Sarah and the 4 T of the demo making

Sarah et la gestion commerciale nwbc

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here a nice presentation I did for my own company internal promotion of the usability that is provided by the user portal called NWBC.

In this story Sarah will make a good job as she knows the 4 T of the demo :

1. Telling Story
2. Tell Show Tell
3. True Value
4. Time (finding and taking)

The slide are mostly in French but  simple and visual
tell me if you like it

Before the demo show, Do not miss the Telling Story Show

Before showing the demo feature, I try myself to tell a nice story to my audience and in this story (sounds like fairy tale) the feature is the real hero who help the different characters to make their day better solving their own problems. In the press distribution scenario I came up with, we can see how the solution will help Jessica to  create automatically the daily issues of the magazine.

Using drawings for customer presentation makes a difference

Let's me share the experience I made using some drawings for a sale demo  presentation given to an customer audience . In this demo, instead of showing pre made demo slide  to my customer I built slides by scanning on them the drawings that reprensented the main customer processes and the way the solution could enhance them . Thanks to these drawings I got more intimacy with the customer, I obtained more personalization, more transparency  and more value : they recognised their processes and were able to check better my understanding of their needs.  They were more confident to ask question and to share their goals and say what was important for them .On my side  I was more confortable  to comment and discuss about these slides that  I really produced on my own  rather than discussing about slide coming from my company's external services (Marketing, Business Development...)

What Is Value ?

In our software daily job environment we used to speak about value and how we have to buy value to our customer instead of speaking about features and functionalities ! And that's good... But what is value ? can you explain us what is behind this word ?
Fortunately I got the answer (as usual) in seth's god and it is very simple :
VALUE = BENEFITS / PRICE

Which that means incidentally that at the demo level point of view, both Value and benefits are more or less equivalent so stop patronizing us about these concepts

let's quote seth's blog : "In a down economy, marketers fret a lot about price. We think that since times are tough, people care about price and nothing but price. Of course, people actually care more about value. They care about value more than they used to because they can’t afford to overpay, they don’t want to make a mistake with their money. Value = benefit/price. That means that one way to make value go up is to lower price, right? The thing is, there’s another way to make the value go up. Increase what you give. Increase quality and quantity and the unmeasurable pieces that bring confidence and joy to an interaction. When all of your competitors are busy increasing value by cutting prices, you can actually increase market share by increasing value and raising benefits. In a down economy, marketers fret a lot about price. We think that since times are tough, people care about price and nothing but price. Of course, people actually care more about value. They care about value more than they used to because they can’t afford to overpay, they don’t want to make a mistake with their money. Value = benefit/price. That means that one way to make value go up is to lower price, right? The thing is, there’s another way to make the value go up. Increase what you give. Increase quality and quantity and the unmeasurable pieces that bring confidence and joy to an interaction. When all of your competitors are busy increasing value by cutting prices, you can actually increase market share by increasing value and raising benefits. "

Moreover I can add a new math equation concept to my collection :

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.

Use the Magic Power of the Number 3 and the Rule of Thirds for your software presentations

The number 3 is magic for successful and powerful software presentations, it helps you to build demo content fast and to check whether you have got for your outstandind sofware demo :
--> The 3 main business benefits that you will provide to your customer
-->The 3 acts ( Act I, Act, II, Act III ) of the story you are going to tell them ( problem, action, happy end)
-->The 3 mean features (asked by the stakeholders) that your are going to show them into the system in details and with their own datas. And once you have customized their 3 most important business processes, you have to ask yourself the question "SO WHAT" before making more technical work for new processes ! will it be worth it to show them more features as you will have already proved them your software capabilities , does this new feature bring additional values or additional complexities ? ( Visualize your customer debriefing after the demo " oh their tool is very powerful and the sales engineer guy demonstrated every feature we had but it sounds now a little bit too much complicated for our people and our company, we would do better to choose another tool simpler and less sophisticated)
-->The 3 main pain points they are currently facing and that your software will solve
-->The 3 reasons you will give them (if asked) to buy your software licenses
-->The 3 reasons you will give them (if asked) to buy your software licenses NOW !
And also, take care to use the Rule of Thirds in every slide because that rule allows you to create design attractive slides. The rule of third is a technique that photographers learn for framing their shots.It is a guideline for composition that suggests placing key graphic elements along lines which divide your image into thirds, or at the intersections of those lines. the image above is an example of the third of rule application. The method is to divide the slide with 4 lines so that you have 4 crossing points and 9 boxes. This 4 crossing points are called "power points" and are area you might place the key element of your slide rather than in the middle. And once you have placed your image to one of this power point, you need to use carefully the "Empty Space" in order to highlight your image ( So many slides are crowded using all the space because sometimes we want to do our home work well by fulfilling all the space) If you want to know more, have a look to the post "How to Improve Your Slides with the Rule of Thirds" from the Six Minutes blog and you will get too as usual interesting insights in presentationZen and in this video below.

