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