Debilitating Demo Diseases: Harbor Tour Delusion

0
137

Share on LinkedIn

Harbor Tour Delusion – Living in the Land of Hope

Symptoms: Presenting a long, tortured demo that attempts to cover all of the possible customer needs and problems before any reasonable discussion of the customer’s situation.

Aka: Harbor Tour Demo, Show-up-and-Throw-up, Spray and Pray, the Spaghetti Demo, Doin’ the Demo Dash.

Examples: “To give you an idea of what we do, let me show you a demo…”

“Stop me if anything looks interesting…”

[Trade show booth] “Hi – would you like a demo?”

Cure: Collect a handful of Informal Success Stories. Distill and carefully extract the key Situation information, based on:

• Job Title and Industry
• Critical Business Issue
• Reason
• Specific Capabilities
• Delta

Match customer Job Title/Industry, present appropriate Success Stories to generate interest, follow with questions… Apply the Menu Approach for crusty customers or larger groups. Hold back from delivering demo until customer situation is well understood.

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.

ADD YOUR COMMENT

Please use comments to add value to the discussion. Maximum one link to an educational blog post or article. We will NOT PUBLISH brief comments like "good post," comments that mainly promote links, or comments with links to companies, products, or services.

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here