How to introduce yourself as a presales ?

Your prospect and your customer want to know who you are, they want to know how long have you been with your company, they want to know what your expertise is for the demo you will give them. And so when you meet your customer you need to specify what is your "Super Power" as Seth Godin said in his last post, you need to point out what is the specific value you will be able to deliver,you need to make clear the reasons why you are going to help them. If you don't have a "Super Power" you're just another handshake. So don't say as i did before " Hi, i am BOB , I am a presales and I am from Courbevoie. France" Instead, try "I am BOB, I am a 5 years expert in media solution software and I am focused on how to improve business and reduce pains in the media industry area". You don't have to praise yourself, but you have to make the first introduction meaningful, you have to make your customer aware of your superpower. ( but not with the gun...)

In order to introduce yourself , I would highly recommend you not to introduce yourself as a presales ( by the bargain most customer don't even know that this job does exist and therefore they will assimilate you as a kind of sales guy and you will lose immediately at the first meeting the confidence and the trust that is generally and naturally granted to the technical or engineer guy ) Instead introduce your value and your superpower.

By the way, have a look the way Clara introduces herself in her pitch for 'The best job in the world" contest. Is not that nicely enthusiastic ?

And you ? what do you think of this post ? What is your point of view about how to introduce yourself ?

Mastering Technical Sales Book for Sales Engineer

Here's a new book "Mastering Technical Sales" I ordered from Amazon. (unfortunately not yet delivered).I am excited and looking forward to reading it and learning new demo insights because I am a great fan of the related blog and web site where I found inspiring and unexpected (no cliches ! ) ideas about my job in their newsletters. Let's me share with you some of them among my favorite posts.
Click on the link to get the newsletter in a PDF format :

• Selling In A Down Economy for Sales Engineers : The seven strategies for success in the new reality
  
• The Stress Free Demo : how to organise yourself and your demo for avoiding harmful stress that can destroy your work, your health and the "health of your pipeline"
  
• Cliches: Think Outside The Box : my favorite one and how to get rid of cliches during the discovery process. Cliches are not only about overused expression or idea or main marketing ingredient ( like thinking about the box, win win, customer's view at 360°, scalable, value oriented processes, moving forward...) Cliches are also about presales superficial and predictable behavior.

What do you think of this blog ? Do you know this book ? please make your suggestions and comments !

Don't be a yes man but say no carefully

Saying "NO" is sometimes valuable in software sales cycle as it saves money and times for both your customer and your organisation. Saying "NO" often requires some courage because it is easier to please everyone all the time and you need also courage to face the sale rep or others people from your company challenging this "NO" : " Can you explain me why our product doesn't meet such customer's requirement that sounds so basic to me ? " or " We have already got a reference customer who implemented similar features ! I don't understand why you said no !"

Anyway, I should recommend to be cautious because NO is a big stop in sales cycle and once it is said you have a difficult way to return back. If you are asked a feature that is not supported in standard by your application Don't start with NO, try to answer instead by other questions about this particular feature and why it is needed for their business goals and try to understand the business needs behind this unexpected feature, tell you customer that this special need is probably possible with some additional customising in you software, tell them you are going to check it later on and give them the schedule date when you will go back in order to get them informed about the result of your homework....
Say NO the less you can (not never) and always address your audience with the willing of saying "YES" because you want to provide a service and find out solutions to your customer's issues, Don't start with NO because you are willing to help and make the things done and not avoided.

To be a demo god like Steve Jobs

Did you ever notice that there is 2 presenter categories, the first category relates to people that we do not listen when they speak even though we are interested in their topic and in the second category are the people we listen whatever the topic they are discussing about? Obviously Steve Jobs belongs to the second and he is considered by many as one of the most talented presenter in the world.

