Great Demo!

Tuesday, June 30, 2026

How Chunking Improves Demos – Part 2: Short Chunks and Pauses!

Does time play an important role in chunking?

"You can have it all. Just not all at once."

– Oprah Winfrey

Just as we need to pace ourselves when eating and pause between bites (teenagers excepted), retention of ideas improves when we give them time to get digested.

It turns out that the typical adult human can pay attention when receiving information for about ten minutes. That’s it. After that, our mental mouth is full; we need time to swallow and process before our next bite.

Now consider: How long are your typical demos? Thirty minutes? An hour?

For an hour-long demo, each mental bite of three (typical) to seven (exceptional) ideas is all your prospect can handle at a time. Accordingly, you’ll need to break up your demo into (at least!) six bites – six chunks – of ten minutes each.

But that’s stretching your audience’s ability to pay attention. Chunks of a few minutes yield stronger engagement and spur a real conversation to take place.

Continuing our dining analogy, note that there are significant pauses between dishes in a multiple course meal. Each course represents a chunk and each bite a tasty, consumable component within that chunk.

But it is the pause, along with conversation and a sip of water that refreshes and enables us to start on the next chunk with our full attention.

Next: Losing Attention!

Resources:

Great Demo! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C9SNKC2Y/

- Chunking – page 239, 249

Monty Python, “Three shall be the number…”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IOMNUayJjI

How Chunking Improves Demos – Part 1: Bitesize Bits Are Better

https://greatdemo.com/how-chunking-improves-demos/

Monday, June 29, 2026

How Chunking Improves Demos

Bitesize Bits Are Better: Here’s Your First!

"A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."

– Herbert A. Simon

Read this European phone number to a colleague: +49692877693.

How did you present it?

Was it a single non-stop string without any pauses or groupings, or did you break it up into small sections, such as “+49 69 287 76 93”?

Chances are you broke it up into two- or three-number chunks. We do this naturally!

And, if you happened to present the phone number as a single long string, I’ll bet your colleague may have asked you to repeat it, tacitly expecting you to break it up into small, discrete sections.

Why do we break things up this way?

Chunking!

"Chunking makes our brains more efficient. The more you can chunk something, the faster and easier you can process it..."

– Kevin Maney

From Google: “We chunk information to bypass the strict limits of our working memory. By grouping individual pieces of data into larger, meaningful units, we reduce cognitive overload, make content easier to scan, and significantly improve our ability to memorize and process information.”

Very simply, we break things up into smaller components to make them consumable. Eating provides a simple set of analogies, for example. We cut food into bite-size pieces since we can’t fit anything larger in our mouths: This is a physical limitation.

Our brains suffer similar mental limitations. But traditional demos ignore these constraints, confusing prospects and vendors alike. Prospects are told “Now, this is really important…” dozens of times, while vendors don’t understand why prospects are confused.

Contemplate a traditional 1-hour SaaS demo (a stunningly awful Harbor Tour). How many features would you guess are presented? Forty is a good estimate, yet I’ve seen many demos that highlighted a feature per minute. That’s sixty specific ideas the vendor wants their prospect to remember.

That. Is. Impossible!

It’s like pouring a liter of wine into a glass that only holds 150ml: 850ml is wasted. (For folks in the U.S., that’s like pouring a quart of wine into a 5oz glass.) However, you can consume that full bottle of wine over time if you drink five individual glasses (please space this out over a few hours and I’m not responsible for your behavior if you do attempt this experiment!).

At best, your typical human can retain five to seven pieces of information at once. That’s a metaphoric generous glass of wine. Frankly, three ideas are what most people are comfortable with at a time, representative of a more consumable pour.

The point is that if you chunk things in the physical or mental worlds and present those chunks over time (with some additional strategies and tactics, below) you have a much better chance of enabling consumption and retention.

Resources:

Great Demo! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C9SNKC2Y/

- Chunking – page 239, 249

Monty Python, “Three shall be the number…”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IOMNUayJjI

Friday, June 26, 2026

Do You Read as Much as You Post?

“We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.”

– Epictetus

Here’s an intriguing idea: For every minute you invest in publishing posts on LinkedIn, commit at least the same time to read and learn from others’ posts!

Thursday, June 25, 2026

Four Out of Three People…

Four out of three people struggle with math!

And

There are three types of people in the world:

Those who can count precisely and those who cannot.

Similarly

There are three types of people in the world:

Those who understand binary and those who do not.

Wednesday, June 24, 2026

Dealing with "Just Show Me a Demo?" Seven Methods to Move into Discovery

Far too often, prospects demand, “Just show me a demo…!” when we know the correct approach is to invest, mutually, in a discovery conversation. But how do we convince prospects to make this change? Here are seven ideas!

Prospect says, “Just show me a demo…”

1. You respond, “Terrific! Let’s schedule eight hours for your demo, because that’s what it will take to go through our offering. Or we could invest thirty minutes to discuss your situation so that we can focus on what’s important for you. The resulting demo will likely last well under an hour.”

2. You offer, “You are investing a great deal of time and energy in finding and implementing a new system. Let’s ensure that investment pays off for you by helping us understand your situation/goals/needs/etc. fully before we present a demo.”

3. You say, “Oh! This is exactly like having a severe headache and going to the doctor and the doctor says, ‘You have a headache? Great! Go down to the pharmacy and try each of the one thousand drugs we offer and then let me know which one works best…!’ We can continue on that pathway or, if you allow me to be your ‘physician,’ I can discuss your situation to enable an accurate diagnosis and a focused demo prescription.”

