As I noted recently, in any deal, there are a small number of people who can meaningfully say Yes, a large number whose Yes doesn’t matter but whose collective No might, and usually a small number of people with significant power to say No.
In demoing software, you need to first figure out who’s in the room. Then you need to figure out into which of these buckets they fall. This is a tricky evaluation in walk-by demos at conferences and such. Good salespeople seem to pick up on the viewer’s position quickly; the rest of us need to ask.
If you’ve got yea-sayers (or potential yea-sayers), those whose Yes does matter, show how you make their life better. That’s the focus of most of this series — don’t talk features, don’t talk about yourself or your company (too early in the process), just show these folks one, two, or at most three things, in the context of their work, how your software will improve their work-life. These folks include the Champion, usually the Customer, and often one or two key Users.
Many onsite demos have a room full of hangers-on. These folks may be Users, they may be IT folks charged with implementing a solution, they may just be there for the donuts. You can ignore the folks there for the donuts, though you don’t want to get caught up in their irrelevant questions.
The (non-key) Users are probably scared. Will your software take their jobs away? Does it threaten them? Often, the answer is yes, at least in part — which makes it rather hard to demo to them. The grumblers don’t have decision power… but they may well have a lot of influence over whether your solution, once up and running, is perceived as successful. So be nice, even if you don’t focus on them during the demo.
Many of the low-level IT folks will be grumblers, too. They can say neither yes nor no, and the reality is that they probably have little impact even within IT. Don’t play to this audience unless they’re the only folks in the room.
However, there will be folks who can say No, often but not always higher-level managers from IT. I think the best way to handle these folks is in a private demo, if it can be arranged, where you focus on assuaging their concerns about maintainability, total cost of ownership, stability, and so on.
Other important naysayers may come from Procurement or even HR. You probably have no chance to win these folks over to the Yes column; that’s the internal Champion’s job. However, they will be concerned about your company’s stability; will you be around in four years? There’s not much you can do in the demo itself to address their concerns. However, this is where you finally get to use those slides about the founder’s background, your venture capital funding, and so on. Even if they don’t state these concerns, they do have them. But don’t screw up the demo by commingling this material with your demo story.
(Even in the Champion role, I used to take the lead in probing the company’s long-term future, in part because I had significant start-up experience and knew the pitfalls of such issues as expansion vs. cash flow. However, I never did so in front of Users or business Customers.)
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There is a site called Great Demos that yesterday posted an insightful piece about what people do and don’t remember about demos. Check it out.
