The 10 pearls of the discovery process

Did you remember some discovery interviews you had with your prospect that turned into a nightmare ? You will be likely to have bad times with reluctant customer like it happened to Bob Reifstahl in this nightmare on the video Discovery street discovery process.
Fortunately it won't be always the case and the discovery is anyway the most important part of your pre sales job and it is a great opportunity in order to :

1 Understand the main customer's business goals and pain points and how the implementation of your software could help your customer to reach this goals or to reduce the pains

2 Ask your customer "Why your organisation win in business". You will know more about the organisation and the value of your customer and you will be able to use the demo to show how your software will support this success and this unique position.

3 Check it out whether there is a real compelling event for their software implementation: Do they really want to change ? Do they have no other choice to change their IT or can they afford to postpone the project ? What happens if nothing is done ?

4 Know why did they send you the RFP ? Why are they considering your software and your company as relevant for their business ?

5 Ask to your customer "Why your organisation win in business". You will know more about the organisation and the value of your customer and you will be able to use the demo to show how your software will support this success and this unique position.

6 Learn from each individual what he really expects of the software value by asking "If you could transport yourself forward in time to 3 months after the go-live and look back, what would be the most important changes you would want to see?”

7 Collect valuable informations about their business jargon, customers, vendors, data and documents that will be useful for the demo

8 Focus on the 3 or 5 mains business scenarios that are both critical and valuable for their industry and that you could illustrate during the demo without showing all the features.

9 Find out the Unique Business Value of your software : The reason why your software will be unique to the customer's eyes

10 Create allies for your demo ( by selling yourself as a professional guy but not selling yet your product) and spot your assumed "enemy".

and Listen listen listen listen your customer and then contribute by helping them...

Have a look to Bob having bad times discovering his enemy :
"BOB - Go back to the forecasting methods, for exemple do you use exponential smoothing method today ?
THE CUSTOMER - Yes, sometimes we do, sometimes we don't"
Does that sound familiar to you ? I hope not !

Brainstorming with the publisher Centre France

Last week we met our customer Centre France a french newspapers group located in Clermont-Ferrand in order to demonstrate to them how our software could help them to reach their business goals. Before going into the system, we shared with them the brainstorming my colleagues and I had building our value proposition. First we actually told them we brainstormed, we didn't start directly into the system in order to customize the features they wanted to see, and indeed the dices was running as our ideas : Next, we explained them our fist vision we have got from their particular needs and their project and this vision was a complete solution that would handle with their CRM, Subscription, advertising, single copy sales requirements.

Of course, this vision was not wrong but eventually we came up together with a better understanding of their actual need with the next upcoming slide in which we shared with them the same vision but enhanced a lot by the focus on the customer. We told them that we want to deliver a customer centric solution that will provide both the features but also a better knowledge and a better service to their clients.

By positioning the customer at the epicenter of our customer's project, we made it clear to them that we really were willing to add value to their project. Moreover, they appreciated our customized and adapted slides rather than standard ones.

Thriving in the New Reality in 2009

There is no question that the world is facing an extremely challenging set of economic scenarios. Unlike the past years, we are no longer in a rapid expanding global economy scenarios and we all know that the world is in the midst of an economic upheaval of unheard proportions. Given all the bad news we've been seeing on the TV and in the newspapers, it would be really easy to consumed by the crisis ! It is tough but it is no time to lose confidence because in every crisis there is somes dangers but some opportunities as well and there is first the opportunity to transform ourselves in order to thrive in this new reality. Lets go back to the basic adopting the new reality behavior requirements vs old habit we used to do a few months ago.

Thriving versus Winning : In the new reality you don't necessarily need to make a lot of money in your pocket to feel succesfull but rather you can thrive in 2009 by adding more values to your customers, spending more time with them, sharing with them your knowledge industry issues (what you have learnt from others customers) discovering their pain points and finding out how you can help them and having an idea of what they should do in order to solve their problem and eventually having fun doing it

Contribution versus Competition : In the new reality, you have to think in term of contributions rather than competition : that means how can you today make this day a better day and how can you today make as a contribution your company a better place to live and work in.

