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

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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

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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 !

Good news, the trap has been avoided !

Do you remenber the post "the demo trap" I wrote a few weeks ago about a demo I collapsed due to a dubious question I was asked by my customer ? "Do you confirm me Xavier that your software support this given feature" and as i tough it was a customer requirement I answered with a positive answer. Unfortunately my software demonstration turned out to be a dead end as my customer actually didn't want a tool that would allow this particular feature..
In this rapid demo scene I am asked by my customer "Xavier could you confirm me that any sales representative will be allowed to see all the opportunities of the others ? " It sounded like a a requirement and so i was tempted to say "Yes we can" (oh sorry for this bad joke, i can't help not doing it...) but I didn't actually and instead I carefully answered his question by another question "well that depends on some system options, how are you working right now ?" or as a variant "it depends on system customizing, would you mind telling me what your preference is ? " And so i got round the trap and I could go on successfully with this outstanding demo.Enjoy this little demo scene and improve may be your french understanding as this video is in french language.

Squee ! We won SAP Ease of Use's Best Presentation Contest

The demo I and Dominique Trigaud did to our customer France Telecom last month (in order to convince them to work with us for their Fiber To the Home application ) was selected in France to be candidate to the "best demo 2008 regarding usability" worldwide contest. On thusday the 17 th of December we presented what we have done and how we won the France Telecom deal with simple and visual slides, with an engaging message and with the Dominique's outstanding screen design work.

Below you can find our presentation, thanks to Bruno Lemarchand and Dan O'rourke for their help and support

Ease Of Use Presentation

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