I’m demoed out.

I just came back from a three-day conference and trade show on legal technology, called, appropriately enough, LegalTech. I saw awful demo after awful demo, along with a few decent ones.

(For the record, in this post I’m excluding a number of demos that were one-on-one by people who knew me. That’s an entirely different matter, with different rules.)

The Single Worst Demo of LegalTech

I won’t name the vendor; I actually like many of their products. However, they hyped their newest product by urging people to gather — standing — in a private room and watch a ten-minute presentation projected on a long wall, with some interaction with live actors and musicians. After ten minutes, I had no better idea of what the product was, who it was for, or why it was better than either their previous version or their competitors’ products.

I’m not sure it qualifies as a demo. However, they had folks all over the show floor and hallways urging people to see the “demo,” so I’ll take their word for it. I talked to a few other folks in the room with me at one particular showing, and they largely expected a demo too.

If I had to speculate, I’d guess some marketing guru read The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs and missed the point: it’s not about presentations, it’s about presenters! There was no presenter here; it was an unfortunately empty son et lumière show.

I eventually did get to see the product itself, and it wasn’t bad but wasn’t revolutionary either. There was a great value case to be made around the new version, but they spent a lot of money to not make it. (On the other hand, they did keep name recognition high, and the folks who use their product will figure out the value of the new version quickly enough.)

Percentage of Booths Where I Couldn’t Tell What Problem They Were Solving

At least 25%. If you eliminate the three largest classes of software in this market — matter management, document management, and electronic discovery services, where every attendee knows the problems they purport to solve — this percentage was at least 50%.

Half the vendors who needed to tell attendees what they did failed to do so. That would have astonished me if it weren’t so much the case at most other shows too.

If you cannot describe the problem you solve in a single headline and/or graphic image, it’s probably a marketing failure… but it could also indicate that you don’t understand the problem, that you’ve built a solution in search of a problem.

Biggest Missed Opportunity

I say this about any trade show at which printer vendors exhibit. Offer to print out my boarding pass! No one wants to stand in yet another line at the airport, and at many hotels it’s hard to get something printed or attendees are too busy at night to hassle with it.

Print my boarding pass, and frame it on a page touting the value of your printer. You know darn well that attendees will toss most of the literature before they board the plane, and most of us are smart enough to avoid picking the stuff up in the first place if we’re not really interested. But you can’t throw away your boarding pass until the plane takes off, and you have to have it out multiple times to look at it.

This is a short-term opportunity, probably, since within a few years most airlines will make it possible to flash your cell phone at a reader to confirm your boarding assignment. But for now, it’s the best way to get me to your booth! No one goes to a show like LegalTech looking for printers; here’s a super-cheap way to (a) get people to your booth and (b) show off the product.

Number of Demos in Which I Could Clearly Hear the Demoer

Zero for those in the high-traffic areas of the show.

If you’re in a backwater, people can hear you because there isn’t much traffic, but the goal is both traffic and attention. If you’ve paid your dues and your cash — it takes both — to get a good location, either hire demoers who can project properly — acting training might help — or get some speakers and microphones to subtly enhance your voice.

Granted, my ears aren’t the best… but that’s a common ailment as we get older. And age has a rough equivalence with purchasing power and influence.

I watched others to see if they were hearing more clearly. By the strained looks on their faces, even those with good ears were struggling.

Even if you’re doing a one-on-one demo, speak loudly enough so that others walking by can hear you and perhaps get caught up in what you’re doing. Customers are where you make them. Serendipity matters.

Percentage of Demos That Began With a Problem Statement/Context

Maybe 10%.

More than half the demos I saw were afflicted with severe feature-itis. Benefits beat features (even for techies), and problem-solving beats benefits. Identify the problem and its context immediately and astonish us with how perfectly you’ve solved it. By the way, that’s the real message in The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs. Jobs always presents a clear context for his product introductions, even if he doesn’t make it obvious that this is what he’s doing. It’s a useful book; I wish more demoers — and conference speakers — would read it.

Two Nice Demos That Would Have Been Enhanced by More Context

I absolutely loved the way that Lexis/Nexis, a legal search-and-more tool, is integrated into Microsoft Outlook and Word. I spent years cajoling vendors into doing that, with limited success in the early aughts or whatever you call the first decade of this century. There was plenty of evidence that users wanted to do their work within Outlook and Word, their normal haunts, and that such integration was a huge factor in adoption. Unfortunately, although Word integration was easy, Outlook integration was — and remains — extremely difficult. Lexis/Nexis has figured it out… or, more accurately, convinced Microsoft to help them do it in partnership.

