This book doesn’t appear to be about business, necessarily, but – it definitely is!

Brain Rules provides both the explanation and, more important, clear guidance on how to help you enable your customers to remember the material you present in demos (and via other communications vehicles as well).

Particularly useful and interesting are the following chapters:

- Rule #4: We don’t pay attention to boring things (attention)
- Rule #5: Repeat to remember (short-term memory)
- Rule #6: Remember to repeat (long-term memory)
- Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses (vision)

I feel as though I’ve slowly (over a period of many years!) been discovering many of the principles that the author presents in the book. A colleague of mine wisely commented that “An hour of research is worth a year in the lab” – but, of course, he’s a cynic.

Summary? Read it. Here’s information on the book:

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, John Medina, Pear Press, Reprint edition (March 10, 2009), ISBN-10: 0979777747, ISBN-13: 978-0979777745.

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Imagine you want to drive to the store to pick up a few things for dinner – a trip that normally should take 10 minutes one way. You get into your car, leave your driveway and proceed down the street. Your car is equipped with a very intelligent voice-controlled GPS, however, which decides that there are other options you should see on the way.

The GPS takes control and turns off from the direct route to show you an interesting restaurant it thinks you might want to try sometime in the future. You thank the GPS, and ask it to return to the original course. It does so.

A few blocks later, it once again changes direction and drives 5 minutes to show you a nice park. “Terrific…” you say, “but please return to the original course.” The GPS sighs quietly, but obediently returns to the original route once again.

After a moment of quiet, the GPS makes a left turn and proceeds 8 minutes to a new home-products and hardware store. It announces proudly that the store just opened recently and is a great option for everything from paint to plumbing. Annoyed, you tell the GPS “Please return to course!” It does so, after grumbling that you really should see all of the cool options it knows about…

At this point you disable the GPS and proceed directly to the store – dinner will be late!

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Given that the purpose of software demonstrations is to (1) build a vision of a solution or (2) show proof, everything we do in a demo needs to support these objectives. In demos we are working to “suspend disbelief” in our customer audience – in other words, we need to make the demo appear to be as close as possible to real life. Anything we do or show that is obviously fake hurts our cause.

Two examples of making a demo obviously appear to be fake are:

- The use of silly or obviously fictional names (e.g., “Mary Manager”, “Dave Departmenthead”, “Sarah Superuser”).
- Naming files or processes “demo” or “test”.

To these I add a third, slightly less obvious item:

- Dates and date ranges.

I was watching a demo recently and noted that all of the reports that were run and presented showed data from 1998 and 1999. This automatically makes one wonder about the software: Has it been updated since then? Are their QA test suites that old? Have they tried the system with current data?

The old data also impacted my attention. Instead of listening and watching the next steps in the demo, I found myself wondering and thinking about data from 1998…

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How does cognitive dissonance apply to delivering demos? Cognitive dissonance can be defined as an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously in mind. Cognitive dissonance occurs when a person perceives a logical inconsistency with his/her thoughts.

This happens when one idea implies the opposite of another. In movies, a great example is when a man and woman initially despise each other, but then fall in love (grudgingly at first, of course!).

Does cognitive dissonance occur with software demos? Yes and no. [Sorry, couldn’t resist the example!] It certainly happens when the vendor says, “Easy to use…” but the demo shows the offering as complex and confusing, from the customer’s perspective.

Equally importantly, cognitive dissonance may occur within the vendor’s team – particularly in discussions between sales and presales players, both before and after the demo:

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I was learning about a software company’s presales on-boarding process recently and noted a practice that reminded me of a Seth Godin blog post from a few months back…

The on-boarding process included the following steps (among many others) for a newly hired presales person:

1. Watch our current demo.
2. Read the script.
3. Learn it.
4. Prove you know it by presenting the demo in a role-play session [they called this the “Certification Review”].

The candidate presales person lost points for going off-script or incorporating any changes. Seems like a great plan to ensure that the new hire can follow the process dependably, right?

