Yes, here’s another great
cooking analogy that can be applied to the wonderful world of demos… Consider
how we choose new recipes that we want to try from cookbooks:
First, we typically browse
the pictures of the completed dishes to find something that looks good.
This idea of “Does it look good?” is often done unconsciously as we page
along. Note that anything that does NOT look good will not be chosen – we
make a rapid, unconscious assessment of dishes (“Yes, No, or Meh…”).
Interestingly, the same
principle applies to the world of demos. Our customers apply a similar
unconscious process when viewing screens of software – “Does it look
good?” Unfortunately, most software is rather boring (wait – don’t tell
me: rows and columns of text and numbers followed by the frequent and
rather pointless pie chart…). Our job when presenting demos is to make
each important screen as attractive and appetizing as possible.
In Great Demo! Workshops we
teach how to use pointing and words to accomplish this for Illustrations and
other key screens, like a waiter in an elegant restaurant describing the dish he
has just placed in front of you.
Back to choosing a recipe…
After we review the picture,
what do we examine next? We likely explore the recipe itself. There
are typically two sets of questions we ask ourselves as we are doing this:
1.
Regarding the list
of ingredients, is this recipe affordable vs. expensive; do I have
all/some/most already?
2.
As we read the
recipe, we are asking, “Can I do this – how hard is it? How long will it
take? Do I want to do this?”
The first set of questions
only plays a small role in demos (“Do we have the necessary infrastructure?”),
but the second set maps wonderfully to customer perceptions at demos!
“Can I do this? How
hard is it? Does it look like something I want to do?”
The longer the recipe and the
more steps involved, the less likely we will want to execute it. The same
principle applies directly to the world of demos. The more clicks,
steps, and screens involved in any particular task, the less attractive it will
appear to your customer.
Solution? In Great
Demo! Workshops we teach the idea of the “Do It” pathway and the constant
reminder to complete all tasks and pathways using the “Fewest Number of
Clicks”. Less is more.
So, we can apply the same
ideas to demos that we use when choosing new recipes from cookbooks: Present
your software screens like a waiter in an elegant restaurant and keep the list
of steps in your software “recipe” as short as possible!
