“Mousing” in Demos

How important are your mouse movements in your demos? Very!

Consider a typical live 1-hour demo: When delivered over the web, most (or all!) of the session will rely on your mouse for pointing and software execution. In face-to-face sessions you have the option of using your hands, fingers, or other pointing tools to direct your audience’s eyes, but a large portion of the demo will be under mouse control.

Your mouse is your primarily vehicle for visual guidance in demos. Here’s a story that illustrates the challenges that you may also face:

A colleague and I were doing “booth duty” at a trade show, where I was serving as the salesperson and my colleague was presenting demos. This coworker was known for being exceptionally bright and charismatic. They knew the software intimately and could construct and deliver demos wonderfully, but with one flaw: Their mousing was erratic. In fact, they were the cause for the origin of the phrase, “Zippy Mouse Syndrome”!

It wasn’t just that their mousing was bad: It was magnificently awful! The mouse would circle the screen, then fly away tangentially, then linger ever-so-briefly in a corner, then reemerge to describe wild geometric figures before collapsing into a vibrating, quivering mass in a pointless location (pun intended). All of that consumed just a few seconds, then repeated. Endlessly!

During a demo that afternoon, after just a few minutes of these excursions, the prospect gently (but firmly!) placed their hand over my colleague’s hand and stopped the hand (and mouse) from moving.

“I think I should drive,” they said, “You just tell me what to do…!”

They balance of the demo went wonderfully and the prospect (we learned later) purchased our product. 

There’s a lesson or two here…

Your mouse is you when you demo. Make its motions reflect your statements, explanations, and your overall message. Your mouse isn’t limited to pointing, it also enables you to underscore and highlight items, circle, designate, annotate, link and combine items. In all cases, move your mouse smoothly, deliberately, and precisely. Face-to-face presentation skills classes teach participants how to use their arms, hands, and body to support and reinforce their messages. Your mousing should be applied similarly.

For most disciplines, intentional practice is required to become proficient. All of your mouse movements should be practiced until they are executed smoothly, deliberately, and precisely. Record your demos and evaluate your mouse movements: What did you do well? What could you do better or differently? Practice and repeat until your mousing is “unconsciously competent”.

Of course, “perfecting” any skill is a challenge. As Winston Churchill said, “They say that nobody is perfect. Then they tell you practice makes perfect. I wish they'd make up their minds!”

How is your mousing? 

Podcast: Doing Discovery – Technically Sold

 

I joined Julien Emery of Technically Sold and Superpanel for this 55-minute discussion about Doing Discovery. (Note: I am NOT responsible for the title of this podcast!) 

We explored a lot of territory:

• Why I wrote Doing Discovery and what kicked it off
• The impact of poor vs excellent discovery 
• Reducing No Decision outcomes
• Reducing “wasted” demos
• Reducing wasted POCs
• Metrics and Demo Qualified Leads
• Great Demo! Situation Slides
• Discovery vs qualification
• Key challenges in doing discovery
• Avoiding an inquisition – quid pro quo
• Diagnostic vs Biased Questions
• Executives vs everyone else
• Active Buying Process vs Just Browsing
• Vision Generation Demos
• Pricing and price ranges
• The Myth of the Informed Buyer
• Vision Reengineering
• Biased Questions
• Buying It Back
• Four levels of skills and knowledge
• Communicating business value
• Burn Victims
• Technology Adoption Curve and discovery
• Recapping the 7 Levels of Doing Discovery
• Enabling enablement
• Product Led Growth
• The value of discovery in a “down market”

You can find the podcast here. Enjoy!

What Props or Visual Aids Have You Used in Your Demos?

Here is a terrific visual aid story that I saw in a face-to-face demo meeting: The vendor rep was discussing how their solution eliminated silos and enabled improved consumption of a prospect’s internal data. The rep took two full water bottles, held them up and said, “So, I understand your organization has its data sitting in silos, like these water bottles…” He banged the bottles together, pointing out that “You can’t bring this data together.” Bang, bang went the water bottles.

He then opened each bottle and placed a cup in front of him on the table. He said, “What we propose is to enable you to combine data in ways you’ve never been able to do before…” as he poured water from both water bottles into the cup. He then picked up the cup and continued, “…and enable you to consume your data in ways you’ve never been able to do before!” and he took a sip of the combined mix from the cup. He finished with a satisfied “Ah, refreshing!”

Fabulous! 

What props or visual aids have you used or seen used in demos that really resonated?

ChatGPT Thoughts: When Does ChatGPT Become Sentient?

 

Reusing and remixing what has previously been written is a wonderful thing. It enables past ideas and practices to be summarized.

As an experiment, I asked ChatPGT to “Create a list of the top ten elements for a great software demo”. The result appeared to be a list of items pulled from books, articles, websites and other ingested sources based on the statistical popularity of each element. Nothing on the list is tested by ChatGPT; nothing is challenged. It appears to be a vote-based summary of the most popular ideas already drafted, regardless of their actual effectiveness.

