How to do a great demo |

How to Do a Great Demo #3 — Let Your Product Have the Stage

By JR Design Works Posted on September 7, 2010
Categories: 154 Consulting, Billeo, Continuity Control, Expensify, How to do a great demo

This is a guest post from John Fishback of 154 Consulting, the firm that helps us coach the innovative fintech companies selected for Finovate on their demos.

Titling this post was difficult.
“Actually demonstrate your product,” “Remember why your company
exists,” and, most simply, “Don’t read a script” were all in contention.

The
titling difficulties were because this post focuses on how to avoid
some of the problems that plague less successful Finovate demos —
those that lose the audience early or leave them wondering why the
presenting company came to the conference.

The
classic examples are those demos that feature a presenter using their
seven minutes to give a short speech about the industry or about the
history of their company, only occasionally rambling near to what’s
being shown on the screen, and stopping only when they reach their time
limit and their microphone is mercifully cut off.

At
the other extreme, and almost as difficult for the audience, are the
presenters that are so worried about their time and message that they
read closely from an over-worked script, leaving the Finovate
auditorium feeling stuffy and dull.

These two problems feel very different. But they come from the same root cause, and can be addressed by the same three tactics.

The
root cause of both problems is that the presenter failed to let the
product tell its story. If your product is compelling enough to have
been selected for Finovate, there is something about it that will move
the audience. Putting that powerful thing, rather than your view of
the industry or even the details of your company, center stage is the
first step towards a solid demo.

To
keep your demo compelling, use these three tactics: get right to the
product, explain the customer’s problem, and use good scripting.

Get right to the product:

Continuity
Control got this right at Finovate this spring in San Francisco. CEO Andy
Greenawalt did a great job of putting his product in context, and then
got right to the demo. Compliance is a complex and inflammatory issue;
he could have spent three or four minutes framing out the challenge.
But he didn’t. He started showing off the product, and wove detail
about his customers’ challenges throughout the demo.

As
a rule of thumb, if you are spending more than a minute
talking before you direct the audience’s focus to the screen, you
should do some hard thinking about whether any portions of your
introduction could be built into other parts of your demo.

Explain the customer’s problem

The
worst demos show amazing technology that’s hunting for a problem to
solve. The best demos help the audience understand a customer problem
and demonstrate how the product solves that problem.

Expensify’s
FinovateSpring 2010 demo centers around the manager that
approves expenses. CEO David Barrett explains the frustrations of the
approving manager, and then shows how Expensify’s whiz-bang technology
makes those frustrations disappear.

Use good scripting

I’d
like to be very clear on this. Carrying a word-for-word speech text
onto the stage at Finovate is a bad idea. Nothing will kill audience
interest more than your reading from the page in front of you.

At the same time, thinking through what you are going to say is crucially important.

To
break the compromise, start by thinking about the customer’s problem –
solving that situation is why your company exists. Then choose the key screens you
need to show from your product to explain how you solve that problem.

For
each screen, you need to do three things: navigate the audience to the
screen, describe what they see on the screen, and then explain the
importance or meaning of what they’ve seen. For example, you might say
“Let’s look at our login screen” (navigate), “Here customers enter
their username and password” (describe), “We do this because everyone
else in the entire world does login this way, so it is familiar to the
customer” (importance/meaning).

A better example of this kind of scripting is the Billeo demo from FinovateFall 2009. CEO Murali Subbarao
consistently directs our attention to the screen, describes what’s
happening, and then tells us why the functionality Billeo provides
makes customers’ lives easier.

Scripting
in this way ensures that the product remains the audience’s main focus
and prevents you from wandering off topic, while avoiding over-scripted
stuffiness.

(There
are exceptions to the rule. iPay technologies did a great job of
showing how their product works through a tightly scripted demo, but
they put in a great deal of rehearsal time to make that work, and the
script remained focused on the customer problem.)

For
Finovate demos, it is the product that matters most. Failing to put
the product first creates a variety of problems, and is the shared
characteristic of the least effective demos. Successful demos follow
many different approaches, but all focus clearly on the presenter’s
product.

