Ami’s Ten Demo Commandments

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said,
people will forget what you did,
but people will never forget how you made them feel.

Maya Angelou

Few people know that Maya Angelou was talking about presales engineering when she wrote the words that have become one of her most famous quotes. I dare you to argue with it. Does it mean every demo that made the prospect feel better than the competition resulted in a contract? Unfortunately, no. But in highly competitive deals, where the differences in features are easily forgotten after hours and hours of demos, how the prospect felt during and after your demo is far more important than any feature you showed. I will die on this hill.

Here are 10 other demo principles that you should know about before taking any of the advice on this blog:

1. Every demo can be improved with a little humor. I had a colleague once warn me about using humor in front a health care company (because they deal with life & death) only to ignore their advice, and then receive numerous compliments from the customer, the partner, and top score amongst three vicious competitors. Of course you have to make sure the humor is appropriate and inoffensive, but I have yet to find a presentation that is not improved with a bit of wit. At the same time, I would never suggest a demo should be one-liner after one-liner. I try to sprinkle humor throughout a demo, and especially with remote demos over Teams/Zoom/Webex, hearing other people laugh will snapback the attention of those whose attention drifted elsewhere.
   
2. Not every joke has to be for everybody. I will often insert jokes or hide Easter eggs that maybe 5-10% of an audience will get, and that’s okay. Sometimes they’re references to pop culture or sports, and in a more innocent time, politics (BUT NOT ANYMORE!). Invariably, your bond with that 5-10% becomes really strong because of the unique power of inside jokes. Additionally, I expect that you may not be comfortable delivering some of the ideas I’ll share here, and that’s ok too. Hopefully I can at least stir up some creativity so you can find a way to make the concept your own.
   
3. My style is high-risk/high-reward. I tend to overcompensate for everyone else’s smoke-&-mirrors in demos. I get it — sometimes features aren’t working the way we’d like, or not at all, and through duct tape and bubble gum, the demo works only if you follow one safe path. It’s low risk only until the prospect asks you to veer from the script, or worse, to show your work. At that point, any credibility you’ve accrued is lost as the prospect is now wondering what else is hiding underneath everything they saw and liked. If I expect the prospect wants to see how an email campaign is created and sent, I’ll start from scratch, create the email with them, and then send it those in attendance for real. They see exactly what it takes, and can be confident there were no tricks up my sleeves. I acknowledge this is a high-risk/high-reward approach fraught with potential issues, but if you’ve practiced it until you’ve got it, I think it conveys the ultimate confidence in what you’re selling.
   
4. I always* put the customer at the center of the demo. So many demos use fictitious characters at fictitious companies to tell a story (which is better than not telling a story!), but why not make your prospect the hero (or villain) of the story? The audience is far more likely to remain engaged if they believe the story is happening to them. Or better yet, if they think they may be called upon at some point in the story to choose where the adventure goes next. As a result, every demo I give is customized at least a little bit. The reason we have a job as a presales engineer is because sales leaders believe there’s value in mapping the customer’s needs to the solutions we sell. If no customization were required, they’d let us go and just send out videos.
   * I’m sure there was a time or two I couldn’t center it on the customer for a good reason, but you get the point.
   
5. The smaller the audience, the more risks I’ll take. There are things you can do –risks you can take, jokes you can tell– in a private demo to a prospect that corporate marketing –and especially corporate marketing at a company as big as Microsoft– would never put in a video on the public website, or deliver to a conference of 1000s. The demo script from Product Marketing has to be safe and corporate; your demo to a half dozen decision-makers that have already seen two other safe, corporate demos, can be a little more provocative.
   
6. Immerse the customer in the story you’re telling. Data that includes words like “test” or “demo” or “foo” detract from the setting. If the page is important enough to share, take the few minutes to curate the data that appears so it fills out the story. Data is also a great place to hide clever Easter eggs that may go noticed by some or all that are watching. In fact, better than all that is to stop thinking of it as “data” and instead, think of it as characters, settings, or props for your story.
   
7. Executives love dashboards & reports. The people buying the software are rarely the ones that will be using it day-to-day. To keep executive attention as long as you can, start with the birds eye view available from dashboards; if you leave it to the end, you may have already lost their attention. As you’ll see, I like to start most demos with reports or analytics, ideally highlighting a genuine insight in a report that kicks off the action (“here we can see our sales are down in the northwest so let’s go see what’s happening there and what we can do about it”). Too many demos of analytics describe the types of reports you can get without ever using an insight as a springboard into actions that can be taken with the software.
   
8. Executives love workflow & automation. This one can be a double-edge sword since end users are inherently fearful of “automation” as a threat to their jobs while executives may want it to reduce headcount, but more often than not, they just want to guide their employees through best practices consistently. From a demo perspective, the challenge with Dynamics is that Power Automate is not the sexiest thing to demo so best to have lots of flows set up in every application so you never have to show them how to create one.
   
9. Everyone loves a good drag-and-drop GUI. Because so much of every application is forms-over-data, a drag-and-drop UI is eye candy. Ultimately, it may be a slower way to get something done, but they always demo well. Within Sales, Sequences look great (and it supports the point above about workflow & automation). Marketing has the Journey designers in both Outbound Marketing and Real-time Marketing, but Marketers also love calendars so be sure to show at least one calendar view. Within Field Service, the Schedule Board is visually appealing when you’ve set it up such that there’s a good use of color and maps. Show Kanban view any chance you get. Power Apps canvas apps have unlimited possibilities. And any demo of how to administer Dynamics should make sure to include both the Business Process Flow designer as well as the Business Rules designer.
   
10. All the humor in the world won’t matter if you can’t demonstrate mastery. Not just mastery of the product, but also the customer’s industry and your competition. Humor should enhance your credibility, not mask inadequacy. It’s a case of 1 + 1 = 3. Your humor lands even better once the prospect realizes you really know your $#!@, and the prospect’s interest in doing business with you is increased with each dollop of humor.
    
    For visual learners, I’ve illustrated the principle in the magic quadrant below. A demo that lacks mastery and humor (the lower left corner) is broke. A demo with lots of humor and no mastery is a joke (and not in a good way). A demo that is all mastery, no humor (the lower right corner) is a bore. A demo of both humor and mastery is where you want to score (up and to the right).

If you agree with the principles above, or are intrigued to hear more, welcome! And if you found this helpful, wait until you see how I’ve codified some of this into the world’s first Demo Sexiness Calculator™.