public Great Demo! Workshop – April 12

2011-03-31T21:42:00.001-07:00

[Warning: Shameless Self-Promotion Alert!]

Our next Public Great Demo! Workshop is scheduled for April 12, 2011 in San Jose, California, co-sponsored by SKMurphy (www.SKMurphy.com). This is a terrific opportunity for individuals or small groups to learn how to put Great Demo! ideas into day-to-day practice. An overview, agenda, location and pricing information is available here: www.skmurphy.com/blog/2010/11/30/great-demo-workshop-on-april-12-2011/

Is There a “Grand Unified Story Theory”?

2011-03-23T09:30:00.000-07:00

Many managers ask their teams to “wrap a story” around their demos – and many teams struggle to find and use stories that meet this requirement. One tactic is to use a “day-in-the-life” as the story to bind together a range of tasks, functions and, potentially, 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, after all, to hear about executing one’s day-to-day job?

It may be, in fact, unlikely that a real story can be wrapped around most demos (there may be no “Grand Unified Story Theory”…!). Stories are often most effective to serve as punctuation, as reinforcement, and as alternative mechanisms for making ideas stick.

[More on Storytelling for Demos shortly…]

One Picture Is Worth 1000 Clicks

2011-03-19T09:21:00.001-07:00

I often describe Illustrations (the “Wow!” or end-deliverable in Great Demo! methodology) as in terms of the classic statement, “One picture is worth a thousand words”. At a recent Great Demo! Workshop, one participant cleverly commented that “One Illustration is worth a thousand clicks”!

Scripted Demos – Another Method of “Gentle Subversion”

2011-03-16T18:05:00.000-07:00

Many customers require that vendors follow their scripts step-by-step, even if the logic and flow aren’t particularly logical for the vendor’s software. This often results in long, frustrating demo sessions for vendors (and customers as well).

In addition to the other tactics suggested previously, here’s another method to consider: Follow the customer’s script and demonstrate each proof point in accord with the script, initially – however, if/when your customer begins to get comfortable with you and your offering (and if you have earned sufficient credibility), you can consider asking to change some sections to enable to better flow (for the customer’s sake, of course) and better visualization of the capabilities they’ve requested (for the customer’s benefit, of course).

In the worst case, your customer simply says, “No”. In the best situation, they say, “Sure” – and you are able to re-order and rearrange your demo in accord with your interests. If you do make changes, be sure in each summary section to identify which capabilities were covered in that section (“We just showed you items 401, 402, 403, 404, and 452 – are you comfortable that we handled these sufficiently?”).

Show Up and Throw Up

2011-03-09T07:56:00.000-08:00

Traditional “educational” or “informational” demos are often known by less favorable names (for good reason), including:

- Show Up and Throw Up
- Spray and Pray
- The Harbor Tour
- Living in the Land of Hope

Here’s a new one I just heard: The "Tech Splatter" demo.

Any others?

Public Great Demo! Workshop – April 12

2011-03-08T08:15:00.001-08:00

[Warning: Shameless Self-Promotion Alert!]

Our next Public Great Demo! Workshop is scheduled for April 12, 2011 in San Jose, California, co-sponsored by SKMurphy (http://www.skmurphy.com/). This is a terrific opportunity for individuals or small groups to learn how to put Great Demo! ideas into day-to-day practice. An overview, agenda, location and pricing information is available here: www.skmurphy.com/blog/2010/11/30/great-demo-workshop-on-april-12-2011/

Build vs. Buy – Handling the “We could build it ourselves...” Objection

2011-03-05T13:20:00.000-08:00

Here are two approaches I've used very successfully (and seen used very successfully) in battling "build vs. buy" situations:

1. People love to write new code, but hate to QA, support and maintain code already written. You can drive this point home by outlining the customer support calls (and hours) required to help customers (internal or external) use the application; and by the pain and suffering of keeping applications current with the ever-changing versions of Windows, Java, IE, Oracle, etc.etc.etc. and doing the ongoing testing to confirm (yuck). The hours of doing this "not fun" work can help tip the balance to a vision of "using the framework provided by the vendor to create the really interesting stuff internally, and outsource the ugly maintenance and support stuff to the vendor...".