Work Smarter versus Work harder : Unless you didn't work too much in 2008 I don't think it could be possible for most of us to work harder in 2009 ! I think that trying to work harder could end up into an worthless spiral without additional value or results. In the new reality you have to try to be smarter ( or less stupid i don't know) focusing on the Pareto's law : 20 % of the work drives 80% of the results and therefore we will have to focus on the right thing to do rather than systematically doing all the things right.

Simplicity versus Complexity : The customer business processes are often complex and will continue to be in the new reality no doubt about it, but our job is to make them simpler through our system software and through the value message we deliver to them. Simplicity is difficult to obtain but supremely powerful and beautiful (and visual and simple slides vs boring bulleted point slides are part of it)

Personalization versus Standardization : Being closer to the customer in the new reality will allow us to run more personalized software demonstration in the customers language and with relevant master data that will sound familiar to them ( and not widget data)

Possibilities versus hopeless world : Do not fall into the world of doubt, fear and uncertainty but take this world's new reality as still in essence full of opportunities and possibilities with freedom, abundance and spontaneity. Be fearless, trust yourself and trust your company.

Innovation versus Execution : Flawless sales and pre sales execution does matter in the new reality but innovation and creativity are more. The new area requires thinking differently in order to better serve our customer and to better help our colleagues. Creativity means not being paralyzed by old practices and expert knowledge but being able to think outside the box (but not as a cliché from job resume) to find solutions to unforeseen problems.

Ordering pizza in the future : a funny video that shows why a lot of software options is getting your customer mad !

Just having an idea of the result provided by too much software features in your application ! At the beginning of this order example, everything sounds OK with the call center system that provides a nice CTI integration and allows the woman agent to know automatically the name and the historical interactions of the customer ! But things went probably bad the day when the pizza shop company management decided to add some more business value to their business buying expensive licences for other vertical solutions like an healthcare software databases preventing their customers from cholesterol risks. Additionally they bought all the files and software databases they could, trying to improve their customers knowledge in order to run more efficiently their up-selling operations... But sometimes the customer want to be better serve and not to be better manipulated, too much knowledge seems suspect and a Big Brother oriented thing - We can have some doubts for instance about the advertising campaigns we would receive by mail (spam) that would be so-called based on the telecoms company knowledge of our private downloads on the Internet-

Still thinking about drawings with slides

Here you will find an example of how with drawings and slide animation it is possible to make it simple rather complex concept about semantic web. That video by Manu Sporny of Digital Bazaar is a clear overview and an outstanding demo of the main tenets of the Internet, explaining its main limitations in its current incarnation and the potential of next generation intelligent agent machines to help us find the right information we need .....

Watch and enjoy the video

Drawing pictures rather than reading slides for demo software

Theses days our slides in my own company are getting more and more overcrowded and seem not effective at all .When it comes to software presentation it is possible that bad and long slides presentations are worse than anything else because the audience is frustrated in 2 ways : They are frustrated first by the bad slides themselves and second they think we are wasting a precious time that could be used for the software product presentation INTO THE SYSTEM.

The situation has turned into so a bad point (bad power point) that our CEO Leo Apotheker decided to forbid the use of powerpoint slides for the next upcoming demos and so the software demonstration that some of my sales colleagues will perform tomorrow for SODEXO ( "Making every day a better day" what a nice company slogan !). It is a great idea indeed from Leo to perform a software demo without any slide : it helps us to focus on the most important thing that is our software and moreover it forces us to focus on the main customer's requirements meanwhile our creativity will be raised a thousand times by this constraint ( Creativity always improves when constraint happens, that is the thesis of the book "Creativity from constraints")

For instance we could use the whiteboard for drawing pictures and illustrating ideas and concepts in order to explain how our software will solve the customer's problems : this idea is very well explained and illustrated in the Dan Roam's book "The Back of the Napkin" (and i would recommend too his blog) In this book the author demonstrates (even though we have no artistic talent but all of us are quite good at visual thinking like any human being... ) how simple drawings communicate infinitely better than those complex slides presentations.