Why ?

• Does he make dramatic effect he would learn from the actor studio in Hollywood ?


• Does he show complicated and colorful powerpoint slides with a lot of customized animation ?


• Does he use complex techniques in order to hypnotize his audience ?

No, and may be we can learn each of us to present like Steve Job. In this video from bnet.com, communications coach Carmine Gallo provides helpful insights of the methods that Steve Jobs uses to captivate his audience.

Here is the summary of speaking tips used by steve and decoded by Carmine

• Set the Theme
• Make your theme clear and consistent
• Create a headline that sets the direction for your meeting
• Provide the Outline
• Open and close each section with a clear transition
• Make is easy for your listeners to follow your story
• Demonstrate Enthusiasm
• Wow your audience
• Sell an Experience
• Make numbers and statistics meaningful
• Analogies help connect the dots for your audience
• Make it Visual
• Paint a simple picture that doesn’t overwhelm
• Give ‘em a Show
• Identify your memorable moment and build up to it
• Give your audience an added bonus to walk away with
• Rehearse, Rehearse, Rehearse
• Spend the time to rehearse (finding time)

5 reasons why our software demonstrations fail

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 :

1. 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)
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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).
5. 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 ?

10 rules for Being in the zone and for outstanding demos !

The use of the term "being in the zone" is most often in reference to a sporting event. An athlete is in the zone when he can feel and see nothing but the goal he seeks. The time that he remains in this zone allows him to become unflappable in his quest. Being in the zone can be a valuable business tool on your road to success and outstanding demo. Below you will find the 10 main requirements needed in order to achieve it for both you and your organisation :

1) Creative spatial arrangements: Chairs, pin walls, charts, but no tables; thus work primarily standing and moving.
2) Playground design: Charts for information inputs, flow graphs, project summary, craziness (here also craziness has a place), safe place (here all may say what is otherwise only thought), result wall, open topics

3) Parallel, organized working

4) Target group focus

5) Advancement and a prototype approach

6) Increase in efficiency through visualization (vision trumps all others senses)

7) Existence of differences among colleagues represents an opportunity, rather than an obstacle.

8) Set up a rule at work : make half the day alone time

9) During this alone time, give up outlook messaging, call phone and meetings (that are toxic)

10) Avoid any email thread that's going to require an immediate response

You are in the zone when you are fully concentrated on your work and fully tuned out of your environment. we lose track of time and produce great stuff through absolute concentration.... and the work we are doing is a reward in itself. However, it is very easy to get knocked out of the zone : Noise phone call, going out for lunch, having a look to the outlook mail,having a coffee break, meeting, interruption by coworkers... All knocks you out of the zone. When you have a long stretch and when you aren't bothered you can get in the zone, the zone is when you are most productive. It's when you don't have to hesitate between various tasks, it's when you are not interrupted to answer a question or look up something or send email. Getting in the zone takes time.And that's why interruption is your enemy when you prepare your demo . The alone time zone is where the real outstanding demo can be built and may happens.

And last, remember the advice from the "Getting Real" by 37 signals from which this post is inspired by :

"Meetings are toxic", Don't have them !

Reducing Text On Slide with Nancy Duarte

Reading the great book of Nancy Duarte "Slide:ology, p 222" , I learnt some tricks in order to create slide with less text and i tried to apply ( because it is "easier said than done" ) them on this following slide that has too many words and bullet point :

Then, I highlight the key words per bullet and I try to summarize the main messages of the content with them :Afterwards, i remove all other text on the slide, leaving just the keywords and key messages with an additional image: Is that not better than the first try ! I really would recommend the Nancy's book slide:ology

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.

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.

Thinking out of the box for demo

"Seeing the big picture" and "Thinking out the box" are the main qualities that are regarded by the companies today. It is somehow a cliche that is used by the advertising campaigns of many consulting companies : they say "our consultants think out of the box" even though they come from the same business school and are left-brain-minded like the others. Nevertheless it's important to think differently sometimes and to be able seeing in other direction when you have on your hand a tricky software demonstration to prepare. So let's revisit the famous nine-dot puzzle i read today about in the Benjamin Zander's book "the art of possibility" As you may or may not know the puzzle asks us to join all nine dots with four straight lines, without taking pen from paper. So go ahead and have a try at it :