This may mean that asking ChatGPT to provide guidance on any topic will yield results based on the most common denominators of past thinking: The result is a grand average.

I look forward to the day, however, when ChatGPT actually creates and synthesizes new ideas. At that point, we should ask ourselves (and ChatGPT), has ChatGPT become sentient? When, also, will ChatGPT’s capabilities (and their offspring’s) be considered equivalent to human thought?

What rights should it/they have? Should they be able to hold property? Should they be able join and participate in government?

Would they be able to direct the creation of new versions of themselves, to improve? 

(And perhaps these questions suggest the formation of a new field of study, called “Evolutionary Socio-AI”!)

“Competitive Deals are Won Early, Not Late”

Very interesting conclusions from a study done by Gong a few years ago:

• “Competitive Deals are Won Early, Not Late”

And

• “Competitive deals are won with discovery techniques, not closing techniques.”

In my experience with enterprise offerings, the vendor that is perceived as doing a superior job with discovery is in a competitively advantageous position. It is good to see that the data supports this!

If you want to enjoy this competitive advantage, check out Doing Discovery…

Overcoming Sales Objections – Why Many Sales Objections Shouldn't NEED to Be Overcome

“Help me understand how to handle customer sales objections…” 

“My team needs to learn how to handle objections…”

“We get lots of sales objections in our demos and need to manage them better…”

Sound familiar?

Many sales and presales training programs discuss ways to overcome objections, and managers frequently request skills training for their teams. There are numerous books, blog posts and articles on the subject, including the use of some rather intriguing acronyms (e.g., ARC, LAER, FFF, LAARC, and ECIRR). 

But, why do prospects raise objections? Is it possible that vendors are working to address the wrong problem? Is it possible that objections are a symptom of deeper problems? Perhaps sales objections shouldn’t come up in the first place, in a well-executed sales process!  

Let’s explore some common sales objections, their causes and some solutions:

“Do you have a ‘lite’ version of your software?” or “We don’t need the Cadillac version; we just want the Chevy…”

This is an example of “Buying It Back”. The prospect feels the product has more functionality than they need, and they don’t want to pay for the extra capabilities they don’t expect to use. This is an indication that too many features and functions were presented in the demo, many more than the Specific Capabilities the prospect actually needs.

Solution: Improve demo and discovery skills. Uncover and understand which Specific Capabilities your prospect needs and wants during discovery and only present those in your demo. Use Biased Questions to introduce capabilities that you think may be of interest or are competitively differentiating to avoid presenting features that won’t be appreciated.

“Your product looks too complicated for most of our users, so we only want a couple of licenses for a few experts to use…”

The demo showed too many options and too many clicks overall. It likely had numerous “if” and “or” choices showing an enormous range of possibilities, and presented pathways in too much detail. It made simple tasks look much more complicated than they needed to be.

Solution: Improve demo skills. Just “Do It”: Show the shortest path to complete any task. Use the fewest number of clicks or steps to get that task done. Let your prospect ask for more detail if interested and Peel Back the Layers in accord with their depth and level of interest.

“We didn’t see what we were looking for in the demo…”

Many traditional demos focus on what the vendor wants to show, and in the order that the vendor finds most comfortable. These demos often present as many features as the time allows, with special emphasis given to the vendor’s “competitive differentiators”. The result is that vendors run out of time to cover prospect-specific requirements.

A second reason for this objection is misalignment between what is demonstrated and prospect job titles. When vendors present demos of detailed staff-level workflows to managers and executives (who will never run those workflows), they often neglect showing the reports and dashboards desired by management to run their businesses. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard vendors say, “And we’ve got dozens of canned reports available (which can be configured), …” but never showed any of the reports or dashboards!

Another cause is spending too much time in the demo with “Setup Mode”. Far too many traditional demos consume time showing how to set things up in the system, how you can create and configure forms, reports, workflows, preferences, and more. Generally, the only people interested in these capabilities are the system administrators. 

I once watched a 90-minute demo where the first 40 minutes were dedicated entirely to Setup Mode items. Stunningly, the presenter then said, “Of course, you won’t have to do any of this because we take care of all of it during implementation…” Incomprehensible!

Solution: Improve demo and discovery skills. Execute discovery and then align your demos with what you’ve learned in discovery. Present the most important deliverables and capabilities early, and organize your demo on a job-title-by-job-title basis, focusing on what each job title wants to see. Start with the highest-ranking people, complete their segment, then move “downstream” (e.g., executives first, then middle managers, then staff members, then system admins).

An additional note: It is incredibly insulting to a prospect for them to invest time in a discovery conversation and then to have that information ignored in the subsequent demo!

“You don’t understand our business…”

You’ll hear this objection when the demo environment or demo data is out of alignment, when discovery was superficial, or both!

I’ve seen vendors present demos that showed manufacturing data and terminology to prospects in finance and vice versa. The gap is too large between these industries for a demo to be believable for these prospects.