2. Paint a REALLY big picture of "typical" requirements... You can point out, for example, that there are “ten years of development” in your application(s), done (most likely) by dozens of developers and QA folks. The list of features and functions in your offering(s) is likely REALLY long, particularly for comparatively mature products. List the features and functions in their full (gory) length (could be pages of features) and comment that "this list is only those functions required by customers - you should see the ongoing wish-list as well!". The idea here is to make the development project appear to be WAY too large to contemplate for a customer’s small team of developers...

Great Demo Coaching (and Self-Coaching) Key Attributes List

2011-02-23T16:41:00.001-08:00

For those seeking to implement Great Demo! methodology with their teams – or for those individuals who are working to improve their own Great Demo! practice, I have created a Great Demo! Key Attributes list – send me an email at PCohan@SecondDerivative.com if you’d like a copy.

The list includes 23 key elements along with (my) recommended importance weightings. You are welcome to use it as it is or edit for your own purposes.

A Delicious Example of “Consumable Components”

2011-02-08T07:06:00.000-08:00

For those lucky enough to enjoy a Kaiseki dinner, it is also a wonderful example of “Consumable Components”. From Wikipedia,

“...Kaiseki is a type of art form that balances the taste, texture, appearance, and colors of food. Finished dishes are carefully presented on plates that are chosen to enhance both the appearance and the seasonal theme of the meal. Dishes are beautifully arranged and garnished, often with real leaves and flowers, as well as edible garnishes designed to resemble natural plants and animals.

It include[s] an appetizer, sashimi, a simmered dish, a grilled dish, and a steamed course, in addition to other dishes at the discretion of the chef.”

Individual courses are presented to the diner in a paced, comfortable manner – courses might include:

• “Sakizuke: an appetizer similar to the French amuse-bouche.
• Hassun: the second course, which sets the seasonal theme. Typically one kind of sushi and several smaller side dishes.
• Mukōzuke: a sliced dish of seasonal sashimi.
• Takiawase: vegetables served with meat, fish or tofu; the ingredients are simmered separately.
• Futamono: a "lidded dish"; typically a soup.
• Yakimono: Broiled seasonal fish.
• Su-zakana: a small dish used to clean the palate, such as vegetables in vinegar.
• Hiyashi-bachi: served only in summer; chilled, lightly-cooked vegetables.
• Naka-choko: another palate-cleanser; may be a light, acidic soup.
• Shiizakana: a substantial dish, such as a hot pot.
• Gohan: a rice dish made with seasonal ingredients.
• Kō no mono: seasonal pickled vegetables.
• Tome-wan: a miso-based or vegetable soup served with rice.
• Mizumono: a seasonal dessert; may be fruit, confection, ice cream, or cake.”

Presenting your demos following similar Kaiseki ideas may make your demos equally delightful, tasteful and engaging…!

“W” Key for Remote Demos – Cuing the Sales Person

2011-02-01T08:11:00.000-08:00

Another use for the “W” Key (in PowerPoint Slideshow mode) is to cue the sales person (if present at the customer site) that it is time to offer commentary or summarize… This can also be used in face-to-face situations as well.

"During a live presentation, should the presenter use the actual names of the prospects in the room?" [This question comes from a colleague who asked me to post it…]

2011-01-28T12:20:00.000-08:00

“I often give my presentations over the phone. I am able to recognize at least some of the voices in the room and associate them with their names (and usually, their roles). I do something very similar when I’m in person, only then I write the names on my paper in the seating order they are in around the table.

In my presentations, I will try to use this knowledge. When I get a question, I might start the response with something like “That’s a great question, Tom”. Or if I know from a prior call, that Sally’s group is struggling with a particular problem, when I show how our solution addresses that problem, I might call out to Sally and say something like “Sally, would something like this be of value to your team?” Sometimes I might use a name in a more generic way, such as “In this case, we’ll pass it on to Bill and Jean for the final approval”. My thinking is that all of this makes the presentation more personable, and helps “re-nengage” people to the presentation that might have been slowly drifting away into their Blackberries.

The technique has seemed to work well for me, or, at least, it has never blatantly backfired on me. However, I’m getting some feedback now from others on our team that this is not a “best practice” for presenters. They say that it is risky, you could offend or embarrass someone by calling out them personally amongst a group of their peers’/bosses. They say that it sounds unprofessional, a bit too smarmy, and that cheapens the professionalism that we want to convey. They say, at the end of the day, that it just isn’t necessary. You can address questions to the entire group, why pigeonhole it?”