Consultant's Corner: The Back of The Napkin
As a matter of fact, this book could be very useful even though Powerpoint environment doesn't totally disappear... Basically it is not a slide problem but a bad bulleted-point slide problem that is going to bore everybody around the business.

How to transform a very good presentation in a great one ?

Let's me me share with you a post i read from the Guy Kawasaki's blog where guy explains how Nancy Duarte and his team who perform an extreme makeover for his current presentation.
The big challenge was that guy's presentation was already very good from a design point of view as you can check it on this following slides ( Pdf presentation) :

Innovation

View SlideShare document or Upload your own. (tags: outstanding presentation)

The first thing Nancy Duarte team did was to brainstorm about the theme of innovation and what kinD of design slides should apply for this theme. They found out that the current Guy templates was a little too much boxed-in and under controlled whereas innovation should require to be more inventive and less rigid and controlled.

Nancy Duartetext

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: nancy duarte)

Among the overall assessment and critique, the Nancy remark about the logo inspired me as it is very relevant too to all the templates of my own company "Why does each slide need to contain the same logo ! "
And eventually enjoy the final result ! Is that not great ? You know now how to make the journey from good demo to great demo : that's start reading slide:ology book of Nancy

Big Demo : Proving God's Existence...

Just an idea that the big demo ever would be the demo of god existence isn't ? it shouldn't not be so far a software demo (that is of course the main dedication of this blog) but it would be obviously an outstanding demo as well. Related to this ontological topic, each of us behaves like our customer use to do with our software product: they don't know what to think about our product and they want some proofs, they want a demo that will prove our software existence related to their wishes.

Have a look now to Saint Anselm's work who was one of the first to attempt an ontological argument for God's existence and who proposed the following nice argument :

(1) God is the thought object than which no thought object can be thought to be greater

oh i assume everybody will agree with that definition , God indeed is that entity than which nothing greater can be conceived.

But now suppose that :
(2) God is only in the intellect that means God is thought of, but does not exist

But certainly in this case :
(3) any thought object that can be thought to exist in reality can be thought to be greater than any thought object that is only in the intellect

And it cannot be doubted that :
(4) God can be thought to exist in reality

Therefore :
(5) Some thought object can be thought to be greater than the thought object than which no thought object can be thought to be greater [1,2,3,4]

Which is a contradiction, because we have to abandon our supposition that God is only in the intellect, therefore God has to exist in reality, too.

This demo is based on the acceptation of the first premise (1) that suppose Existence is perfection and so as God is though as the perfect being he also need to exist to be perfect. For instance, if one had put the inverse principle that non-existence is perfection, he would have been able to prove in the same way the God's non existence. (see the Necessary nonexistence
by Douglas Gasking)

Our demo audience for software need proofs, they need to trust us and to agree with us at the beginning that means on the first features and principles for which we start with them to build our value proposition message.

Happy New Year 2009 in a world of possibilities !

I wish you all a very good year in 2009 both personal and professional. 2009 is predicted to be hard and difficult and may be it will be if we pay too much attention to the sad and solemn official speech that our French President did the 31 th of December in which he almost promised to french people "blood, sweat and tears". However i think 2009 will be what we will do with it, seizing all the opportunities and deciding by ourselves to find out or to reinvent some projects, aims and expectations in order to achieve and exceed them. "Crisis ? What Crisis?" said the progressive rock band Supertramp 30 years ago ! and Seth Godin himself wrote in his in his last post (apart from the fact he doesn't like usually news years event, what a funny guy!) : "The place where expectations are lowest: leadership. Everyone expects you to get in line and follow, not lead.The opportunity this year is bigger than ever: to lead change, to create a movement in a direction you want to go. While the rest of your world huddles and holds back, here's a golden chance to use cheap media, available attention and great talent to make something that matters". Another interesting thought is given by the Chinese language for which the word Crisis is the combination of two different characters : the first character means Danger and the second character means Opportunity. So rather living in the the world of "it is too difficult" the world of "complaints", "it can't be done", the world of "no chance, the resource is not here", "it's hopeless", the world of "people can't be better than they are" the world of "survival and scarcity" we can decide on the contrary to live in 2009 in another world that is the world called by Benjamin Zander the world of possibilities !