Solution: Improve the demo environment and associated demo skills. This may require multiple demo environments, with demo data and deliverables tuned for each vertical. Tools like Saleo provide solutions, enabling sales and presales teams to work from a single demo environment while presenting the appropriate data, labels, graphs, images, and terminology for each target vertical.

Next, what do I mean by “discovery was superficial”? Vendors selling into certain verticals need “situational fluency,” meaning the vendors need to understand their prospects’ typical business challenges, environment, practices, and terms. This can be a major problem for vendor new hires in sales, presales, and customer success. I once saw a vendor demo to an auto parts company where the vendor was unfamiliar with “Just-in-Time” manufacturing and Kanban: They were literally shown the door!

Solution: Improve discovery skills. In this case, it means learning about the specific target industry. Some of this (hopefully!) can be provided during onboarding, and the balance through reading, research, and external courses or resources. Once this knowledge is in place, you can then develop the industry-specific discovery questions that exhibits your understanding of your prospects’ business and enable discovery to be executed satisfactorily.

A second approach is to organize sales teams that include at least one person who is already situationally fluent. This person can then help bring others up to speed and provide ongoing mentoring.

Note that the “both” case is particularly awful: When the demo data doesn’t resonate and the selling team is clueless about the specific vertical. I once heard a prospect mutter, “We’ll never buy from them, that’s for sure…!”

“I’m not comfortable with you as a vendor…”

What’s going here? In spite of a detailed corporate overview presentation that included logos from numerous current customers, the prospect still doesn’t perceive the vendor as viable. Why? It is likely the prospect is concerned about one or more areas of risk: Implementation, support, product roadmap, previous experience, or similar. It is possible the prospect was a “Burn Victim” of a failed implementation or a project that never achieved the desired ROI.

Solution: Improve discovery skills. These concerns should be surfaced and addressed during discovery. “Have you tried to address this before?” is a simple question that could uncover these concerns. 

A Transition Vision discussion is another way to avoid this objection. This dialogue walks the prospect through the implementation process and identifies one or more Value Realization Events to help convince the prospect that you really have their success in mind (and not simply getting the PO and signed license agreement!). 

“Let’s discuss how we can help you move from your current situation to ‘Go Live’ and then all the way to your first significant ROI events...”

Having this conversation during discovery will uncover any major issues that can be addressed. And if you find that there are issues that can’t be addressed satisfactorily, then you’ll know that this sales opportunity is not going to be successful, enabling you to avoid investing additional energy and time.

“While your product does cover about 80% of our requirements, it is missing a few critical capabilities…”

Once again, discovery was likely insufficient in uncovering and understanding prospect “KO” requirements vs needs and wants. 

Solution: Improve discovery skills.  During discovery, if your prospect identifies capabilities that you lack, you need to ask about use and importance: “How often would you use this? How important is it? Who would use it?” and similar, related questions. The answers will let you know whether your offering is a sufficiently good match or not, well before you get to the demo stage…!

In sales, if you are going to fail, fail fast, fail early, and fail cheaply!

“Your product looks good, but we feel we can continue to live with the current situation…”

This opportunity just became a No Decision outcome: The prospect decided that they can stay with the status quo. The opportunities just joined the other 45% of all deals forecasted to close this quarter, becoming a No Decision result.

Solution: Improve demo and discovery skills. Use Great Demo! Situation Slides to assess the likelihood of opportunities progressing to purchase decisions vs No Decision outcomes. There are typically three reasons why sales opportunities end in No Decision:

1. "We can live with the current process. We don't like it, but we can live with it!"

This is a case of the lack of a Critical Business Issue: The prospect agrees that there is a problem, but solving it is not sufficiently compelling for them to invest tangible resources to address it. They haven’t attached the problem to a quarterly, annual, or project-based goal or objective that is at risk. They are willing to live with “the hell that they know” rather than embrace change.

Solution: Improve discovery skills.  In discovery, asking “why” questions can help uncover whether a Critical Business Issue is present or not. Another example is to ask, “Tell me, how are you measured? How do you determine that you’ve been a success, at the end of the year?” The answer is often in the form of a Critical Business Issue.

      2. “We don’t see enough value…”

Insufficient perception of value on the part of the prospect is a classic sales objection that contributes to No Decision outcomes. Without clear and tangible value information, prospects have difficulty generating their business cases and selling internally.

Solution: Improve discovery and demo skills.  First, prospect value information needs to be uncovered and explored during discovery. Workflow Analysis is specifically designed to identify the value elements (Deltas): Tangible expressions of value in terms of time, people or money. These are strongest when they come from the prospect’s own lips. Vendors’ numbers are substantially less believable, from the prospect’s perspective! Sufficiently large Deltas become key drivers in pursuing a solution and supporting the prospect’s internal business case.

Once uncovered, communicate the business value of making the change during your demos. When you present key screens or deliverables, remember to tie the value – the Delta – to those screens

      3. “We’re not in a hurry…” or “We need it yesterday!”

