Dead End Sentences for demo

Yesterday in the evening I watched with my daughter Melisande a TV program dedicated on education best behavior practices and even though demoing is not like teaching there is a lot to learn from the educational side. In this TV program, a leadership and dynamic teacher listed many exemples of dead-end sentences that a teacher should never pronounce in his classroom and in front of his pupils:

• "There is too much noise in this classroom" ( rather inpersonal, no one seems concerned personally)
• "Where have you been educated ? " ( do not even indirectly critizise the way they are educated, they will try to protect and defend their parent... you are dead)
• Anyway I will be paid at the end of the month ( most teachers do not think really that, they say it when they are exhausted and exasperated)
• ...

All this sentences do not help the teaching purpose and on the contrary contribute to "add oil on the fire" (don't worry it is a french expression)
When it comes to the demo topics, it occurs to me that there is also a "not to pronounce list sentences" in this area :

• "I am giving you a little demo on..." ( It is never a little demo)
• "Of course this reference is not like you "( explain rather why this reference is like them)
• Let me show you something I love in my software ( let me show you something that fit perfectly to your business requirements)
• "Using our software, you will have to change your process, it's change management" ( never say that, don't talk about change management at the sale level if it is not asked )
• "That's a feature our competitor do not have" ( you are wrong because it is not about feature and it is not about competition)
• "Sorry about this bug, it was working perfectly well yesterday" ( don't worry about the bug, tell what the software usually does and move forward)
• "And now the tool allow you .... " ( not bad but it is a solution not a tool)
• "Take care on this because it is a little bit complicated" ( ban complicated of your vocabulary during demo)
• What could I say more about this screen ? ( do not describe the software fields and features)
• "I have brought you a glossary in order to help you to match your business vocabulary with our software jargon" ( may be a good idea from teaching point of view but a false one when it comes to demo because we are here to convince our prospect that we speak the same language )
• ...

And from your point of view do you know any other bad testaments ? could you complete this not to pronounce list ? Thanks for your help

Don't worry about your euh, ums, ers... in your software presentation

Watching a software presentation training video some days ago I was astonished by the number of bad "euh", "ums", "eh" I and my colleagues provided during theses demo video scenes. For sure we are not like professional speakers who never do that !
But in another sense, even though we would rather eliminate our "eum" and "eh", our hesitations and repetitions that could distract the audience from our main message, we have also to keep in mind that we are not obliged to be perfect but natural. Moreover a recent study from Stirling and Edimburg Universities suggest that the "ums" and "ers" don't disturb the audience but on the contrary help the brain to follow better the explanations !
Let me quote this article from the Telegraph.co.uk :
"Experts (..) asked volunteers to listen to a series of sentences, including a number punctuated by "ers" and "ahs".

• Then they tested how much the listeners could remember, and found that inserting the "ers" had a significant positive effect on how well the subjects recalled what they had heard.
• Up to an hour after hearing typical sentences, volunteers got 62 per cent of words correct where there had been an "er" in the sentence.
• That compared with 55 per cent for similar utterances where there had not been any stumbles. The tests have since been replicated twice and the results are said to be "statistically significant".

According to the researchers, "disfluencies" like "um" and "er" force the brain to pay attention."
Is that not a good news ?
As a matter a fact what we have to do is focus on the value of our software presentation and deliver our demo with naturalness and integrity . There are many kinds of successful outstanding demo and not one single formula for success.

News from my (former) boss Shai Agassi

Visiting the Garr Raynold's blog I got news of Shai Agassi who was the CEO (not exactly but almost the same... he was very close to the top indeed) of my software company SAP. Shai, since his SAP resignation, has founded Better Place, a company that is focused on one of this century's biggest challenges - building a scalable and sustainable personal transportation system that ends oil dependence now leading- Obviously Shai is still the great motivational speaker we all knew. His 18 minutes lecture at TED is awesome. Like Garr, I specialled appreciated the moment when Shai quoted the JFK President's early 1961 speech about space conquest. " put a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade" . This sentence reminded me nevertheless some materials I have already read in PresentationZEN and Made to Stick books ! Why this JFK message is still so memorable and worth it after almost 50 years ?
Because this message shares a vision that is big, simple, concrete but also a vision without any abstractions and boring technical details. And it is the reason why this message can motivate people towards goals and change the world.

Shai is amazing and my company miss him and his software entrepreneur and creative mind . (although I fully support his goal to make our world a better oil freedom place) We don't forget that ,thanks to the technological platform he drove, he helped us as a company to be less self-centered on our own ERP product and more open to the others environmental software. I don't forget either his SAP speech a few years ago when he was dressed in Superman ! ( Nice limbic effect !)

