Is Your Demo a Snoozer?
One of my clients recently nominated his software for an award hoping to gain a little PR out of it. They didn’t achieve finalist status, but they did gain some extremely valuable (and surprising) feedback about their online demo.
Calling the demo boring, my client took the judges’ feedback to mean he needed to jazz up his presentation with a more sales-y approach and better delivery.
Yikes! What person wants an in-your-face sales pitch when they’re viewing an online demo, I asked? Instead, I suggested he use the demo to give prospects a real life look into how they would use his product.
In his case, he’s selling a presentation software to a non-technical audience. His software offers much more than PowerPoint, giving users the ability to incorporate audio, video, scanned documents, etc. into a presentation.
Their software isn’t the first on the market, but their competitors have a long-standing reputation for being difficult to use. That’s where my client stands out.
Yet calling my client’s product “easy to use” will only trigger doubt in most people’s minds, because let’s be honest, ease-of-use is one of those fluffy, non-tangible, over-used claims in the software industry. If your product really is that easy to use, I said, then prove it by taking your viewers on a journey through the demo.
I suggested he create a scenario where his viewers are in the driver’s seat, under a time crunch where they have just a few minutes to pull together an important presentation. Fortunately, everything they need is already on their laptop: video clip, audio recording, two before/after pictures, a few scanned PDFs, and a slide deck.
Through the demo, I said, show the viewer how they can literally create a presentation portfolio in under one minute. Then walk them through the presentation itself, showing them how they can quickly flip between video, pictures, PDFs, and slides; display before/after pictures side by side; and mark up the PDFs to emphasize points.
By adding a story line to a demo, you effectively accomplish three things:
- You turn passive viewers into active participants,
- You add perspective and context, letting viewers see firsthand what it would be like to use your tool on a daily basis, and
- You create a more memorable demo experience that will likely “stick” in your prospect’s minds.
He’s working on revamping his demo now. I’ll keep you posted on what impact the story line has on his sales funnel.