In the first example, there is likely no Critical Date or Critical Event that drives the prospect’s need to implement a solution. Interestingly, this often means that the prospect understands that they aren’t addressing their Critical Business Issue, and they understand that they aren’t enjoying the value expected from making the change. They simply don’t have sufficient pressure to move forward with a solution: They “kick the can” down the road repeatedly, yielding another and often recurring version of a No Decision result. You’ll see forecasted deals “roll over” quarter after quarter, suffering this fate!

Strangely, the “We need it yesterday!” claim often produces a similar No Decision outcome. If they really “needed it yesterday”, then why hadn’t they implemented a solution? Again, a lack of a Critical Date or Critical Event is the culprit: There is no date and accompanying reason that drives the need for a solution to be adopted in a specific timeframe.

Solution: Improve discovery skills. Ask the appropriate timing questions in your discovery conversations with your prospects. “When do you need a solution in place – and what is driving that timing?”

The absence of any one of the these three Situation Slide elements will dramatically increase the probability of a No Decision result.

“Your product is way too expensive for us (but thanks for the education) …”

In the early stages of a buyer’s journey, buyers need to understand some price basics. Generally speaking, is the vendor’s price within the prospect’s range? The absence of reasonable price information can lead to some serious and potentially painful disconnects later in the sales and buying processes.

Many vendors refuse to offer specific prices early in the engagement, which is understandable. Vendors may need more demographic information on the expected number of users or other licensing parameters prior to providing a quote to the prospect.

However, prospects frequently need budgetary pricing information for longer-term planning purposes, or similar pricing datapoints if they are in an active buying process. If they find out that the price is way beyond their means, they would likely refocus their process on more affordable solutions.

Imagine how you would feel, as a prospect, if you invested time in conversations with a BDR and salesperson, an overview demo, a deep dive demo, and a workshop or POC – only to learn that the price was far too much for your organization!

Solution: Improve discovery skills. General price ranges should be discussed early in the process (e.g., during discovery). Vendors are not required to give specific pricing until they have collected the necessary discovery information, but the prospect needs to know whether the solution is within financial possibility for them.

An additional subtlety to contemplate is that there is a key difference between a price objection and requesting a discount. A price objection is tied to a prospect’s perception of insufficient value or ROI: They don’t see a good business case for the expenditure. 

Requesting a discount, on the other hand, simply means that the prospect wants to get the best price possible. They are comfortable with the value equation and expected ROI; they’d just like to get a deal! If you do choose to offer a discount, remember to ask for something tangible in return.

Summary

In all the above examples, these sales objections could have been avoided by investing in the selling team’s skills and knowledge. Most objections that arise late in the sales process, as a result of incomplete discovery and traditional demo practices. Improving discovery skills, in particular, is clearly the best place to begin. Discovery impacts everything that takes place in the sales funnel, from the first contact onwards.

What sales objections do you hear from your prospects today?

Copyright © 2013-2023 The Second Derivative – All Rights Reserved.

To learn the methods introduced above, consider enrolling in a Great Demo! Doing Discovery or Demonstration Skills Workshop. For more demo and discovery tips, best practices, tools and techniques, explore our blog and articles on the Resources pages of our website at https://GreatDemo.com and join the Great Demo! & Doing Discovery LinkedIn Group to share your experiences and learn from others.

Handling Objections: What Objections Do You Hear Most Frequently?

“Handling objections” is a frequently requested training topic from sales and presales managers for their teams. I’m curious: What objections do you hear most frequently from your prospects?

Here are a few to start the list:

• “Do you have a ‘lite’ version of your software?” or “We don’t need the Cadillac version; we just want the Chevy…”

• “Your product looks too complicated for most of our users – so we only want a couple of licenses for a few experts to use…”

• “I’m not comfortable with you as a vendor…”

• “You don’t understand our business…” or “You don’t understand our challenges…”

• “While your product does cover about 80% of our requirements, it is missing a few critical capabilities…”

• “Your product looks good, but we feel we can continue to live with the current situation…”

• “Your product is way too expensive for us (but thanks for the education) …”

What others have you encountered?

In Doing Discovery and Delivering Demos, What’s an Expert?

I’ve heard numerous people identify themselves or others as “experts” in executing discovery and presenting demos, which makes me wonder: What’s a practical definition of an “expert”?

I’d suggest the following…

A “Novice” is someone who is learning their products, their markets, their prospects and customers, and how to connect and execute discovery conversations and demonstrations successfully.

A “Journeyman”, on the other hand, is someone who can consistently and confidently execute successful discovery and demo processes.

This then begs the question, “What’s an expert?”

Have you ever been in the midst of a demo or discovery call and thought, “Oh! I’ll bet I could do this is part better!” or suddenly came up with a potential improvement to try out?

I’d suggest that a true expert is one who listens to these thoughts and takes action. An expert is someone who is constantly looking to improve their practices. An expert is willing to try new ideas and explore new methods. An expert takes small risks to actively experiment, test, and apply new learnings to get better!

Are you a Novice, a Journeyman, or an Expert?

