What makes a good software demonstration

If you bucket all of the information you've mentally prepped along this spectrum, you can very quickly tailor your demo in the moment. Survive Awkward Silence.

Silence is not the enemy. You need to make friends with it before you demo. Because co-founders and salespeople are often vivacious and passionate about their products, they have a tendency to talk for long stretches and fill every pause with more information. He's found that this keeps him from going off topic just to fill the void, and if he waits for a bit before answering a question, he has more time to be thoughtful about his response.

Best of all, someone else in the room may jump in to supply more context about what they want or need. Ideally, you want lots of people talking and asking questions during your presentation, Falcone says. There are a couple types of questions you can ask over the course of a good demo to keep people engaged and facilitate learning on both sides. The first type is the open-ended question.

Something like, 'Where do you see opportunities to grow your business? Don't underestimate the importance and intent of the questions you choose to ask.

Even if you're just trying to stir up chatter, you need to be thoughtful so you don't kill the energy in the room. Like if you ask, 'So how does this look? Any time you get a response like that, where people don't seem engaged, you need to determine quickly if you're overwhelming them with features or if you chose the wrong ones to highlight.

The second type of question to ask is what Falcone calls a ' point question ' used to maximize effect. Something like: 'All these inefficiencies must really be costing you a lot of money, correct? Of course the most nerve-racking part of a product demo is fielding questions from your prospective customers.

If you find yourself in a tight spot without an easy or articulate answer, your best tool is a ' response question. Why are they asking the question? Maybe they truly don't understand something. Maybe they think a competitor does better. Maybe they doubt your ability to deliver.

You can ask to find out what you're dealing with. Response questions can be very powerful for getting you out of sticky situations.

Falcone remembers one customer asking whether the product he was demoing allowed users to push content wherever they chose. Who are the people on your team who do that today? Would you want everyone to have that level of permission? If they told me that they only wanted technical users pushing content, I could have told them how Monetate would make that possible.

To Summarize:. Get to know your audience as well as you possibly can, down to their individual profiles. Do the legwork this requires beforehand, and take five minutes at the very beginning to understand their goals, challenges and needs in real time.

Anticipate, prepare and rehearse until you can shuffle around your entire presentation and remain informative, unflustered and articulate. Kick off your demo with the outcome that everyone in the room wants. Make it clear how much better their lives and jobs could be if they used your product.

Then pull back and explain why. I completely neglected to read my audience and adjust accordingly. I made a very sleek and easy to use technology appear complicated and confusing. To help you bring your product to life and make it look easy, here are my top 10 secrets to delivering an amazing demo: 1. Exude Calm and Positive Energy Focus on your audience, not on yourself. This talk from the Stanford Technology Ventures Program offers some great practical advice on how to build your personal charisma: 2.

Use this opportunity to direct the conversation. Tell them what you want to say and what they need to hear. Tell them.

This is when you build your business case for why your solution meets their needs. Speak to how you can help—how can your product or service can help them overcome their challenges? Tell them what you told them. Repeat your takeaways to drive the point home before you end your presentation. These are two tactical things you can try on your next call to really hear what your prospects are saying: When the person on the other end is done talking, slowly count to two before responding.

When you deliver your demo, pause early and often. In my early days at Marketo, I watched my fellow SCs employ the magic of a pause in their demos.

At the end of each section, they would pause for several seconds—to the point where it was borderline uncomfortable—instead of asking for some kind of feedback. If your first 2 minutes were successful and you were able to wow them right away, they should be interested to know how you got there. Time to walk through the steps. This does not mean you spend the remainder of a minute demo walking through how you designed everything. That would be terribly boring. Abbreviate the experience and aim to explain it in minutes.

With that in mind, ask them to share ideas and questions. This is where the majority of the demo time should be spent. At this stage, those additional guests, IT namely, will start in with some tougher technical questions.

I make it a point to have some back up just in case I get some head scratching questions. Be sure to have a sales engineer or IT specialist from your side on hand just in case. Having a reason to reengage the prospect can be advantageous even if reveals a gap in your knowledge. Always plan ahead and leave time in your software demo schedule to send a follow up email to all the attendees.

Always having the next step ready and scheduled will keep you top of mind, organized and a step ahead of your competitors.

You wowed them with the dinosaurs; now wow them with your thoughtfulness! We use cookies to track how our visitors are browsing and engaging with our website in order to understand and improve the user experience.

Review our Privacy Policy to learn more. The opening is crucial to an interesting demo. This is the best time to draw the audience in and grab their attention. In addition, this is when the prospect is formulating their initial impression of you.

You want to be sure to establish credibility with them and allow them to relax knowing that you are the right expert to lead the demo. Regardless of the opening you choose, be sure the opening is relevant to the unique needs of your audience; you want to engage them without distracting them.

To keep prospects engaged, you need a demo that shows them how your product solves their unique problems. The closer you can come to their situation in your demo, the more interested they will be. I find that a time-compressed demo that reflects the typical tasks they need to accomplish works best. To keep things as streamlined as possible, be sure to focus on the decision makers in the room and their needs first.