Comments – recommendations?

Deep Dive Demos - Take a Breath

2011-01-21T16:59:00.000-08:00

I often comment that demos should be “chunked” – broken up into consumable components and spaced apart with a summary and a pause before launching into the next segment. A Great Demo! Workshop participant today noted that even with “Deep Dive” demos you still have to come up for air periodically! Great analogy…

Degrees of Proof

2011-01-19T08:02:00.000-08:00

I often comment that “the best demo is… no demo!” Given that a demo is one of a range of forms of proof, and given that (most typically) we want to use the least expensive approach to close a sale, what form(s) of proof do you find you need in your sales cycles?

For example: None (good luck with this!), Reference Call or Visit, Demo, POC, POV, Evaluation, Pilot… And what level of resources is typically required for each of these? (And I’ve tried to list these from the least expensive to the most resource-intensive).

Too Many Panes…

2011-01-15T09:09:00.001-08:00

In a recent Great Demo! Workshop we noted that screens with too many panes could be, well, “paneful” and confusing to consume…

Disappearing Mouse in PowerPoint

2011-01-10T06:44:00.000-08:00

Many people note, with annoyance, that the mouse cursor disappears after a few seconds when showing a presentation – and complain that you have to “shake” the mouse to get it to reappear. There is a fix for this…

In PowerPoint Slide Show mode, the cursor shows briefly, for about 5 seconds or so, and then disappears. This is the native operation for PowerPoint. To make the cursor show continuously, in Slide Slow mode move your mouse to the bottom left of the screen to show the Pencil-like icon (you may have to hunt a bit to find it) and then click on it. It will bring up a small menu with “Arrow Options” at the bottom. Choose this (“Arrow Options”) and then “Visible”. This should keep your mouse visible as long as you stay in Slide Show mode…

Screen “Background” for Demos

2011-01-04T05:37:00.001-08:00

Many people’s laptops have photos of children, pets, or favorite vacation locations as the “backgrounds” of their screen. While sometimes interesting, they may also be distracting or even (occasionally) embarrassing for the presenter. One solution is to change the background to either a completely neutral screen (e.g., default Windows or Mac background) or to use the customer’s web home page.

Speaking Clearly

2010-12-24T08:39:00.001-08:00

It is hard to speak clearly and without ambiguity;

It is harder to decipher unclear and ambiguous speech.

‘Twas the Night Before The Big Demo

2010-12-21T16:57:00.000-08:00

‘Twas the Night Before The Big Demo

(with apologies to Clement Clarke Moore)

‘Twas the night ‘fore the demo and all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, ‘cept my SC and his mouse;
I’d proposed a big licensing deal with great care
In hopes a big order soon would be there;

Management was restless and not in their beds
As visions of bonuses danced in their heads;
And my VP with his forecast and me with my own,
Had just started a long EOQ roam,

When out from my mobile there came a great ring-tone,
I sprang from my chair to answer my phone,
What could it be? Was it good news or no?
A last-minute order? A contract? PO?

Greetings, said my assistant, who spoke on the line,
It was someone to see me, offering help at this time!
Who could it be at this late eleventh-hour,
To make the deal sweet and avoid something sour?

Away to the door I flew in a flash,
And swept it open in my quest for fast cash,
When who to my wondering eyes should appear,
The DemoGuru! And standing so near!

He came in my office and, while dusting off snow,
Said, “I have some news that you’ll want to know.”
He drew up a chair and asked for some tea,
And said to my VP, SC and to me:

“Your deal is in trouble and I’ll tell you now,
Your demo’s confusing, complex and lacks ‘Wow!’
It’s riddled with features and functions and more,
And too many cool things, mouse clicks galore,

Don’t flog them with features and other neat stuff,
Stick with the substance, stay away from the fluff,
The more that you show is not always nice,
Customers may say, ‘Please lower the price!’

The Buzzword-Compliant Vocabulary list,
Are words, I’m afraid, that are better-off missed,
Not Flexible, nor Powerful, nor Easy-to-Use,
Not Robust, nor Seamlessly Integrated abuse,

And no corporate overview, please don’t do that,
After ten minutes they’re grabbing their hats,
Present as a team, so if things get hairy,
Sales folks aren’t lost in the back with Blackberry.