For you who yearn to learn, check out the Resources pages on our new website at https://GreatDemo.com – you’ll find over 100 articles and 250 blog posts, in addition to webinar and podcast recordings on doing discovery, demos, and related topics. Enjoy!

The Three “Whys” and Discovery

In Chip and Dan Heath’s fabulous book Made to Stick, they describe using the “Three Whys” to uncover the emotional core of an idea. They suggest asking “Why” three times for any important topic. With each answer, you get to a higher and more meaningful level: the emotional core.

For example:

A sales manager (as a prospect) says, “I need more, better leads for my team…”

“Why is this important?” you ask.

“Oh, we’re spending too much time working leads that are unqualified…” is the response.

“I see,” you say, “Tell me, why is that a problem?”

“The team isn’t progressing enough leads to next sales stages…” replies the sales manager.

“And why is that an issue for you?” you inquire.

The sales manager admits, “Because if we don’t convert enough leads, we won’t make our quarterly numbers!”

Ah ha! You’ve just uncovered the Critical Business Issue for the sales manager. Three Whys…!

[And why is it important to identify a prospect’s Critical Business Issue? Because the absence of a Critical Business Issue will lead to a No Decision outcome. You can learn more about these ideas in Doing Discovery. Now ask yourself, “Why is this important…?”]

Great Demo! Virtual Demos Best Practices

Want a Horror Story?

I’ll give you a teaser: The punchline is, “Nope, I’m good…”

I watch dozens of recorded virtual demos from my prospects and customers. Sadly, most of these demos are traditional show-up-and-throw-up Harbor Tours. Occasionally, some demos stand out as particularly poor. Here’s the story:

A customer shared two recorded demos with me, each 1-hour long, presented to their typical prospects. These two examples had the same storyline and the only difference between them was the verbal style of delivery. The content and the sequence of steps in each demo were exactly alike. We had scheduled for me to see one more demo, but this one was live.

I connected with the vendor rep online at the agreed-upon time. He shared his desktop and asked, “Can you see my screen?” I replied, “I believe so…”

He said, “Great!” and dived into his demo. I realized he was following exactly the same pathway and talk track as his two predecessors. After eight minutes of talking and clicking he surfaced and asked, “Any questions so far?”

“Nope, I’m good…” I replied.

He dived back into his demo and continued for another eight minutes, then resurfaced again and asked, “Any questions so far?”

I responded, “No, I’m good…” With that, he again dived back into his talk track. This process, with the eight-minute “talk” portions repeated…

Now before continuing with this story, some additional background info is required:

1. I had turned off my video sharing to deal with bandwidth issues, which meant that he couldn’t see what I was doing during the demo; and
2. I time demos, or more specifically, I time how long the vendor talks before eliciting a response from the prospect. Talk:Listen info from the various web collaboration tools is terrific, but this was a live demo.

Seeing an opportunity, I said to myself, “I have to run this experiment!”

Immediately after his most recent “Any questions so far?” query, I grabbed my tea mug, left my office and went to the kitchen. I refreshed my tea, looked out at the view for a few minutes, and relaxed for a bit. At the 7-minute mark I returned to my office and sure enough, about one minute later, what do you think happened?

He resurfaced and asked, “Any questions so far?”

“Nope, I’m good…” was my response.

So, what is the horrifying thing about this? He had no idea I was physically gone for that segment!

The demo was going perfectly, as far as he was concerned, but his audience was literally gone. He had no clue that I had left the room (and the demo)!

Want Another Horror Story?

Imagine that you are the prospect, on the receiving end of a vendor’s live demo over the web. The vendor starts with a few corporate and product overview slides, and during this someone comes into your office. You mute the audio and chat with your colleague for a few minutes. They leave and your attention returns to the slides.

Moments later, the vendor rep asks, inevitably, “Any questions so far?”

You reply, “Nope, I’m good…” but you’re already a bit bored.

After another few minutes of listening listlessly, an email drops into your inbox that you want to read. You open it and respond, then idly investigate the balance of your inbox while the demonstrator’s voice drones on about, “Another really nice thing about our software is that everything is configurable – I’ll show you that now…”

Annnnnd you’ve tuned out…!

Does this sound familiar? Has this demo made a strong positive impression with you? Likely not!  

Now let’s turn these examples around: Imagine that it is you or your organization delivering these demos to your prospects. Ouch! What can be done to improve virtual demos?

Here are twelve terrific tips:

1. Learn the Technology: We rarely try something new in front of a prospect…

Before you start a web session with a prospect, get comfortable with the tool that you use (and the tools within that tool). Set up an exploration and practice session with a colleague from your own company. Invest thirty minutes to investigate and experience the capabilities available. That way, you will be able to deploy and apply these tools confidently when you are live with a prospect.