Here’s Seth’s blog post – it may make us rethink this kind of “certification”:

Upside vs. downside

How much of time, staffing and money does your organization spend on creating incredible experiences (vs. avoiding bad outcomes)?

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A recent article in the January 2010 edition of Purchasing offered a checklist for customers of contract management software – and is a good general list for a range of software offerings. Items 1 and 2 are particularly interesting and map extremely well to Great Demo! concepts. Here’s the list:

1. Identify your company’s goals, needs and pain points around contract management. Where are the inefficiencies?
2. Identify what reports you would like to have.
3. Check internally across all departments and business units to see if any contract management systems or processes are already in place.
4. Determine how many people will use the contract management software and how much training they will require.
5. Research and narrow down a potential list of providers that meet your needs.
6. Confirm what pricing from providers includes – service, training, etc.
7. Check your internal IT capabilities before finalizing on a product.

Item number 2, “Identify what reports you would like to have”, speaks directly to a core Great Demo! idea – seeking to understand what end deliverables are desired from the software by the customer. Interestingly, this is one of the first times I’ve ever seen “reports” specifically called out.

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A recent article providing product selection tips for customers evaluating software offerings included the following advice:

- Compile a list of questions from your entire team to ask vendors during their demos…

Interestingly, the article’s guidance for customers is to ask these questions in the demo meeting – there was no mention of asking these questions beforehand. We’ve done such a good job (poor job, really) of training our customers to expect that we lead with demos (rather than qualification/discovery) that this “tip” expects and anticipates that the demo meeting will be the first substantive opportunity for a discussion! (OMG!).

This immediately suggests three tactics:

1. Prior to the demo meeting, contact the customer to ask for the list of questions they may have put together. Use this list as a starting point to guide your qualification/discovery discussions.

2. Use the list of questions as a post-demo review tool: did we address all of their issues? What open topics still need to be addressed?

3. Save and make the list of questions available for the balance of your team, for future sessions with other customers in similar situations.

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Getting into a groove can be a Good Thing – in that we get comfortable and proficient following a specific pathway…

Getting into a rut may be a Bad Thing – in that we are too comfortable and follow the same pathway over and over again..!

For more tips and articles on demonstration effectiveness skills and methods, email me at PCohan@SecondDerivative.com or visit our website at www.SecondDerivative.com. For demo tips, best practices, tools and techniques, join the DemoGurus Community Website at www.DemoGurus.com, or the Great Demo! LinkedIn Group, or explore our blog at http://greatdemo.blogspot.com/.

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I sat in on a demo recently where the presenter navigated to a page with about 10 tabs displayed across the screen and then proceeded to march through each tab, one by one, in detail.

It was very interesting to watch the body language of the audience. The response to the initial page was positive – it looked good; a dashboard of information and status. The next tab was received with moderate interest, but at the third tab many of the audience members visibly sagged in their seats…!

By the fourth and fifth tabs nearly everyone had checked out (perhaps even the presenter, who had clearly presented these tabs many, many times before…). There was an audible sigh of relief as the final tab was described.

This was a classic case of the presenter following the old, established, traditional demo pathway – a slow, painful tab-by-tab march towards no sale! Read more »

I’ve watched a number of vendors struggle with trying to connect to their network/software applications when at customer sites. Typically, they are trying to run through both the customer’s network/firewall as well as their own.

I’ve seen specific cases (many!) where the first 20 minutes of an on-site demo meeting was consumed by the vendor technical person (e.g., SC) working with the customer’s IT staff to figure out how to connect – and fail to connect!

Often, running with virtual machines adds to the challenge. “OK, just reboot now and try it again…” – and it takes 20 minutes to reboot, only to find that you still can’t connect…

Here are current best practices for on-site demos where you need access to your own network:

- Best: Broadband (modem) connection (fastest, most modern version you can find…). This keeps things under your control, with the exception of the possibility of poor phone coverage. This most likely will be the best solution about 95% of the time. You can always ask to move conference rooms, if possible/necessary.
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