Have you ever seen a bad software demonstration?

“Do The Last Thing First” – that’s the recipe for a great demo! You’ll learn how to put the “Wow!” into your demos and make them effective, crisp, and compelling – to engage and capture audiences within the first six minutes of a demonstration meeting.

Many demonstrations focus on teaching customers “how” to use a software product – product training, in fact – and neglect communicating “what” the software enables the customer to achieve with regards to the customer’s business goals and objectives. This results in bored audiences, uncompelling demos, key people leaving and inconclusive meetings, in the short term, and lost or delayed business overall.

There are two key areas of importance in software demonstrations:

1. Gaining an understanding the customer’s business issues and objectives
2. Crisp, compelling delivery of the content

This webinar addresses both items head-on. We’ll share how to ensure that you have captured the information you need before you create or show your demonstrations. Most importantly, we’ll help you organize the content of your demos to ensure that you address your customer’s key business issues within the first few minutes of a demonstration – and generate a “Wow!” response from your customers that engages and compels their attention throughout the demo.

The results are crisp, highly effective demonstrations that satisfy VP’s and senior management, champions, users and all other players.

CEO; Heads of Sales, Marketing, and Presales; Sales, Marketing and Pre-sales Staff

We’ll introduce the overall concept of turning a traditional demo upside down – “Do the Last Thing First” - to kick things off.

We’ll then survey how demos can go poorly, in your experience, and the impact of failed demos on your organization. This sets the stage to look at how to improve our practices…!

Next is a critical segment that explores our customer’s perspective, including presenting a method to uncover 5 key pieces of information needed to prepare a compelling and targeted demo:

1. What is the customer’s current workflow
2. What is the output of that workflow
3. What needs to change
4. What is the value of making the change
5. When does that change need to take place

This information will be captured and summarized in a Situation Slide – a great tool that enables internal communication within your organization and a terrific starting point for your demo.

Our attention will then turn to developing the key components of our demonstration, based on our customer’s specific situation and needs. We’ll develop Illustrations – the Wow! factors – and present how to articulate these to our customer audience members.

The full demo delivery strategy will be presented, including:

• Review the Situation
• Present the Illustration
• Do It
• Peel Back the Layers
• Questions and Answers
• Summary

We’ll describe and develop examples for each key component. We may even provide an example demo – live!

If time allows, we’ll address a number of “real-life” situations – how to manage challenges such as:

• Dealing with multiple players with differing sets of needs
• Presenting demos via the web
• Managing and outflanking competition
• New product roll-out scenarios
• Managing evaluations and POC’s

A final summary closes off the formal content delivery, opening the session to address questions from you, the participants.

Have you ever seen a bad demo delivered in your organization? Or, are your demos good – but you’d like them to be better?

Here are a number of symptoms you may be experiencing today:

1. Your demos take too long to get to the point.
2. You run out of time.
3. Your demos are perceived as too complex or confusing.
4. Your team does a good job with qualification and discovery, but then delivers the same old demo to the audience.
5. Demos done early in the company history were crisp and clear; now they are long and rambling.
6. Too many demonstrations are educational – “show up and throw up” situations.

Your demos aren’t achieving your desired objectives.

Participants will receive a copy of the presentation materials in electronic format. Additionally, each participant will receive a handful of highly relevant – and humorous – articles, including:

• The Content-Free Buzzword-Compliant Vocabulary List
• Stunningly Awful Demonstrations – the Top Ten List of What NOT To Do
• Stunningly Awful Remote Demonstrations – Inflicting Pain at a Distance

Review your own organization’s demos and consider:

1. What are we doing well?
2. What could we be doing better?

Peter Cohan

Peter Cohan is the founder and a principal of The Second Derivative, a consultancy focused on helping software organizations improve their sales and marketing results. In July 2004, he enabled and began moderating DemoGurus^®, a community web exchange dedicated to helping sales and marketing teams improve their software demonstrations. In 2003, he authored Great Demo!, a book that provides methods to create and execute compelling demonstrations. The 2nd edition of Great Demo! was published March 2005.

Before The Second Derivative, Peter founded the Discovery Tools^® business unit at Symyx Technologies, Inc., where he grew the business from an empty spreadsheet into a $30 million operation. Prior to Symyx, Peter served in marketing, sales, and management positions at MDL Information Systems, a leading provider of scientific information management software. Peter currently serves on the Board of Directors for Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc. and the board of advisors for Newallstreet, Inc. He holds a degree in chemistry.

Peter has experience as an individual contributor, manager and senior management in marketing, sales, and business development. He has also been, and continues to be, a customer.

He can be reached by phone (1-650-631-3694), email (PCohan@SecondDerivative.com) or blog (http://greatdemo.blogspot.com).