No Secret

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I know of no harder place to do a software demo than a trade-show/exhibition-hall floor:

It’s noisy.
You have to figure out a strategy for getting people to stop at the booth and listen for at least ten seconds.
The people who do stop will have different situations (contexts) and different needs… and some proportion won’t be your [...]

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In part 2 of this series, I described a scenario with Google Docs focusing on collaboration. Recall that there were two demoers!

Collaboration

If you’re showing collaboration, you need two demoers! Don’t try to fake it; that’s confusing and counterproductive. If possible, set up the scenarios so that you don’t have to switch between screens, such as [...]

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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. [...]

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In any deal, there are a small number of people who can meaningfully say Yes, a large number whose Yes doesn’t matter, and usually a small number of people with significant power to say No. In a later post in this series, I’ll talk about the Yes/No conundrum.

For now, I want to focus on three [...]

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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 [...]

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What do Start Me Up, A Hard Day’s Night, and Stairway to Heaven have in common beside being big hit records?

More importantly, what do the first 1000 milliseconds — 1 second — of these songs have in common?

The first couple of notes/chords are instantly recognizable, even to those without any musical training. Okay, there’s an [...]

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The first 60 seconds of a one-on-0ne software demo are critical. You earn or lose the customer in that first minute.

If you’re doing a booth at a trade show, you have even less time — perhaps 5-10 seconds for walk-by folks, 20-30 seconds for those who have stopped in front of your booth and turn [...]

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I sat through yet another awful software demo recently.

It got me thinking of how bad most software demos are… and why they don’t have to be like that.

I’ve been part of all the aspects of software demos over the years. I’ve demoed to customers and large audiences software that my company sold, sometimes software that [...]