Demos

If a demo is going well, your audience will pepper you with questions. This is a great sign of an engaged audience. It gives them the chance to focus on their key topics. Unfortunately, given the open-ended nature, many new demo’ers find answering questions to be particularly challenging. This blog post will give specific advice on how to handle questions. Rule 0: DO NOT CUT THE PROSPECT OFF This is so fundamental it is both rule 0 and written in caps. No one likes to be interrupted. When you interrupt a prospect it comes across as arrogant, or worse, dismissive. Remember, you are talking for most of the demo. The prospect wants to feel heard and understood. ...

“If I had had more time, I would have written a shorter letter" Blaise Pascal 1 As Pascal notes, it’s hard to be concise. This is especially true when demo’ing a complex enterprise application. Unfortunately, our audience has trouble following a complex idea along on a longwinded feature focused demo. This makes it our task, as demo’ers, to break each key point into a short digestible story. I call these vignettes. ...

This post will be the first in a series on effective enterprise technology demos. I will share tips, tricks, and lessons I have learned over 5 years giving demos to everyone from analysts to C-Levels execs. Each post will contain a specific and actionable way to improve your demos immediately. Today, we will talk about how to use the first 2 sentences to capture the audience’s attention. The Problem: Like it or not, these days every person walking into a meeting can easily zone you out (with computer/tablet/phone) to do work they deem more important than listen to you. This is especially tempting when dealing with a vendor. This means you need to prove to them that listening to you is worth their time. ...