Your customer’s queued and ready to go,
They love the vision you’ve built with them so
They want Technical Proof in the demo you’ve planned,
Just the key capabilities, everything else banned.”

“But how can we do this?” I heard myself cry,
“We’re victims of momentum, we’re nervous to try,
Another approach, a new way to go,
We have to admit we’re just a bit slow!”

“Do the Last Thing First!” he said with a smile,
“Then peel back the layers, and Do It with style,
Peel it back in accord with their interest,
Stay focused and execute, and you’ll find it best,

Your customer’s Situation is a great way to intro,
Their Reasons and needs, from CBI flow,
Review these and check – is this still the case?
Are we aligned or are we off-base?

Start with the end, that big pay-off piece,
Illustrate and describe, those are the keys!
Capture their interest, compel their attention,
Make sure it aligns with their mode of consumption.

When it clicks and they’re hooked, they’ll then ask for more,
There’s absolutely no way that they’ll head for the door,
They’ll say, “Please show us, prove that it’s so,
Show us the rest, please do demo.”

Then Do It, just Do It, with no extra clicks,
To return to that Illustrative image that sticks,
Make it simple, make it fast, make it easy and clear,
Then they will realize they’ve nothing to fear,

Encourage their questions, most are not new,
Good ones and Great ones and Stupid ones too,
Treat Hostiles with courtesy, use your Parking Lot so
Those mean, nasty folks can’t damage your flow,

Peel back the layers, Do It Again,
Show only what’s needed, put nothing else in,
Let them drive the demo, let them think they’re in charge,
While their Vision Solution you work to enlarge!

Summarize, summarize, tell them again,
‘Cause adults do learn by repetition,
And when you show a key take-away screen,
Leave it up, let it linger, so they’ll know what they’ve seen!

“I get it – I’ll do it!” exclaimed my SC,
“This is all so obvious, it’s way clear to me!”
And he sprang into action, his mouse flew like lightening,
(Frankly, his speed was a little bit frightening!)

And with that the DemoGuru smiled and he said,
“Your way is now clear, put that baby to bed,
Your deal’s now on track, your order secure,
You’ll make your numbers at the end of the year,

Then he strode from my office in a blink of a pun,
Turned ‘round and he said, “My job here is done,”
Ere he drove out of sight, I did hear him say,
“Great Demo! to all and to all a Great Day!”

Copyright © 2005-2010 The Second Derivative – All Rights Reserved.

How Do Customers “Score” Scripted Demos?

2010-12-12T13:39:00.001-08:00

It can be very interesting to compare how different customers score scripted demos in general – and it is important to understand how your customers are planning to score your upcoming scripted demos…

There are at least three scoring methods that are typically used:

1. Efficacy: How well does the vendor’s offering match the requirements – often done on a 5-point or 10-point scale.
2. Ease-of-use: How easy does it appear to use to accomplish each task – again often done a 5-point or 10-point scale.
3. Counting Clicks: customers often count the number of clicks or steps required to complete particular tasks – often as a way of normalizing and removing some level of subjectivity.

Some customers will subtract “points” for not following the proscribed script or other perceived deviations from their process.

Any other scoring methods you’ve come across?

What’s the Difference Between a Business Issue and a Critical Business Issue?

2010-12-06T08:05:00.000-08:00

If you have ever “lost” business to “No Decision”, the following may be one reason:

All of us have “Business Issues” that we face every day – and that we do nothing about. “My laptop is slow, my cube is small, the commute traffic is terrible…” and so forth. We just live with these Business Issues. We may not like the status quo, but we don’t take action. A Critical Business issue is one that we are willing to address through the application of tangible resource – time, people, or money – to get it fixed or solved.

Here’s a wonderful example of the difference:

How long would you continue to drive your car with a slightly annoying squeak coming from the front wheels? A few days? A week? Month? Longer? Very few people will take their car to have the squeak diagnosed right away. Many more will do nothing, unless the squeak gets (markedly) worse. Others won’t do anything until something overt (and most likely bad!) happens… It is simply another “Business Issue” as long as the situation doesn’t change.

On the other hand, what if the brake warning light came on or the squeak changed to a horrible howl? Most people would get their car looked at right away, even if it meant taking time from work or home life, and spending a few hundred dollars for the repair. That’s because the issue is now critical – a Critical Business Issue!