The first step is to assess the capabilities that are available. Does your tool offer:

• Options for screen sharing (e.g., one window vs full desktop, pause and resume)?
• Screen layout and organization options?
• Whiteboard capabilities?
• Annotation capabilities?
• Annotation capabilities for the audience?
• Chat dialogue?
• Dedicated Q&A area?
• Video display options?
• Display backgrounds choices?
• Audio input/output/mute options?
• Emoji or other reactions?
• Audience entry management?
• Participant management?
• Breakout rooms?
• Recording capabilities?
• Integration with other apps?
• What else does it offer?

Now, try them out! For the first fifteen minutes of your test run, explore and try all of the various capabilities available and get feedback from your colleague. Then switch and let your coworker explore for the next fifteen minutes.

In particular, practice using the annotation capabilities. Some tools currently offer a rich set of lines, colors, shapes and text (e.g., Zoom). Others may lack this capability (in which you should explore using a 3^rd party add-on tool).

Now you’ve been exposed to what is possible and can apply these options in real demos (and discovery calls, presentations, and other over-the-web interactions).

2. Test the Technology: Avoid “Gee, I don’t know why this isn’t working…”

For any substantive web demo or online meeting, reach out to your key contact, champion, or a colleague who will also be on the call, and suggest that you start the web session five to ten minutes before the formal meeting is scheduled to begin.

Use those minutes to check screen sharing, latency, screen resolution, color rendering, sound level and clarity, and font readability. Latency can be surprisingly long in some situations. I’ll tell my contact, “OK, I’m going to say 3-2-1 ‘click’ and then advance the slide – please tell me when you see it.”

Note that this dialogue, prior to starting the demo, also begins to train your prospect that the demo will be a conversation.

Another check to consider is the size of your mouse cursor. The default size (on both Mac and Windows) tends to be quite small. I generally recommend increasing the size about 2x and choosing a filled-in version, rather than just the outline. 

Along similar lines, if you are using a large screen monitor and you are presenting to people with smaller screens, your display will be squeezed down to fit your prospects’. Your software’s text size may appear very small and hard to read, so you may need to change your screen resolution to address this. Test it to make sure!

Finally, when operating in a browser, go into full-screen mode. This removes the toolbars and tabs from the top, and the bottom ribbons as well, giving you as much as 14% more screen for your software. Additionally, it reduces perceived complexity, as there are fewer buttons, tabs, and commands in view.

3. Apply the Technology: Avoid the “Gosh this is boring” prospect perception…

Most vendors assume that delivering a virtual demo is nothing more than “Can you see my screen?” followed by click and talk, click and talk. Sadly, this is insufficient to hold audience attention!

Drive interactivity by actually using the tools that the folks at the various toolmakers have implemented for your enjoyment:

• Use the annotation tools (including pens, shapes, stamps, arrows and more). The act of a new, unanticipated drawing or graphic appearing on the screen grabs your audience’s attention and wakes them up. Drawing a circle or dragging a rectangle around a screen element attracts your audience’s eyes to exactly what you want them to see;

• Invite your prospect to use the annotation tools, if they have questions about specific portions of the screen;

• The participants’ panes typically display the names of the attendees: Use their names when responding to questions and comments;

• Use the whiteboard capabilities and enable your prospect to draw when the opportunity arises – doing Workflow Analysis is one example;

• For larger groups, particularly if the audience is muted, use the Chat or Q&A dialogs to drive a conversation with your audience;

• The pause button is a wonderful tool that most people are completely unaware of: When Pause is “on”, it continues to show the last screen you were sharing, enabling you to do anything you want without the audience seeing it! You can restart an app, open or close files, clean up your desktop, read your own email… When you are ready to share your screen again, simply un-pause. Delightful!

• Video offers a range of options. You can use your video pane to gesture and communicate your personality. I’ve “given” audience members pieces of paper and other objects by virtually passing them through the webcam. Invite your audience members to share their video as well so that you can watch their reactions and attention. You can consider calling people by name who may have become distracted, “Pat, what are your thoughts about using this function?”

• Look them in their eyes… Wait, what? Your webcam operates the same way a movie camera does, capturing your head, torso and background. If you are looking down at your keyboard or the lower portion of your screen, you look to your audience like you are looking down, as well. When you have a key idea to communicate look directly at your webcam. This makes it appear to your audience that you are looking right at them! Julie Hansen’s terrific book, Look Me In the Eye offers additional ideas and guidance on connecting with your audience over the web;

• Let your prospect drive…! This is non-obvious, but hugely engaging: Invite your prospect to drive certain portions of the demo. You can manage the risk by employing your champion and practicing prior to the session. Few things wake up an audience like having one of their own members driving the software!

• There may be other capabilities that emerge as tools vendors improve their products: Explore them, test them, and use them!

4. Put Passion into Your Delivery: Avoid audience “Zzzzzz…”

Nothing says “boredom” like a flat, passionless voice droning on endlessly…

You may need to compensate for the inability of your audience to see more than your head and torso by injecting more energy and dynamics into your verbal delivery. Some presenters prefer to stand when delivering a web demo to help with this.

Take a lesson from musicians: Modulate your voice from loud to soft for impact, apply crescendos to build tension, and the take advantage of the power of the pause. These methods add drama to your delivery. (Wind instrument players and vocalists will recognize, “Push from your diaphragm…” to project your voice.)