How to avoid Proof Of Concept (mud wrestling)

Proof of Concept (POC) , blueprint or even scripted demos are time and resources consuming both for our customer and our presales team. And worse than that , the POC usually end in a software features battlefield war that means in the fun slang of some of my company's colleagues "to be involved in the bad mud wrestling" where everything can happen including the loss of the deal even though we have got the best feature product. Of course a POC can be valuable if you have got with your prospect a "why not you agreement" whereby your competitors are out of the picture, that means your customer get you in their building and is spending the time with your product and your company that he is not spending with another vendor...
But in other case, POC driven by the customer and the consultancy company that is supposed to help them to make a choice ( the later the better...) and where our competitors are involved too is a bad situation for everybody (except for the consultant company in charge of the choice)

I think there are creative ways of avoiding long RPF answer and long POC cycles explaining they will save money and time by choosing more rapidly ( of course it won't work every time but these some tips are worth it to use) Bellow some ideas I have got :

• Explain for instance to your customer that starting the project 6 month earlier will save him 1 € million (let's say) and go on telling you customer "if we can show you two similar companies who had faced the same problem you do, could you shorten your sales cycle"
• Ask you customer what are their 10 main critical business process in their company and make an outstanding demo that show the additional value of your software for each process. Then tell your customer why is it worth it to waste additional time resources ands money as you have already proved your value.
• Give to your customer a free limited trial/workshop approach in which you install your product in the customer premises for a fixed period in order to address in some meeting their main business goals and process requirement. Of course this approach is also time consuming but you make generally your competitor out of the battlefield.

what about you and your tips and trick in order to avoid long sales cycles with exhausting Proof Of Concept ? tell me I am looking forward to listen your piece of advices and recommendations !

What is the right attitude during software demo training ?

2 weeks ago, I and my presales colleagues attended a software demo training and during the session ( and also after the session ...) I was wondering about the right behavior we should observe during this kind of training. As a matter of fact, who doesn't need training ? who doesn't need to improve himself ? Of course I understand the point of view of some colleagues of mine... I fully understand that one could see him as offended by the training in itself about his own daily job. That's the negative thoughts :
"Oh I have been presales for so long years working hard every day and giving the best I could to my company and my customers and now what is the message that my company sends to me ? I would need training ! I am not as good as expected ! Oh they didn't appreciate me as they should do !"
Consider now the opposite positive thoughts :
"My company takes care of me and appreciates a lot what I have already done and for this reason my company is investing times and money in order to improve my personal skills"

Well, the last statement seems a little bit naive (I agree) but is obviously preferable a lot to the negative one.

But anyway, what is the right attitude during the training meeting ? the answer is very simple : the right attitude is to play the game and to apply the best you can the tips and the concept of the training. Afterward of course, feel free to apply or not the technique you learnt about, feel free to say I don't agree and bla bla bla...

But listen and learn with the heart and the eyes of the beginners when you are attending a training. Learn as if you were to live forever.

What do you think of that ? do you agree ? Do you feel as some of my colleagues offended when your company wants you to attend a demo training ?

Googling 'leadership'

I am currently interested in leadership ( may be a weak point in many organisations ? ) and how our leadership in software demonstration can change the things and make a real difference. So what ? My feeling is that proving the value of our solution could no be enough because we need also to be a leader, to inspire others and our customer by having significant impact not only during the presentation but also during every customer's interactions

So I googled the word "leadership" in order to find out interesting materials that could inspire me. And luckily the google juice provided me very nice insights about leadership on TED website :

First, I have got a nice lesson from Benjamin ZANDER whose name came first in the google research as a well known speaker on leadership. This video actually is not only about classical music but about how you can share ideas that inspire and engage people. What are some of the characteristics of a true leader according to Benjamin ?

1. "A leader has no any doubts for one moment the capacity of the people he is leading to realize whatever he is dreaming"
   
2. The leader doesn't think about every single note along the line but he thinks about the whole vision without caring all the fences underneath .
   
3. The leader takes his power from his ability to make others powerful, his job is to awaken possibilities in other people
   
4. The main question a leader ask himself during a presentation is "how many shinning eyes I have in front of me ?" and Benjamin adds "Success is not about wealth and fame and and power it is about how many shinning eyes I have around me".

And further more, still on the web with google, I found some interesting (and sometimes strange) ideas in different pages and video about leadership that I have written down on the paper and that I am going to share with you...

A little bit strange ( but still nice) :

• "Effective leaders have the ability to consistently move themselves and others to action because they understand the invisible forces that shape up" Oooooh and by the bargain I lost the link address of this page ! what's the essence of theses invisible forces ? ( may be crossing over to the dark side...) Can you help me in your comments understand this statement.

I also have encountered a nice idea about running a company :

• "Our goal for a company is to be excellent, not to be the biggest, not to be the most profitable but to do the best job possible"

And one idea from Seth Godin's blog

• "What works is leading. Leading a (relatively) small group of people. Taking them somewhere they'd like to go. Connecting them to one another."

And eventually, still looking desperately about leadership I discovered a pearl in this wonderful Eddi Reader's song "What You Do With What You've Got". The meditation behind this song that deals with how to use the best of our our gifts and talents inspire me as all of us can become a leader with what he was given, in other words we are probably leaders when we give the best we can.

As a conclusion, I ended my Google travel in leadership topics wondering about how to be a leader could be related to software demonstrations. We do not only have to prove the value of our solution, we have also to get our own and may be personal idea in the way our customer should choose our solution and afterwards share this vision in every customer's interaction

What do you think of this post ? What do you think about how leadership skills can improve our software demo ? Looking forward to reading your comments