Do Something With Your Marketing: Better Demos

In this week's do something with your marketing. I want us to think about demos differently. I was recently watching a product demonstration and somebody had a a product and and they were trying to demo this thing live and uh were fumbling through the features and and what ended up happening was it was a really unconvincing demo because they were trying to do this thing, they're trying to make this thing work, and while they were doing so, what was happening was they were they were so flustered, they were trying to fill the space, fill the time with words while they were doing the product demo, and they started saying some like really inappropriate things for a a business context, a business being a professional context, because they simply were were struggling to make the thing work and you know they were pushing buttons and switches and knobs and and stuff like that and it went really badly. And watching this, you knew the person generally knew the product that they were demoing. They generally knew the questions that the customer's gonna ask, but that experience of having the product not do what we're supposed to do, you know, little things popping off here and there while they were doing the demo really threw them, really flustered them.

And so you ended up with a fairly unconvincing demo and potentially you know a lost deal. So how do we deal with this? How do we prevent this from happening to us? Think about product demos, service demos, tours, whatever you want to call the thing. Like cooking shows.

If you watch a cooking show, y you know that there's no way the the turkey that you know takes four and a half hours to cook is done in twenty one minutes without commercials, right? Of course, there's prep in advance. Of course, uh individual stages are prepared separately. Of course, the final product is cooked well in advance, so that when uh you know the last three minutes of the show are on, uh, the the celebrity chef comes out and brings out the turkey and everyone ooze and ahs, like, yeah. We all know that was staged, and we're okay with that being staged because we want to see the result.

We want to see what we get out of the deal. You know, we follow this recipe. Do we get a a delicious turkey or a uh whatever the food product is? I'm saying turkey because it was just an American Thanksgiving here. Um what they do is instead of trying to do the demonstration live, most cooking shows break down the process into a series of measurable steps, and there are these milestones along the way, like thawing the turkey.

I'm gonna keep using the turkey example, thawing the turkey, uh, preparing the turkey, uh, basting the turkey, and then presenting the thing. And instead of trying to show the process from beginning to end in real time, they just show little bits here and there uh uh up till each milestone, and they present each of the milestones along the way. And so you end up with a very good compact half hour of television or 20 minutes on YouTube, or whatever the the places that you you watch your recipes, and it looks great and it convinces you, yeah, I could do that, or yeah, that's the thing, that's the way to do that thing. We want our product and service demos to be exactly the same. So instead of thinking about how can we do this thing live, how can we um walk through how easy it is, take the highlights, take the highlights, prepare, show the stages of cooking, and then show the final product.

I did this recently, I was doing a product demonstration for IBM Watson Studio. And I know the ins and outs of Watson Studio. I know where it's not going to do well in a demo. I know there are certain algorithms that uh you don't dare run in real time because you don't know what Watson's going to do. You sometimes it'll he'll say, like, hey, I built you this classification algorithm in 26 seconds, awesome, that looks great.

Other times, be like, hey, I'm running this classification algorithm, and estimated time is one hour 41 minutes. Well, that doesn't look so good, right? So in the demo, I cleaned the day, I did the entire process beforehand, and then essentially left browser tabs open because it's a web-based service. Browser tabs open at each of the milestones, and then during the demo, I tinkered a little bit here and there, but I showed each stage of the cooking until we got to the final product. And by the time we were done, people are like, Oh, I get it, got it.

Uh, I just can see what this thing does. Now, when you go to actual implementation, yes, we will walk through live here's how to do the thing, but when you're just doing a demo, trying to show that your product or service fills a certain need, think of it like a cooking show, prepare for it like a cooking show, bake the whole thing in advance, and then show off the milestones. You will have much better demos that way, you will be less flustered, you'll be then much less likely to to say things that you shouldn't say, or uh fill space with random banter that just confuses or distracts people. Be as rehearsed as an Emerald Legacy or a Gordon Ramsay or any of these folks in what you do in your demos so that you deliver the experience that people are expecting and you answer their questions. So that's this week's Do Something With Your Marketing.

Change your demos to cooking shows and see how it works for you. As always, uh please leave your comments in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon. Take care.

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