This is a guest post from John Fishback. John is the principal of 154 Consulting and directs 154’s Financial Services Product Group, which combines message development and presentation advice services with financial services industry experience to help financial services companies, startups, and vendors develop and market products that speak clearly to customers’ needs. He can be reached at john@154consulting.com.

How to Do a Great Demo #2 — Ask for Something

By JR Design Works Posted on May 6, 2010
Categories: 154 Consulting, BrightScope, How to do a great demo

This is a guest post from John Fishback of 154 Consulting — the firm that helps us coach the innovative fintech companies selected for Finovate on their demos.

Finovate’s
unique format is exhilarating for attendees, but it puts real pressure
on demoing companies to leave the audience with something to remember
and act on. The demo from BrightScope at Finovate 2009 in New York (video) is an excellent example of a demo, and especially a conclusion, built to drive the audience to act.

Ryan
Alford, BrightScope’s President and head of product development, speaks
to three audiences with his demo: individuals relying on their 401(k)
for retirement planning, plan sponsors, and advisors. For each, he
offers something that makes BrightScope compelling. More importantly,
he asks each group to take action at the end of the demo.

Ryan
spends most of his time speaking to plan participants, and shows how
BrightScope helps them understand how their 401(k) plan stacks up. In
this first section, Ryan highlights a feature that helps participants
and BrightScope work together to their mutual advantage: requesting a
rating for your plan. This is a savvy choice. By spending time on this
feature, he turns participant’s mental dialogue from “I should check
this out if my plan is covered” to “I should check this out no matter
what.”

Ryan’s
other two audiences, plan sponsors and advisors, get less time on their
value drivers. But Ryan effectively illustrates their needs and shows
how BrightScope meets them. For plan sponsors, the honest desire to do
right by participants is supported by BrightScope’s dashboard, which
shows what drove plan ratings. For advisors, their hope to generate
business in advising poorly performing plans is clearly supported by
BrightScope’s advisor tools.

To
this point, Ryan has done a good demo. He has a unique product and
he’s letting it speak for itself. But his conclusion is head and
shoulders above most. He asks each of his audiences to complete a specific task, saying:

“If you are a participant, you should get your plan rated.

If
you are a plan sponsor, you should request a free demo of the dashboard
to see if this tool will help you understand and improve your plan.

If you are an advisor, please contact us to learn about how you can gain access to our advisor tools.”

In
my line of work, we call these “calls to action” or “asks.” They’re the
actions you want your audience to take, and it’s always important to
make them very clear.

It’s
even more important at Finovate. Finovate’s format of seven-minute
demos with a minute-long break between each provides a lot of
excitement, but it also gives the audience an immense amount to think
about. After each demo ends, there are only about twenty seconds to
really think about the demo before Finovate’s master of ceremonies,
Eric Mattson, thanks the presenter and begins introducing the next
company. Those seconds are when the audience decides what to do.

At
the Finovate 2009 event in New York, a third of presenting companies
left the stage with no call to action. They simply summarized their
main points or key messages and thanked the audience. Just over a
quarter did better, finishing their demo by asking for a specific
action that could take place anywhere.

The
rest? Forty percent of presenting companies ended their demo with some
version of “come see us at our booth.” That’s not a bad ask,
particularly because Finovate explicitly builds in networking sessions
between demos.

But
after too many demos end with “see us at our booth,” the audience
starts to tune the phrase out. Several people tweeting on the
Finovate 2009 demos on Twitter remarked about the constant refrain of “come to our booth,” and lamented that they didn’t know why they should.

So how should a demo end if the next step you’d like the audience to take is actually to come visit your booth? Use the moment to start the conversation you’d like to have one on one. Rather than a generic invitation to visit the booth, invite the
audience to see some specific aspect of the product you haven’t had a
chance to show. Or focus on a possible objection (e.g. “If you’re
interested in seeing how we integrate quickly and easily with 95% of
all core processing systems, we’ll be walking through that at our
booth”).

No
matter what you specifically close with, use the last moment you have
everyone’s attention as BrightScope did – by asking the audience to
take the next step.

