MOD 10
The Demo That Sells
A demo is a story you tell with the product, not a tour of the product.
The most influential demo methodology in the field — Peter Cohan's Great Demo! — reduces to one governing rule: show the outcome before the mechanism. Buyers don't want to learn your software; they want to see their own problem disappear, then decide if they trust how it happened.
The method, in sequence
- Know the audience — confirm who's in the room and what each of them personally needs to see before you start, not after
- Offer a menu, not an agenda — let them choose what matters most to see first; a forced linear tour loses a mixed audience within minutes
- Open with a situation slide — restate their problem before touching the product (see Mod 09)
- Illustrate the positive business outcome first — show the "after" state, then work backwards into how it's achieved, rather than building up feature by feature to a payoff
- Make it a conversation — ask questions throughout; a demo that's a monologue is a presentation, not a discovery‑continuing dialogue
- Follow up in writing — a short recap of what was shown, what was agreed as valuable, and the next step, sent same day
Script the skeleton in advance for every recurring scenario, then tailor the data and specifics live — a fully canned demo reads as generic the instant a technical buyer asks "can it do X with our data." Skeleton structure in Template 4.
When it breaks (and it will)
Recovery playbookAcknowledge it immediately, don't hide it. Have a backup — recorded segment, screenshots, or a second environment — ready before you present, not scrambled for live. Never debug silently in front of an audience; narrate what you're checking, or pivot to the situation slide and come back to it. A well‑handled failure often builds more trust than a flawless run — it's proof you don't panic under the exact conditions a live production incident would create.
Everything above is about what to show and say. The sheet that follows this module is about the channel most demo coaching skips entirely — how it sounds.