Debilitating Demo Diseases: Feature Pox

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Feature Pox

Symptoms: Presentation of waaaaaaaay too many features and capabilities. Severe boredom, ennui, and sleeping may ensue in the customer’s ranks. Other symptoms include stifled yawns, furtive glances at wristwatches and – in one documented case – a customer getting up from the table to physically bang his head on the wall…!

Examples: “Let me go through each of the tabs across the top in order…”

“And next I’ll show you our context-sensitive help system…”

“Here are the 17 file export options – I’ll go through them one by one…”

Cure: Reality Pills, taken 4 times daily. Present only the Specific Capabilities needed by the customer to address the problem. Hold everything else back.

Copyright © 2008 The Second Derivative – All Rights Reserved.

For a PDF copy of the full article and other articles on demonstration effectiveness skills and methods, email me at [email protected] 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 explore our blog at http://greatdemo.blogspot.com/.

Peter Cohan
Have you ever seen a bad software demonstration? Peter Cohan is the founder and principal of Great Demo!, focused on helping software organizations improve the success rates of their demos. He authored Great Demo! - how to prepare and deliver surprisingly compelling software demonstrations. 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.

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