Continuing in the Better Demos series….
This one’s pretty obvious… and yet it’s forgotten at least as often as it’s remembered. Demonstrate the benefits to the customer (and/or user) of the software solution you’re selling; features by themselves may be cool, but they rarely help sell the product.
Is this rule always true? I can think of three specific exceptions:
- Apple and other “cool toys” sell features because the benefits themselves are limited, or perhaps the benefit is the coolness of the “toy” itself. The original iPod didn’t do more than its competitors at the time; in fact, it did less, since you couldn’t change the battery because Steve Jobs didn’t want a screw to disturb the lines of the sleek case. Apple has been able to duplicate this success many times, but few others can. Remember Sharper Image stores?
- Technoids love features. (I used to be a proud member of that fraternity, two decades ago.) I think even here it’s the benefits that are selling; it’s just that these folks are wizards at seeing a feature and immediately figuring out themselves what the benefit is, and thus they help sell themselves on the software.
- Mass-market software goes through a stage referred to as “feature wars.” The software in a category has reached a level where the entrants do the basic stuff necessary for useful operation. The next stage is competition on a checklist of features, because users have little else on which to base a decision. Vertical-market software solutions rarely reach this stage.
Other than these three highly limited exceptions, sell the benefits to the customer or user.
In future posts I’ll talk about customer vs. user vs. champion and yea-sayers vs. naysayers in terms of how you approach demoing to these groups.
Meanwhile, consider the basic rule:
Demo two or three ways that your solution will make life easier/better for the viewer, in a context that the viewer instantly recognizes and understands.
An Example of Selling Benefits, Not Features
Go back to the Google Docs example. I really think Google’s been approaching this software the wrong way. (And yes, I’ve had this conversation directly with someone on the Google Docs team.) Let’s look at the Google spreadsheet. By and large, they’ve been selling it by saying it has feature parity with Excel, but it’s cheaper.
The problem is that “feature parity” isn’t a benefit, and the majority of users I’ve talked to don’t believe it. Cheaper is a benefit, but only to a purchasing agent or individual user — and Microsoft has been able to make plausible arguments in the corporate space that Excel on an enterprise license isn’t really more expensive all-up than Google spreadsheet — and a lot less risky.
The big benefit comes via real-time collaboration. Construct a scenario applicable to the user in which real-time collaboration solves a problem that the user has. (See the quickie example here.)
Or let’s say I’m selling a time-tracking solution, for lawyers or consultants. (I’m about to sit through umpteen time-tracking demos next week at LegalTech.) Here are some scenarios I might envision (based on who’s in front of the demoer):
- Attorney (front-end user): You get off the phone with a client. The software, tied into your phone system, has recognized the phone number and pre-filled a time entry with the client info and the time you spent on the phone, rounded up to the next tenth-of-an-hour increment. All you have to do is click OK. Oh, wait, you’re still working on the matter even after the call ends? The timer on the software continues to run, and when you’re ready you can click either “Bill for the call” or “Bill for the call plus the additional time until this moment.”
- Firm billing coordinator (back-end user): Show how the data is automatically tied to the overall billing and general-ledger systems, including applying outside counsel guidelines and flagging any activity that might be non-billable under those guidelines. Getting bills together at the end of the month is a big headache; you’re showing your solution as pain reliever.
- Firm management (customer/champion): Forget the software. Show reports from other customers demonstrating that they have been able to bill 6% more time using your solution because it has reduced the amount of work that the attorneys forgot to bill. (Jokes aside, it happens a lot.)
- Firm IT guy/CIO: Show how the software checks every night for updates a la Windows Update and gives IT control of when and whether to install those updates. Show it running on Windows 7 on one machine and Windows 2000 on another — and also on a BlackBerry! In other words, ease their pain, which is compatibility, installation, and maintenance.