Passion does not necessarily mean speaking rapidly! In fact, you may find that slowing down your delivery and choosing your words with care has more positive impact than trying to cram as much as possible into the available time!

For folks in the U.S.: Be aware of your audience’s geo location, as well. The use of North American metaphors may not resonate with international audiences. Similarly, plan to use more “international” English and avoid local colloquialisms. After all, that dog don’t hunt (see what I did there?).

5. Video View: “Oh, that’s an interesting background…”

Be aware of what your background looks like and the lighting on your face, in particular. I’ve seen folks delivering demos who appeared to be facing sideways! Clearly, they were working from two monitors, with their webcam on one monitor and their software on another.

If you are presenting from an office, assess what your audiences sees behind you. Clean and simple is best; consider including one or two relevant or interesting objects as conversation starters, such as a favorite book or two (I’d suggest Great Demo! and Doing Discovery – I know the author!).

If you are using a virtual background, check to make sure it appears clean and doesn’t suffer from fuzziness – those of us with unruly hair may do better with no virtual background.

Additionally, in most virtual demos, presenters turn on their video and leave it on for the duration. If your audience has limited screen “real estate” they may find themselves watching your face rather than viewing your software. Consider the following as a solution:

Your Video ON: During introductions, to help “personalize” the demo. It’s a real person presenting, not a disembodied voice;

Your Video OFF: While sharing your software screens, so that your audience is focusing on your software. With your video on, they may be watching you rather than your software;

Your Video ON: For your interim summaries, Q&A, and your final summary.

6. Move Your Mouse Smooooothly and Deliberately: Avoid “Zippy Mouse Syndrome…”

When we mouse for ourselves, the cursor follows where our eyes are looking, resulting, in many cases, in the cursor zooming wildly around the screen. This is actually painful for many viewers!

Along the same lines, have you ever seen someone circle something endlessly with their cursor…? Solution? “Move and Stop”.

I’ve found the most amazing principle: If you take your hand off of the mouse, the cursor stops moving. Yes!  Incredible! Move the mouse to where you want it to be, then take your hand off while you talk. It doesn’t move!

When navigating in a demo, find the target location on the screen with your eyes before you move your mouse, then navigate your mouse smoothly to the new location. Then let go of the mouse! Do not circle the location around and around and around and around…

This is the perfect time to use an annotation tool to highlight the area on the screen, while you describe the what the capability does, how it helps the prospect address their business problems, and communicate the value associated with using the capability.

7. Drive Interactivity: Avoid the “chirp chirp chirp” sound of crickets in an empty room…

Most traditional demos try to pack as much into the hour as possible, while simultaneously telling the audience, “Please ask questions along the way to make this as interactive as possible…”

Unfortunately, these two objectives are mutually exclusive, and many demonstrators really don’t want any questions, as those questions will consume precious time needed to show the many capabilities in their software. This gets worse with every release as more features are added.

What’s the rescue for this dilemma? Great Demo! methodology provides some terrific answers:

1. Do the Last Thing First (as opposed to “saving the best for last…”);
2. Use Inverted Pyramid (to ensure you cover the most important things);
3. Execute every pathway using the Fewest Number of Clicks (to reduce apparent complexity).

A study of demos by Gong.io found that the most successful demos applied these three principles. Additionally, the most successful demos had speaker switches on an average of every 76 seconds. (A “speaker switch” is a change from the vendor talking to the prospect speaking and vice versa.)

This doesn’t mean that every 76 seconds you need some response from your audience, but it does tell you that if you’ve been presenting for 4 or 5 minutes or longer without a speaker switch, you need to stop, pause, and drive that interaction. Here are a few suggestions:

• Summarize frequently: This also cues the audience that it is their turn to ask questions;9

• Check-in frequently: Use phrases such as, “Comments or questions?” or “What do you think of what you’ve seen so far?” and “Does that address your requirements sufficiently?”

• Test the latency periodically: Here’s a great mid-demo check. Tell your audience, “I’m going to say ‘3-2-1 click’, then please let me know when you see the graphic appear…” This (gently, but firmly) forces your audience to engage;

• Check for specific attention: “Can you see my mouse pointing at the logo?”

• Use the highlighters, arrows, pens and other annotation tools periodically;

• Highlight text (drag across text to reverse highlight): This is a simple and very effective highlighting technique;

• When driving interaction with larger audiences: Have them raise their virtual hands, communicate reactions, and use the Chat/Q&A dialogs to respond to your questions and enable questions or comments from them. You often can “riff” off of Chat comments to encourage more contributions and reward those who participate.

8. Use an Agenda: And avoid your prospect wondering, “Where is this going…?”

In Great Demo! methodology, we teach breaking a demo up into consumable chunks. It turns out that the typical adult human can pay attention for about 10 minutes before they need to be “refreshed” in some way. Accordingly, in a sixty-minute demo you should have (at least!) six chunks – more would be better.