Many sales opportunities go to “No Decision” because the customer didn’t consider the problem to be sufficiently important to address – it wasn’t perceived as a Critical Business Issue.

Encrispen

2010-11-30T06:47:00.000-08:00

I’d like to propose a new word: “Encrispen” and suggest defining it as “the process and action of making something crisp, clear and focused”. It is the essence of a Great Demo!

If you were trying to communicate this idea to others, what words or images might you use? Here are a few starters:

Words:
- Crisp
- Concise
- Pointed
- Quick
- Focused
- Clean
- Swift
- Short
- Get-to-the-Point
- Brief
- Succinct
- Terse

Images:
- A camera lens (expressing focus)
- A crisp handful of paper money folded in half
- Origami items, similarly crisply folded
- A raft of razor-sharp pencils
- Potato chips (“crisps”, in the UK)
- A raptor focused on its target
- A vanishing point (an empty subway tunnel that vanishes to a point…)
- The business end of an X-acto knife
- A dart about to strike a dart-board dead-center

What other words, images or ideas might you suggest?

Buying an ERP System – Recommendations for Customers

2010-11-29T07:23:00.000-08:00

A recent checklist from Inside-ERP (“ERP To-Do Checklist: Things to Ask Before You Write That BIG Check To A Vendor”) included four items that really resonated with me:

“What are the specific business problems you need to solve with ERP? For instance, do you need to shorten product lead times or improve communications with your suppliers? Are there industry regulations to which your company must adhere?”

Sounds very much like statements of CBI’s (Critical Business Issues) or underlying Problems/Reasons, used in creating Situation Slides for demos.

“What are the goals and metrics that you will use to measure the business benefits of your organization’s new ERP solution? A good starting point for these metrics are the KPIs — such as inventory accuracy, cost reductions and month-end closing processes — that your company is already tracking.”

Wonderful examples of possible measurements of the Delta – the value of making the change.

“What features and functions do you need from a new ERP solution that will help increase users’ productivity and provide access to the business data users most need?”

Simple statement of the Specific Capabilities needed.

The fourth recommendation promoted the idea of an implementation timeline – Transition Vision – and the concept of Early Wins “to allow you to implement them in phases... Taking the implementation in prioritized steps gives IT managers and ERP users a chance to learn new processes.”

“That’s Too Bad…”

2010-11-24T08:35:00.001-08:00

A number of years ago I was part of a sales team presenting a demo to a large prospect in Houston (no names…). Things were going great – the end-users were loving the software and management heads were nodding in agreement.

The prospect’s IT manager asked, “Can our users store their data locally, in addition to on corporate server?”

Our presales guy, who was presenting the demo, quickly responded, “Yes, absolutely. Users can download and save datasets locally on their laptops in a few simple steps. Here – let me show you…” And he did.

The IT manager then said, “That’s too bad… We have a strict policy of no corporate data on local machines. We won’t be able to use your software…!” [Ouch!] A sad example of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory… What should the presales person have done?

Before jumping to answer “Yes!” (and rushing to demo the feature), he should have asked, “Why do you ask – what are you looking to accomplish?”

Making the Complex Seem Simple

2010-11-19T08:18:00.001-08:00

In many demos, vendor software offerings are perceived by prospects as being “too complex; too complicated”. One of our objectives is to avoid this perception: Instead of making the simple look dangerously complex, we want to make the complex look wonderfully simple (while having great potential depth).

This is a key idea in Great Demo! methodology – and the “Do It” pathway is one example of how to achieve this. Another is to avoid words like “if” and “or” when presenting demos. What else can be done to help improve the perception of being wonderfully simple, yet with depth when needed?

New YouTube Great Demo! Videos

2010-11-09T07:46:00.000-08:00

We’ve posted 4 new videos on YouTube at www.youtube.com/user/PCohan. The first three are testimonials from our recent Great Demo! Public Workshop (September 2010) and the fourth is an interview done by DreamSimplicity (www.dreamsimplicity.com) at the same event.

Remote Demos – What If the Host Isn’t There?

2010-11-08T09:45:00.001-08:00

What if you have been scheduled to join or present in a Remote Demo, but find that the host is late and has not started the online meeting on time? (Has this ever happened to you?)

