Great Demo!: How To Create And Execute Stunning Software Demonstrations

by Peter E. Cohan

Many presales, sales, marketing, and customer success practitioners say they are skilled at doing demos – but are they?

A head of presales commented, “They don’t know what they don’t know…! 50% of our sales opportunities end in ‘No Decision’ and 30% of our demos are just pure waste. We must move from our traditional approaches to a validated, proven methodology that succeeds…!”

Assess where you and your team stand on these ten levels of increasing

Level 1: Follows the standard demo script
Level 2: Customizes based on the prospect’s market/industry
Level 3: Customizes based on the discovery information uncovered
Level 4: Communicates tangible business value
Level 5: Differentiates Vision Generation from Technical Proof scenarios
Level 6: Manages and explores prospect questions
Level 7: Uses Biased Questions to outflank competition and reengineer vision
Level 8: Applies storytelling techniques to reinforce key ideas
Level 9: Applies these skills to the broad range of demo scenarios required, including demos for prospects occupying different portions of the Technology Adoption Curve, presenting new products, Executive Briefing Centers, transactional sales cycles, expansion opportunities, lunch and learn sessions, tradeshows, demos for analysts and third parties, channel partners, internal demos, and other scenarios
Level 10: Captures and reuses demo success scenarios, and integrates, aligns, and leverages the skills above into a cohesive demonstration methodology

Organizations that reach Level 4 enjoy substantial competitive advantages vs their peers, those at Level 7 gain critical differentiation, and teams at Level 10 experience remarkable scaling and amplification rewards.

Consuming and performing the exercises in this book can transform individuals, teams, and organizations from undifferentiated sellers into high-performing experts who truly enable buyers, resulting in mutually successful outcomes that endure.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Buisness, Technology, Professional Development, Management

494 pages, Paperback

First published May 6, 2003

Reviews

[Tony Moze]

To know I did a podcast interview and taught by this man, brings more depth to this book for me. This guy is amazing, and I feel that this extends beyond software demonstrations. I think this is about how to publicly speak, how to command the crowd, etc. It’s the psychology of things.

I appreciate this book!

I know I have to read it more than once because it’s the manual for doing GREAT demos.

[Bill]

This was a book I read for work, and it was fine. It's a bit out of date, but the central premise was solid. I suspect not a ton for a great salesperson or SE, but still a good framework of how to consider things.

We actually did a quick workshop with the author and that was more impressive than the book itself.

[Mikhail Filatov]

This book is not about “how to create and execute Stunning Software Demonstrations”.
It’s not even a book -it seems to be slide notes for a pre sales course.
There are 2 major recommendations:start with most important part (inverted pyramid) and do Discovery process to understand customer pains, etc.
Can be summarized in 20 pages max.

[Homar Sánchez-Olguín]

A Classic tech sales before the AI era

Peter did a terrific job explaining thoroughly on great demos; even though it’s an old book, general rules still —and will, apply for sales engineers who want to close effectively.

[Tom Mairs]

A good reminder to focus on your audience, not your product. It could use an update on the examples, but the core concepts are sound and more people need to read this book.

[Rodrigo]

Good compendium on how to structure software demonstrations.

[Tanner Garrett]

Good for the most part, but from “Remote demonstrations” onwards is for some reason riddled with typos and incredibly out of date. Would still highly recommend!

[Stephanie Midwinter]

~3.5 stars. I read this one for work. It was written well and easy enough to read. There's a lot of common sense in here, but some decent tidbits and reminders.

[Jaron Dunford]

Notes:

Understand their priorities and then ask, what specific capabilities are needed to solve this problem

Give them what they need right away. 2 real world examples, DMV giving you wrong thing, or car dealer selling features you don't need

Create your summaries before you create the demo. Enables you to focus in key themes consistently.

Summarize early and often

Look for buzz words

Involve people in your demos. Increases owenership

[Krista]

In my former SE role we did not follow any one “demo method” and it worked successfully for our team. My new job I will be starting soon uses “The Great Demo!” Method, and my manager recommended I read this book. I absolutely love the method and wish I would have gotten my hand on this book sooner! With that said, they need to write an updated 3rd edition of this book because there was only a small section on remote demos that happen as special circumstances when the new reality is probably 90-95% of software demonstrations are happening remotely now.

[Jay French]

This book was suggested by a supervisor. I'm in a job where I do demos of enterprise software. This book covers the basic processes involved in understanding client needs and building a great demo. The book is very good on the basics, and provides some sample checklists and reports. I did notice that it is a bit dated - the software references are from 2001 (these may have been updated in a newer version of this book). The book did not go into team demoing, which comprises a lot of enterprise software demos that I see and give. It also did not go into virtual machines for software demos, which came to the front after the book was written. It separated presentations from the demo themselves and spent no time discussing the presentation aspect. The book's recommendations, followed to the letter, would be truly time consuming, but would lead to great customer demos for many kinds of software.

[Jim]

good basic premises, reminds read of things that seem like common sense -- but, it's good to see it written down in one place.

[Lori Grant]

A should-read book on marketing tools for the knowledge worker, manager, executive, or entrepreneur.