“You Must Now Show Us How…!”

Early Experiments with Great Demo! Illustrations

 

One hundred years ago I was working out of our Swiss office with the mission to “Achieve deployment of our flagship product into our key European accounts.” We had sold large licenses of this software but much of it was “shelfware,” not yet in production use by our target end users.

 

Accordingly, we had organized regular Sprechstunden (doctor’s hours, effectively) at one of our key customers near Frankfurt and it was my turn to be the “doctor.” We had just released an important add-on capability (thanks Dave D!) that finally provided users with the deliverables they needed: the ability to generate Structure Activity Relationship (SAR) tables in Excel.

 

These tables were (and still are!) the currency for analysis and communication by drug discovery scientists and medicinal chemists, in particular. They often have piles of these tables on their desktops. Producing these tables had previously been a laborious cut-and-paste process, requiring repeated toggling between several systems: A real pain! Our new capability reduced hours of this effort down to minutes.

 

I’d seen demos from other members of our team that took the traditional approach, starting from an empty spreadsheet and progressing step-by-step while showing several options and alternatives along the way. I’d observed that audiences looked bored until they saw the completed SAR tables at the end of the demo, often taking twenty or thirty minutes.

 

When I noticed how audiences visibly perked up when they saw the final output, I decided to run an experiment for this meeting.

 

I entered our customer’s large meeting room to see sixty German medicinal chemists seated, ready for our Sprechstunde. I set up my laptop and immediately presented a simple example of a SAR table output and asked, “Is this the kind of thing you’d like to generate?”

 

There was an audible sound of people leaning forward in their chairs, and a few chemists started to speak, but I held up my hand and said, “How about this one?” as I presented a more complex example.

 

There were some vigorous head-nods, and many chemists knocked their knuckles on the tables in front of them (a sign of agreement and/or appreciation in that part of the world). Again, a few started to speak, but I held up my hand again.

 

“And what do you think about this one?” I asked as I presented a publication-ready example, the kind of output they deeply desired.

 

One of the chemists in the front row stood up and declared, “You must now show us how…!”

 

This was one of the first experiments with the idea of “Do the Last Thing First” through presenting compelling Illustrations, and it was a terrific success!

 

You’ll find the complete methodology in Great Demo! or (even better) learn how to achieve similar results in a Great Demo! Workshop.