They did a separate-suite demo for perhaps a dozen people at a time, with a bright and shiny marketing VP doing a 20 minute spiel-and-demo. (Someone else was running the mouse, which is a good idea in these kinds of demos.) She touted the tight integration, showed all the cool stuff you could do, and truly wowed most of the folks I was sitting with. Unfortunately, she never stated the problem she was solving. She was reasonably good about touting benefits rather than features, though it’s hard not to get a bit down-in-the-weeds when you’re talking about one thing for 20 minutes.

But she never stated the user/business problem.

Now if you were there, you know that the problem became obvious a couple of minutes into the demo. I watched the penny drop for most of the attendees about five minutes in, as they finally “got” what was going on and realized the difference it could make in their effectiveness. However, this demo would have gone from good to great if the VP had simply noted some context in the first minute or so. She could have shown all the back-and-forth in the previous version, she could have shown a competitor’s back-and-forth if she quite properly didn’t want to denigrate her current product, or she could even have posed a thought experiment — “Think about how much you go back and forth between screens to day, cutting and pasting, looking stuff up, and so on. You get your work done, but wouldn’t it be magical if you could do it all in one place? What about if that one place were your place, the place you do the bulk of your work — not in some other software, but right inside Outlook and Word?” She gave us the last sentence, but never set it up with the previous two — and thus had an unnecessary number of blank looks for the first few minutes.

There was also a vendor buried in perhaps the worst spot in the entire sprawling trade-show floor with what looks like a very nice product, called iCyte.

How often do you want to find something you noted before on some website? Did you bookmark it? Can you find it in your rat’s nest of bookmarks? Do your bookmarks really work for you? What if it was just a few words halfway down one of those pages, maybe not even directly related to the site’s putative content? (For example, if you want to find out more about iCyte in a month and can’t remember the name, would you think to look here, in a post about demos?)

Okay, I just gave you the context. Maybe it was because I saw the demo near the end of the three-day show and everybody was a bit burned out, but the demoer didn’t provide me that context. Indeed, I would have walked away if it weren’t for the fact that I was interested in demos themselves as much as the content of them, and I could see that the person I was trying to connect with two booths down was talking to someone else. So I took another 30 seconds to figure out what iCyte did, and I’m very glad I did. It’s a cool product.

The demoer eventually supplied some context and here’s-the-problem stuff, but it was a minute into the demo. You usually don’t get a whole minute on a trade show floor.

(Now if only they get iCyte to work with Chrome, I’ll be a happy camper.)

“Help! I Can’t See”

Maybe a decade ago, Microsoft created a talking Barney — you know, the purple Annoyasaur. I don’t remember why we did this, and it didn’t last very long or make a huge market splash. Nonetheless, we created this two-foot-tall purple plush beast that interacted in a relatively realistic way with three-year-olds using data from a variety of sensors. (Um, realistic for a companion, not a dinosaur; a real Annoyasaur would simply eat your kid and be done with it.) For example, if a kid put her hands over Barney’s eyes or shook its hand, it would respond like another kid, albeit a grape-juice-colored, whiny kid.

The marketing team gave a beta version to someone (I’ve forgotten whom, but she was relatively well known) who flew into Redmond/Seattle to talk with the development team about it. She carried it aboard her return flight and stuck it in the overhead compartment. Later, as the plane jostled and bumped down the taxiway, the on/off switch must have gotten nudged, because people around her were aghast when there came a child-like voice from the overhead compartment crying, “Help! I can’t see.”

The Help-I-Can’t-See award is shared this year by at least 20 vendors who were in darker areas of the show floor and didn’t have lights on and in their booths! C’mon, at a minimum your back wall graphics and signage need to be well-lit. You need to bring lights!

More to the point, this was New York, where you can make anything happen. Once you discover Monday morning that your booth is in a dark spot, go out and buy some lighting! At a minimum, get a couple of floor lamps to put around your booth, but for a hundred dollars you could have gotten two or three halogen gooseneck lights to clip atop your booth. I remember doing trade shows in New York in the 1980s where we had to pay a show electrician a ridiculous rate to hook up our lights, but that’s a small price to pay compared to the money you’re already spending on the show — and throwing away because people can’t see you. And you could probably get away with doing it yourself after the show started, not that I recommend such a thing, of course.