One simple solution is to ensure that the host grants alternative host rights to a second person (e.g., you) so that you can start the meeting even if the host is late. This is a current capability in many of the online collaboration tools (e.g., WebEx, GoToMeeting, etc.).

What Happens If You Peel Back the Layers Too Far?

2010-11-07T08:17:00.000-08:00

A colleague once noted that Peeling Back the Layers is like peeling the layers of an onion – if you peel it back too far, you cry. At a recent Great Demo! Workshop, a participant added that if you continue to peel, you not only cry but you’ll find you have nothing left!

Great Demo! Example of Using Prop/Technology

2010-11-04T07:44:00.001-07:00

A recent Great Demo! Workshop participant presented a demo to a large audience using a wonderful prop/technology combination – she used a webcam to show the live use of an iPhone application. While there are very nice emulators that could have presented the app, using a webcam from her laptop to show the live video of her hands and fingers running the iPhone was very compelling. It had everybody’s attention riveted!

What’s the Opposite of “Dumb-it-Down”?

2010-10-25T14:32:00.001-07:00

Frequently, I hear Great Demo! Workshop participants comment that their software is often perceived as too complex, as overkill for many prospects – and that they need to “dumb-it-down” in their demos. I’d like to suggest that an alternative, potentially more apt phrasing could be to “Smarten-it-down”…!

“How Many Sales People Work for You?”

2010-10-22T09:34:00.000-07:00

When asked, “How many sales people work for you?”, a VP of Sales replied, “About half of them…”!

“What would happen if you do nothing?”

2010-10-21T16:21:00.000-07:00

Far too often, sales opportunities result in losing to that most common of all competitors: “No decision”. During a discovery or qualification discussion, the question “What would happen if you do nothing?” is an excellent way to test the importance and impact of a situation – and to determine whether the business issue is sufficiently important to the prospect to pursue.

A follow-on question could be, “Would that be acceptable to you?” if the answer is “Yes”, then the business issue is likely not a Critical Business Issue – and would have a strong probability of resulting in “No decision”.

Remote Demos Team Practice

2010-10-19T06:23:00.001-07:00

Here’s a simple, pragmatic tip: I have seen geographically distributed sales, presales and marketing teams use WebEx/GoToMeeting/Live Meeting (etc.) to conduct their weekly status/progress meetings on-line. This is a great way to build skills with the tools, with passing control among meeting attendees and practicing the use of the various annotation, white-boarding and other capabilities.

There is often a great deal of cross-learning that takes place – “Wow, I didn’t know WebEx/GoToMeeting/Live Meeting (etc.) could do that… Please show us how you do that!”

Remote Demos – the Role of the “Active Conduit”

2010-10-11T17:02:00.000-07:00

[I'd promised to publish a more complete version of this some time after my initial post - here it is. It is also available in article format as a PDF - send me an email at PCohan@SecondDerivative.com and I'll send it to you.]

The (very) best practice for Remote Demos is to split your forces – to have a representative from your organization at the customer site to serve as the eyes for the person presenting the demo remotely. The person at the customer site needs to be an Active Conduit of information to the demonstrator – he/she needs to be the demonstrator’s “eyes” on-site.

The lack of this Active Conduit feedback results in poor communication, confused presenters and audiences, and inconclusive results. Executing the role of the Active Conduit is critical to the success of Remote Demos – a passive representative from your company at the customer site is insufficient and a waste of resource!

For many vendors it is the sales person who typically sits with the customer at the customer site. Next best, if you cannot have one of your representatives present, is to ask your champion or coach to be your “eyes” for the meeting.

Here’s a brief list of the items that need to be communicated by the person at the customer site to the remote individual:

Before the demo:

1. Arrive at the customer’s conference room 15 minutes before the formal meeting is scheduled to begin to get things set up and operating correctly:

a) Start the collaboration tool (e.g., GoToMeeting, WebEx, Live Meeting, etc.) session on the customer side.

b) Help test and confirm screen resolution issues – “Yes, I can see your mouse across the full diagonal and we’ve maximized the screen here on the receiving end”.

c) Help test and confirm audio – “Yes, I can hear you fine… Here, let me move the conference phone microphones to better positions so that you can hear us better.”

d) Help test “latency” – “Looks like we have about a 2 second delay right now…”

2. Plan for managing questions – “Can you please plan to capture questions in a Word document from your laptop during the session?”

