Crafting a good product demo

Crafting a good product demo sure spares the horror of waking up in the middle of the night before, covered in cold sweat as I’d fallen asleep banging my head over all the what if’s. What if the product doesn’t behave the way I want it to? Or, heaven forbid, presenting live and facing technical challenges like the mic just wouldn’t connect, that screen sharing run with monstrous delay or I become a victim of the infamous 21st century Internet connection blackout.

While these certainly come with the luxury of having to showcase all great capabilities of the product live, there is a fix for everything. It’s no secret demos make the clients stick around and (hopefully, maybe) use the product the way you intended. Good demos also have the potential to skyrocket sales and win you some juicy stakeholder love. The fix is to always iterate, just as the product grows richer in functionality and capacity. I also found there’s pretty much no room to screw up when I’d craft my demo so that it:

is specific to the audience (some might be rolling their eyes right now, but I am surprised how many still forget to think about the audience when planning a product demo)

is more visual than explanatory

provides tips and best practice how the product works for the benefit of that same audience

saves sufficient time for Q&A

Again, my most successful demos — the ones driving engagement and making users (quantifiably) love the tool — took a lot of preparation in advance and very little moderator magic. As they were specific to the users nobody would leave the room feeling they have to operate a spacecraft guided by a coffee machine manual. Executive stakeholders would get the whole picture how this (strategic) investment is important to hit the tactical performance targets. Subject matter experts would take a deep dive into the product functionality and be confident working in the pipeline. Cognitive clarity was achieved by demonstrating what happens when, rather than describing it in lengthy manifestos. Like that even the many features of a complex engineering masterpiece like an innovation management platform looked collaborative and familiar. Simple language and phrasing kept conversations to the point as it was never the intention to try and dilute the message to a user base of multinational professionals. Although the process was only being developed, it was already a step towards transformation and the vision — stepping away from product dry runs and implementing ready decks as much as possible. An example I like to look back at is Slack’s rich but easy on the eye demo, that combines little bits of this and that into a great hybrid process. I’d recommend any SaaS business with growing user base which, for the most part, is going to be independent in its onboarding (self-onboarded) to start planning how to automate so demos are scalable and easy to edit.

When it comes to customer experience in innovation management platforms there’s no such thing as one size fits all. A handful of tricks up the sleeve help, but each program is unique and companies are facing the challenge to either completely immerse in the client’s business and understand their pain-points or get ready to see a lot of them churn. The trend to appoint experience executives whose job is looking for ways to implement more self-service and automation technology (i.e. empower customers to help themselves) is the obvious result of having to handle a growing number of accounts and, at the same time, accelerate the pace of technological change. This is also why organisations find it more difficult to provide their clients with high quality experiences.

But fear not! Whether you have the resources to create automated demos or not (yet), make sure to always live demo the product to all new sign ups/clients/stakeholders. Building client relationships and trust is the beauty of working with IT products. As long as the customers get value out of them, keep apace with the aforementioned technological change and are able to plan their own strategy, then the proper infrastructure is in place.