Monday, December 15, 2008

The "Tell Show Tell" Technique, What else ?

If you are working in the software environment You may have heard about the "tell show tell" technique that apply in a software demonstration and that is described in Robert Riefstahl's book "Demonstrating to win". What this technique is about ?
It's a very simple method you can use in order to make your software's features simple and easy to understand for your prospect point of view. Basically all what you have to do before showing one feature of your software is to :
  1. Tell the prospect what they are going to see
  2. Show them into the system what you have just told ( and only what you have told about)
  3. Tell them finally what they just saw

It is very simple indeed but i can assure you it is actually very efficient. I really tried out a significant change the day i started to apply it. It is easy to understand for your audience, it gives rhythm to you presentation and avoid you to go somewhere else in your software once you entered into, and furthermore it gives you the opportunity (once you did the whole "tell show tell") to explain why such specific feature is important and why this feature will provide them benefits.
In my current company we are all convinced by the "Tell Show Tell" technique but the problem is that we are using different meaning under the words ( "Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings". LZ)

  1. Tell has a lot to do with rather identifying the pain points and telling the prospect what are their objectives ans strategic goals
  2. Show means hopefully the same
  3. Tell (the second) means adding and proving the unique value that our software will provide to the customer accordingly to their goals

Is that's bad ? No of course ! But it is not the same technique Robert Riefstahl described in his book. I think we are misleading a tactic trick that is very useful for software demonstration (Tell Show Tell) and the strategic value proposition we need to provide to the customer. As a matter of fact we need to read again "Demonstrating to Win" and to apply properly the "Tell Show Tell" technique.

Tell Show Tell, what else ?

1 comment:

my hobby said...

Great post ,thanks for sharing this.