3. Review any other pre-meeting plans or issues.

During the demo:

1. Alert regarding “latency” – “Looks like you are about 3 seconds ahead of what we are seeing here… You may need to slow down.”

2. Somebody new arrives at the meeting – “Before you go on, we have a new participant in the room…” [And to ask the three questions:

a) What is your name?

b) What is your job title?

c) What would you like to accomplish during our session today?]

3. Somebody leaves – “Just to let you know, Bob had to leave the meeting….”

4. Unspoken questions – “Hang on, it looks like Jennifer has a question [furrowed brow, raised hand, look of confusion, etc.].”

5. Inability to hear – “John, let me repeat that question for you…”

6. Manage and alert during side conversations – “Hold on, we have a side conversation going on about the capability you just presented…”

7. Provide “color” commentary, as appropriate, e.g., “I want to let you know that they are all smiling and nodding their heads…!”

After the demo:

1. Debrief with the customer – face-to-face feedback provides nuances often missed via the phone.

2. Listen for “casual” conversations – what else are the audience members saying about the demo, the product, the company…

3. Afterwards, communicate this information back to the balance of the selling team.

You can train your own representatives to execute these items – or your champion/coach – by reviewing this list with them ahead of your demos. Following these practices will improve the outcome of your Remote Demos markedly!

Demo Self and Team Improvement Suggestion

2010-10-04T06:03:00.000-07:00

Participants at Great Demo! Workshops often note that they rarely have a chance to see one another deliver demos to customers – to see and hear how colleagues present, and manage questions and situational challenges – and that this cross-exposure is often one of the most interesting outputs from Workshops.

Here’s a simple (but surprisingly effective) recommendation: schedule to do at least one “ride-along” on another team member’s demo each quarter. Ride-alongs can be done face-to-face or, much less expensively, via a remote demo using WebEx, GoToMeeting, or similar tool. The folks who participate in these sessions should also schedule time for a mutual debrief discussion: “What do we do well; what could we have done better?”

Some presales managers also include this idea as a quarterly

Pre-Filled Login Dialog – Fewer “Clicks” and No Errors

2010-09-30T15:47:00.000-07:00

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a demo begin with, “Now I’ll log into the application…” – followed by one or more rounds of typing, correcting, being rejected (miss-entered login or password), followed by more typing (much more carefully the second – or third – time around)! I often suggest to start your demo already logged in, as a result.

However, many applications will time-out and require you to log in again if you don’t start your demo rapidly enough after introductions, etc. Here’s a simple solution to minimize the typing seen by the customer and to reduce the risk of login errors: enter your login and password – but don’t click on “login”. Simply leave it so that you have only a single click to login once the demo “proper” begins. Nice!

RFP – Acronym Alternative

2010-09-28T12:01:00.001-07:00

Just heard at a recent Great Demo! Workshop: RFP = “Request For Pain”.

A Cure for Zippy Mouse Syndrome

2010-09-17T10:54:00.001-07:00

Record a few of your demos using Camtasia (or similar tool) to track your mouse movements – play them back and be prepared to be shocked...! Use what you learn to adjust and to slow your mouse movements down to make them smooth and d-e-l-i-b-e-r-a-t-e.

Remote Demos – the role of the “Active Conduit”

2010-09-10T06:24:00.000-07:00

I note that the (very) best practice for Remote Demos is to split your forces – to have a representative from your organization at the customer site to serve as the eyes for the person presenting the demo remotely. The person at the customer site needs to be an active conduit of information to the demonstrator – he/she needs to be the demonstrator’s “eyes” on-site. Here’s a brief list of the items that need to be communicated by the person at the customer site to the remote individual:

Before the demo:

1. Arrive in the customer conference room 15 minutes before the formal meeting is scheduled to begin…
2. Start the collaboration tool (e.g., GoToMeeting, WebEx, Live Meeting, etc.) session on the customer side.
3. Help test and confirm screen resolution issues – “Yes, I can see your mouse across the full diagonal and we’ve maximized the screen here on the receiving end”.
4. Help test and confirm audio – “Yes, I can hear you fine… Here, let me move the conference phone microphones to better positions so that you can hear us better.”
5. Help test “latency” – “Looks like we have about a 2 second delay right now…”
6. Plan for managing questions – “Can you please plan to capture questions in a Word document from your laptop during the session?”
7. Review any other pre-meeting plans or issues.