How to Do a Great Demo #1 — Differentiate Early

By JR Design Works Posted on April 12, 2010
Categories: 154 Consulting, How to do a great demo, Simplifi

This is a guest post from John Fishback of 154 Consulting — the firm that helps us coach the innovative fintech companies selected for Finovate on their demos.

The demo from SimpliFi at FinovateStartup09 (video here) is a great example of a company clearly communicating why their product is important. CEO Brian Link and COO Bill Grizack used their seven minutes to the fullest and showed off the best of Simplfi’s features. Their demo never felt rushed, and it made a huge impact on the audience (they were one of the best of show award winners).

Brian and Bill generated that impact by focusing on who they are as a company and why the marketplace needs SimpliFi. You can see evidence of that throughout this demo, but focus on Brian’s first minute.

He opens simply:

“Good afternoon. My name is Brian Link and this is Bill Grizack; we’re the co-founders of SimpliFi, a free online financial planning and advice service for middle class consumers.

SimpliFi is based in the technology hotbed of Winston-Salem, North Carolina.“

Here, SimpliFi clears the first hurdle of any demo: can you say what your product does in a sentence? Brian’s simple introduction is the best way to start. We don’t need to know more about his background, or Bill’s, at least not at this point. That SimpliFi is in Winston-Salem is not “need to know” information, but it is a point of differentiation with many of the day’s other presenters.

It’s in what comes next that the SimpliFi demo really shines. Brian does what too many demos fail to do at all, let alone right up front. He puts SimpliFi in the context of the industry:

“Before we start the demo I just want to say that I think we can all agree that we’ve seen some really terrific budgeting and PFM tools demoed here today. In fact, we’re going to see another one here in a couple of minutes, Rudder.

These guys are doing some really great work, and I think if it’s possible they’ve actually made budgeting cool again in America.

But with all due respect, we don’t think budgeting is the biggest issue for the average American.

We think it’s planning.“

This is clever positioning. While personal financial management (PFM) dominates the casual observer’s understanding of the online financial services space because of major players like Mint and Wesabe, there are many PFM services in the marketplace. It is hard for a new PFM to stand out. Were Brian to open with a statement like “SimpliFi is a budgeting and planning tool. . .” (and indeed, at a later Finovate event, SimpliFi unveiled PFM functionality), the audience could be forgiven for thinking “It’s just another PFM.”

Instead, Brian groups all PFM services together as addressing the same problem, and then positions SimpliFi as addressing an entirely different problem. If your company or product is often compared to an only superficially similar company or product, this approach can pay huge dividends. Rather than explaining all of the differences in functionality or technology, which may not matter to or resonate with your audience, focusing on the different problem or question you address, or the unique way you do so, can help make your value clear.

By this point in the demo, only seconds in and before we’ve even begun looking to the screen, we know basically what SimpliFi is. We also understand that SimpliFi is focused on planning, not budgeting. Now we’re wondering how important the difference between planning and budgeting is.

Brian tells us, with a stunning statistic:

“Consider this stat: Less than 5 percent of Americans have a written financial plan, but those that do are 250 percent more likely to achieve their goals.

The only difference is having a plan.“

We’re still under a minute in to the SimpliFi demo, and the audience now knows what SimpliFi is, how it’s different, and most importantly, that SimpliFi’s approach (planning) is spectacularly successful compared to what 95 percent of us do. That doesn’t just seem important; it is important, and it catches the audience’s attention for the remainder of the demo.

Brian and Bill do a lot of things well during the remainder of their demo. Note particularly how closely the on-screen navigation matches what Brian is saying. But their job is made easy from this point forward, because we already understand what makes SimpliFi important. All they need show is that their tool works, which they easily do in their time remaining.

By putting Simplfi in the context of the industry and by articulating its importance early, Brian and Bill both helped the audience understand SimpliFi’s importance and they made their own work for the rest of the demo easier.

Other companies can learn from SimpliFi’s introduction. The constraints of Finovate’s special format (fast-paced 7-minute demos rather than long slide presentations) make knowing and explaining clearly why your product matters critically important.