4. You respond, “I’m presuming you don’t want to pay for capabilities that you don’t need. So instead of guessing and likely wasting your time and mine let’s invest a few minutes to discuss your actual needs. The demo can then focus specifically on those capabilities.”

5. You offer, “If I were a surgeon, would you want me to grab a scalpel and open you up or would you prefer that I ask a few questions first?”

6. You counter, “Imagine you just sat down for a meal in a nice restaurant and I’m your waiter. Should I simply guess what you want to eat and start bringing out dishes or would you want me to offer you a menu?”

(“And while you’re waiting, we’ll play music and try to guess what music you like. Let’s start with heavy metal/baroque/pure percussion/Grateful Dead ‘space’ etc.”)

7. (My favorite!) You say, “Fine…” and move (gently but firmly) into a Vision Generation Demo that satisfies your prospect’s desire to “see what’s possible” while moving delightfully into a discovery conversation.

And we can use The Menu Approach to focus on the topics of highest interest for your prospect!

Any other ideas to suggest?

Resources:

Doing Discovery

https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Discovery-Important-Enablement-Processes/dp/B0B8RJK4C2/

Avoiding Buying It Back

https://greatdemo.com/are-you-buying-it-back-2/

The Menu Approach

https://greatdemo.com/the-menu-approach-a-truly-terrific-demo-self-rescue-technique-3/

Vision Generation Demos

Great Demo! Third Edition page 258

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C9SNKC2Y/

Real Stories About Discovery:

- “But You Already Know Their Workflow”

- “You Know You Already Closed Me”

- Who Is Mr. Big Ears?

- “Let Me Close My Door”

- The Million Dollar Demo and the Good Little Salesperson

- A Prospect’s Tale

Suspending Disbelief: A Collection of Sales, Presales, and Marketing Stories (and Lessons Learned)

https://tinyurl.com/yc7rsrmy

Tuesday, June 23, 2026

Expansion Questions – An Essential Discovery Skill

Your prospect shares, “It’s a manual process.”

You reply, “Does it typically go smoothly? What happens when someone is on vacation?”

“It’s a mess! We literally have tickets piling up on people’s desks…!” divulges your prospect.

Congratulations! You’ve just deepened and broadened your prospect’s pain using the essential discovery skill of Expansion Questions. So, what are they, how do you use them, and when?

Expansion Questions are a series of interrelated questions designed to span five of the seven discovery skills levels, from uncovering pain to reengineering vision. They are a simple, yet essential skill to master in doing discovery, enabling you to extend, deepen, and quantify your prospects’ pains and related impacted areas.

Expansion Questions leverage your experiences with other prospects and customers, providing you with lists of likely problem areas, impacts, and outcomes to explore with new prospects.

An Example

Let’s return to the conversation above. A skilled vendor and their prospect are talking about the prospect’s current workflow that handles customer requests and issues. Let’s listen:

Prospect comments, “It’s a manual process…”

Vendor responds, “Sorry to hear this – what takes place today?”

Prospect explains, “Well, each request is entered, reviewed, processed, escalated, and closed in a series of steps, with each step done manually by an individual, then passed to the next person in line.”

The vendor asks an Expansion Question, “Does it typically go smoothly? For example, what happens when someone is on vacation?”

The vendor knows, based on previous experience with similar prospects, that vacations often have serious negative impact on these workflows.

Prospect replies, “It’s a mess! We literally have tickets piling up on people’s desks…!”

Vendor responds, “What happens then?”

Prospect offers, “At minimum, it causes delays in response time which impacts customer satisfaction.”

Our vendor makes a note to come back to this impact statement later, but focuses on the current issue for now:

Vendor asks, “I see… How many folks are involved on your team?”

Prospect says, “We have a total of 12 people doing this, and it is far too many!”

Vendor pursues, “Understood. And what would you like to reduce this to?”

Prospect states, “I’d love to get this down to two people. There’s plenty on the team’s plate that needs to be done in addition to this process!”

Note that our vendor has quantified a desired outcome – a Delta – reducing the number of people in the workflow from twelve to two. Next, knowing that manual processes typically result in errors, our vendor introduces another Expansion Question…

You can enjoy the balance of this article here:

https://greatdemo.com/expansion-questions-an-essential-discovery-skill/

Monday, June 22, 2026

Suspending Disbelief: “Short Stories, Big Lessons”

You can learn the hard way or…

“I’ve been a longtime fan of Peter Cohan, and Suspending Disbelief did not disappoint. He’s one of the few authors who can genuinely plant me in a chair and keep me there cover to cover—and this book was no exception.

What makes this book stand out is how effectively it uses storytelling to teach. As Peter explains, stories are what make ideas stick, and he practices exactly what he preaches throughout. Each chapter delivers a short, engaging story with a clear takeaway!

I found many of the scenarios incredibly relatable (sometimes uncomfortably so!), and that’s what makes the lessons so valuable. Whether you’re early in your career or have years of experience, you’ll see yourself in these stories—and more importantly, you’ll walk away with practical insights you can apply immediately.

Entertaining, insightful, and highly actionable. Highly recommended.”

Suspending Disbelief: A Collection of Sales, Presales, and Marketing Stories (and Lessons Learned)

https://tinyurl.com/yc7rsrmy