If you have never done it before Benjamin Zander explains that you are going to have an hard time solving this problem because your will probably classify this nine dots as a a square even though there is no box or square at at all in this page. Unconsciously you will create a square in your mind and therefore you will miss some others possibilities. It is likely that your brain will add another not relevant instruction to the original problem that is "join all nine dots with four straight lines, without taking pen from paper within the square formed by the outer dots"

And, unfortunately there is no solution within this framework. However, we can now help you by saying this additional comment "Feel free to use the whole sheet of paper" and now you can see the same problem through new eyes and a new possibility !!!So have a try again and keep in mind to use all the space, you get it ? congratulations ! here you will get the solution :

thinking out of the boxes

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: software demonstration)

Mostly the reason why we fail to solve a problem it that we try to solve it within a particular frame or point of view :
" Enlarge the box, or create another frame around the data, and problems vanish while new opportunities appear" Benjamin Zander

So you know what i learnt at reading the book "The art of possibility", additionally I encourage you too to watch below the benjamin Zander presentation that i got from the presentationzen blog

Pareto's law and the 80 % maxi rule

You probably have heard about the Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule) that states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.This principle was named after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of income in Italy went to 20% of the population.It is a common rule of thumb in business; e.g., "80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients."

We can apply this principle to the software demonstration : 80% of the deal you win are the result of 20 % of the demo and presentation you give, 80 % of the impact you have on the demonstration audience is a result of 20 % of the message and features you provide to them. That means 20 % of your preparation work will cause this 80 % emotional impact that at the end will drive their decision and your revenue.
And as 20 % of your work provides 80 % of the result you get, the corollary of this for software demonstration is that 80 % of the work preparation is generally enough for success. In the majority of the cases, once you have done the 80% of your work ,all the 20 % stuff you are going to add in order to be "perfect" won't be necessary,this additional work will be probably useless and may be boring with too much details.
Many time software demonstrations and presentations would have been better if their authors have stopped their work at the 80 % of their home work. Very often, the additional 20 % time turns to be not only a wasting time but a destructive one.

That's the 80% maxi rule that works for outstanding demo but also for many aspects of life : Never exceed 80 % of your time or 80 % of your own capacity !!!!
it is true for food because it is healthy to eat only until 80 % full

it is true also for running : each time you go beyond the 80 % of your own cardiac capacity, not only you do not improve your stamina but on the contrary you decrease it.

In order to be more efficient and to avoid negative improvements, we need to learn how to identify when we have reached our own 80% level of capacity and we have to learn to stop a work when the result is enough : that means when we already have made 20 % of the job that will drive 80% of the expected results and furthermore we have made a 60 % additional work for the other 20% upcoming results
ps : slides above comes from the presentationzen website

New template for RFP (Request For Proposal)

Most of the RFP (Request for Proposal) answers are handled with Microsoft Excel that seems (wrongly) the most confortable and easy tool for most of us : on the first left column you get the customer requirements list and on the others you get the "Standard" column (Yes or No whether you software support or not the requirement), the "Specific" columns (Simple,Medium,Complex related to the specific development that is needed to meet the customer requirement ) , and eventually the "Comments" column in which you describe how the standard feature works or how long in mendays the specific development could be. Generally, the outcome of the RFP answers has to do with something like the following document in Microsoft Excel format :
What I would suggest is a more friendly template document based on Microsoft Word that will end up with a clearer and a more friendly design oriented answer to the customer :

This template will allow you :

• To write clear and understandable sentences rather abbreviation
• To check more efficiently the "spelling and grammar" of each section
• To add more easily free text from the format table
• To get an introduction and a conclusion
• To organize you document according the Word table of content so that it will be easier to read for your customer
• To get a better visual result

Feel free to download this template document with the link below

http://www.scribd.com/doc/8543891/Template-RFP

Finding time

That's indeed a big deal : you have a lot things to do that may overwhelm you : you have to answer complex RFP about businesses that some times you didn't suspect they did exist, you have to meet and interview the customer during the discovery process phase , you have to prepare the demo with a lot of customizing steps in order to answer unusual requirements, you have to create the slides and you need to add the value your product is supposed to provide to your audience's company, you have to make the dry run, working and sharing your work with colleagues and managers ... All that means one thing : it is time, a lot of time. And the only answer to that question and the only advice i can address to you is : you have to find the time.