What’s a “refresh”? Anything that resets your audience’s brains! When a person asks a question, they get refreshed and you get another ten minutes of their attention. A great way to refresh is to use an agenda and return to it at the end of each chunk to summarize, pause for questions or comments, and then introduce the next chuck or agenda topic.

Some vendor teams present an agenda at the beginning of a demo, and that’s good. Much better is to present the agenda, deliver your first segment, and then return to your agenda to summarize and check for questions or feedback: You gain an audience refresh. This also helps drive interactivity by providing “space” for questions and observations in between your chunks.

Sharing your agenda at the end of each chunk also gives you the opportunity to introduce the next chunk, as well. “Tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them.” Thanks, Aristotle!

Repeat this process for each segment of your demo and return to your agenda for your final summary.

9. Use An “Active Conduit”: Give yourself eyes in the meeting…

Have you ever delivered a demo over the web to a roomful of people, but you only could see one person or a small subset of the audience? When you are in these or similar situations, designate someone to be your “eyes” for the meeting: An “Active Conduit” providing information to you on what is happening in the meeting room.

In the best case, use your salesperson or other colleague from your company. Next best is your champion or key contact.

Start the session a few minutes early and guide this person to help you:

• Test and confirm the technology is operating correctly: All the checks from Item 2 above;
• Manage introductions: Have them go around the room to help you capture each participant’s name, job title and objectives;
• Communicate tone and how things are going;
• Alert you when new people arrive, or people leave;
• Alert you when someone has a question or comment;
• Manage (and repeat) questions for you (this is a really good one…!);
• Alert you to side-bar discussions or comments that you can’t hear.

10. Clean Up Your Desktop and Alerts: And avoid the embarrassing, “Ohhhh, my!” moments…

It can be amusing to audience members to see email previews and other messages appearing on the presenter’s screen during a demo, but it is distracting and can be downright embarrassing!

Want another horror story?

I was watching a virtual demo a while ago, when one of the prospect team members asked a question. The salesperson texted the presenter the message, “Ignore that question – that guy is an idiot!” Sadly, the salesperson didn’t realize that this text might appear on the screen for all to see – and it did!

End of demo, end of sales cycle…

Moral? Turn off your alerts as much as possible and/or limit screen sharing to the apps necessary.

An additional tip: for those of you with dozens of icons on your desktop, consider hiding them or using an alternative desktop for your demos. A desktop that looks like a corp overview “logo slide” tells the audience, “This will be complicated!”

11. Manage Questions: Parking professionally…

Consider using a Word, Google or similar document to capture parked questions during your demo. Show the audience that you have written the question down (remember to share that portion of your screen) and confirm you have captured it correctly. Using Chat is another good method – just remember to make sure Chat is saved when exiting the tool!

Bonus: For documents, you can use strike-through text to mark questions that you addressed in the session. This will give you a written record of which questions are closed, and which are still pending. It also provides you with an elegant tool for your final summary.

12. Get Better: “But I hate the sound of my own voice…!”

The first time most of us hear our own voice played back from a recording, we are appalled: “Aaaagh! Do I really sound like that?” Once we get through that, we can learn a great deal by recording our web sessions and playing them back. 

This is a wonderful way to hear what you actually said and how you said it: Your “crutch” words (“um”, “erm”, “actually”, etc.), your pace, your tone, your word choices, pauses, and summaries.

• Did you provide introductions for each chunk and summarize at the end? Did you include pauses for your audience to engage with questions or comments?

• How long were your longest non-stop speaking segments? What was your average speaker-switch time?

• Were you speaking at a comfortable pace for your audience? Were your word choices, analogies and metaphors consistent with their geographic and cultural norms?

• How well did you manage questions? Did you cut off your prospect or let them complete their query? Did you dig deeper to uncover the “why” behind their question? Did you confirm you’d addressed the question adequately?

• When you presented key screens, did you remember to describe what your audience was seeing, how it helps them solve their business problems, and how much value is associated with making the change?

• How was your mousing? Was it smooth and deliberate or are you suffering (like me!) from Zippy Mouse Syndrome?

• Were the handoffs between you and your colleagues smooth and professional?

• What sections of your demo resonated most strongly with your prospect?

• Were there any surprises (positive or negative)?

• Did you achieve your objective for the demo? More important, did you enable your prospect to achieve their objectives for the meeting?

What did you do well? What could you do better next time?

The list above also represents a team-based post-demo assessment. Same questions, but for your selling team as a whole.

Twelve Terrific Tips

Learning, practicing and applying these twelve tips will (rather markedly) improve the mechanics of your virtual demos.  

Pick one item to try each week and in a few months, you’ll be surprisingly effective…!

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To learn the methods introduced above, consider enrolling in a Great Demo! Doing Discovery or Demonstration Skills Workshop. For more demo and discovery tips, best practices, tools and techniques, explore our blog and articles on the Resources pages of our website at https://GreatDemo.com and join the Great Demo! LinkedIn Group to share your experiences and learn from others.