To be be honest, our demonstrations are not often outstanding and let's face it : a lot of demos we do are pretty horrible ! It is not surprising because presentations are always tricky exercises and software demonstration are generally even more difficult than any usual slide presentation : we have not only to handle technically our software but we need also more importantly to convince our audience that our software will help them to reach their own goals. So we failed demo when :- We assume audience will get it : we are so familiar with our software or our industry that we miss to explain to our customer what we seems so obvious (and that is not for our customer)
- We don't focus enough on value : we demonstrate successfully some features that don't relate with any customer's benefits or that don't solve customer's pain point and business issues.
- We missed to ask ourselves the "So what" question during the demo preparation : why this feature would bring value to my customer, what will happen if we don't show this slide or if we don't show this feature and if the answer is "it won't happen nothing" we should have to delete this slide or this feature from our demonstration agenda.
- We make it too complicated : presentations usually suck because there are too many complicated slides in it and too many complicated features that lost,bore and confuse the audience. (Even it is asked by the demo script, make it a little simpler that it should do).
- We speak a foreign language to our customer with meaningless computer jargon and acronyms "We are now going to discuss about our distributed and composed platform GECOSYSTIS that will allows you, thanks to the WEB SERVICES, to deploy the BPM and BRM processes".
What do you think about that ? from your side, could you find some others reasons why demo usually fail ?
5 comments:
Agreed, many people try to cram in to much on demo registrations resulting in poor conversion. I think simple, sweet, and quick presentations work the best.
Hi Xavier,
Like you I'm french. Following your very interesting article,
I would recommend to read the excellent book called :
"Demonstrating to Win! : The Indispensable Guide for Demonstrating Software" by Robert Riefstahl
It's light reading and has been very useful for me.
It discusses best practices around software demo'ing and presenting.
Thanks for your article
Demos break. I've laughed about this with customers for years, and it is all too true: "All demos belong to the same union". Creating an interesting intellectual solution to a simple business value proposition opens up too many points of failure. Demos are often created with a room full of professionals, hardware, software (sometimes beta? nah...), empty pizza boxes and the sales professional asking to see what the demo team has created. The best thing to say to a sales person is "don't watch the cook in the kitchen!” Before putting fingers to keyboard, get all the input from anyone who is supposed to have input, and contain the scope. Anyone who blurts out "hey, how about if we show this" during the demo creation process gets their pizza privileges revoked. It is acceptable and of course recommended to keep the team involved, and rehearse! Remember the value prop, match the story to that prop, create the click-by-click script, and keep the demo short and to the point. Adults have an attention span of what, 15 minutes? And, can remember 3 main points? If you made it this far in my post, you understand what I mean.
Oops - used the wrong name :)
Whenever I do a demo, I make sure first that I have a conversation with someone in my audience beforehand as to what I'm about to show is what you want to see. A simple 10-15 min conversation is all it takes so that you are able to address their issues.
The other tip I have is NEVER assume your customer knows the jargon, keep it simple.
Also, NEVER do a 'click-click' presentation i.e. you looing and talking into the screen. Your audience will loose interest very quickly. Maintain interest throughout and also NEVER try and show something on the fly unless your are 100% confident it will work.
Hope this helps :-)
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