During the demo:

1. Alerts regarding “latency” – “Looks like you are about 3 seconds ahead of what we are seeing here…You may need to slow down.”
2. Somebody new – “Before you go on, we have a new participant in the room…”
3. Somebody leaves – “Just to let you know, Bob had to leave the meeting….”
4. Unspoken questions – “Hang on, it looks like Jennifer has a question [furrowed brow, raised hand, look of confusion, etc.].”
5. Inability to hear – “John, let me repeat that question for you…”

Any others?

Dessert Tray – Terrific Example of Vision Generation

2010-09-05T14:14:00.000-07:00

A waiter in a nice restaurant wants to sell desserts to a dining party at a table. Compare the following approaches:

Option 1: The waiter says, “Are you interested in dessert? We have some really nice ones…”

Vs.

Option 2: The waiter brings a tray of fabulous-looking desserts to the table, presents them for visual inspection to the dining party and says, “Are you interested in dessert? We have some really nice ones…”

Which approach will generate more sales of desserts? Why? How can we apply this to demos? (Hint: Think Illustrations and the “Menu Approach”)

Demo Calendar Madness

2010-08-29T08:54:00.000-07:00

Many presales people find that they are often overscheduled with demos – I’ve heard numerous situations where demos are scheduled back-to-back. This can be particularly challenging for teams with highly transactional sales processes. Here’s some self-defense against Demo Calendar Madness (a horrifying affliction!):

Block your calendar with buffer time both before and after each demo.

[After you’ve said, “Duh…!”, allow me to continue…]

In my experience, sales people will hungrily consume all possible demo time from their presales counterparts. And any unoccupied calendar time is considered fair game. Sales folks often don’t know (or care) that the slot before their desired demo is a really tough two hour demo for one our your roughest prospects. They simply see the open slot – and grab it!

So, consider blocking 15-30 minutes ahead of any upcoming demo as your time to prepare – and another 15-30 minutes after each demo to debrief, decompress and restore your laptop/files/demo image to its normal pristine condition.

Your sanity will thank you for this…

Are You a Demo Expert? – Why Experts Should Feel Uncomfortable

2010-08-23T16:30:00.000-07:00

That’s right. If you are a Demo Expert, you should be consciously uncomfortable. You should always be alert to find ways to improve your practice.

Some seasoned veterans – those with 5 or more years of experience – are often the least likely to change their ways. Many perceive themselves at the top of their game; many believe they are experts. They are the skeptics in many training workshops, the ones who arrive thinking, “I’ve been doing this for 10 years – what could they possibly teach me?”

Given the (shockingly) large number of demos that don’t achieve the desired objectives, is it possible that some seasoned veterans – the putative experts – are part of the problem?

[This is the intro to an article I just completed - it is too long to post in a blog - but send me an email PCohan@SecondDerivative.com and I'll send it to you...]

Public (Open) Great Demo! Workshop

2010-08-19T07:32:00.000-07:00

[Warning: Shameless Self-Promotion Alert!]

Our next Public Great Demo! Workshop is scheduled for September 15, 2010 in San Jose, California, co-sponsored by SKMurphy (www.SKMurphy.com). This is a terrific opportunity for individuals or small groups to learn how to put Great Demo! ideas into day-to-day practice. An overview, agenda, location and pricing information is available here: http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2010/04/14/great-demo-workshop-on-sept-15-2010/.

Post-Demo Email Practices

2010-08-17T16:39:00.000-07:00

What should you include in a post-demo email to the customer, beyond “thank you”?

Clearly, it should include any materials or information promised during the demo meeting – or, at minimum, a listing of the items promised. It should also, in my opinion, include any action items promised by the customer, along with the dates agreed upon for completion of both sets of items (vendor and customer).

A more “complete” version of a post-demo email can include a summary of the key capabilities that were demonstrated. This listing helps to reinforce the customer’s memory and can also serve as a vehicle to support vision generation, up-selling/cross-selling and out-flanking competition.

Additionally, I often suggest wording along the lines of “I’m glad we were able to invest the time together yesterday in our demonstration meeting…” as opposed to “Thank you for giving us your time yesterday”.

Any other ideas?