“What We Heard You Say…”

A number of Great Demo! practitioners report that titling Situation Sides with “What We Heard You Say” has yielded several positive outcomes.  First, it really frames the entire intent of presenting a Situation Slide (that it is all about the customer) and makes it wonderfully clear that this is, indeed, the case. 

Second, it also causes presenters to remain in “you” mode (“You said, you said, you said…”) throughout delivery, as opposed to flipping to the (much) less effective, “What WE are going to give you is…” for Specific Capabilities and the Delta. 

Further, I might suggest you try using “What We Heard From Others…” as the slide title when using Situation Slides for Vision Generation demos.  [For more on Vision Generation demos, see my article at www.SecondDerivative.com/articles.html - it should be the third article on the list, currently.]

Pre-answering Questions?

I read a recent post from a training firm suggesting that demo presenters should pre-answer questions that the audience has not asked – and (even worse) suggested that the presenter introduce the questions themselves rhetorically so that the answers can be delivered.

Gack.

Please do this if:

-        You want to take away the possibility of a two-way conversation and turn the session into a fire-hose delivery of features and functions (frankly frightening).

-        You want to “Buy It Back” by introducing features that your customer doesn’t feel they need (and don’t want to pay for).

-        You want to elongate the demo from a crisp focused session into a (much) longer, indistinct seminar.

-        You want to encourage audience members to take you into the weeds.

-        You want the high-ranking folks to leave early (and before you’ve gotten to the “best stuff”).

-        You want your demo to sound like most other traditional demos…

Note:  When should these issues/questions/capabilities be introduced?  Everyone say it together, “In Discovery!”

Great Demo! Podcast

A good introduction to some of the key Great Demo! ideas is available in a recent conversational podcast done with Chris Orlob at Gong.io – you can listen to the recording here. 

The intro begins about a minute in; the trouble starts a few minutes later!