I was recently listening to a recording of a truly painful,
stunningly awful demo from one of my prospects – and the more I heard, the
worse it got…!
It began poorly with a traditional corporate overview
presentation that consumed the first 12 minutes, referencing and listing (among
other things) that the vendor serves a broad range of markets – note that the
customer operated in a single vertical and had no care about the others…
It deteriorated as the product overview began and detailed a
range of options and non-relevant capabilities – including most of the words
listed in (but not limited to!) the Content-Free-Buzzword-Compliant Vocabulary
List – “flexible, comprehensive, seamless, integrated, robust, best-of-breed…” Sigh.
The demo went stunningly awful when, after 35 minutes of
actual demo, the customer interrupted and said, “You’re showing stuff that is
all associated with XXX; we already
have tools to deal with that. We had
asked to see how you handle YYY – would you mind moving to that?”
Ouch!
The demo presenter apparently had not received this information
from whoever did Discovery. Gosh – could
this possibly happen?
But wait, there’s more…
The presenter could have rescued the demo at this point by (1)
apologizing and then (2) asking a few Discovery questions about the YYY topic,
before moving the mouse any further…
However, what do you think happened?
Sadly, the presenter simply changed scripts and commenced his
“standard” demo for YYY… Stunningly
awful! Needless to say, they didn’t get
the business!
Bonus observation:
Numerous times the presenter asked, during the demo, “Any questions so
far?” After the first few times the
customer simply answered, rather tersely, “Nope.” That should have been an indication that
things were not going well – and an opportunity to change!
Bonus observation #2: For Great Demo! practitioners, the use of a Situation Slide to facilitate communications between sales and presales would have averted this tragedy...
No comments:
Post a Comment