Any tips for doing live software demos (somewhat like a webinar)?

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#1

My goal for the next few months is doing some live demos of our software.

Goals:

  1. Find out how much difference (in conversion %) it would make to have perfect onboarding.
  2. “Practice” for making a screencast tutorial
  3. Gather more info on our customers’ needs.

Do you have any tips?

A few insightful demo tips I’ve found so far:

  1. Test everything. Restart. Do quick/simple test.
  2. Practice with a smaller group (maybe just one or two participants) first.

Tips for Recorded screencast videos:

  1. Have a story behind the screencast. (Almost like the classic Use Case Scenario for usability testing)
#2

Some good resources:

http://www.secondderivative.com/Articles.html (the site doesn’t look like much, but Peter has been helping organizations give better product demos for decades, and his content rocks)

Demonstrating to Win by Riefstahl is another oldie but goldie.

And this: http://blog.close.io/how-to-give-product-demos-that-sell-webinar-recording

(Sign up for “Give killer product demos” thingie at the bottom. Steli will release a kindle book about software demos this month, and you’ll get notified when it’s out and get a free copy) :slightly_smiling:

(Disclaimer: I’m on the Close.io team)

2 Likes
#3

Hi Ramin,

Thanks for posting the resources.
I read good things about Just F*ing Demo!: Tactics for Leading Kickass Product Demos

#4

Reviews of Fing demo are a bit mixed.

I read the beginning of Great Demo! and it looks really good.
One big tip:

Do the demo backwards.
Jump right into the useful part. He calls that “Show them the Dinosaur” (as in Jurrasic Park - they show you the dinosaur really early on).

It’s not training, it’ demoing, so it should be focused on the BENEFITS, not features.
So, if you were demoing WORD, you’d show them a cool finished document and point out WHAT you could do more than HOW you did it.
(BTW, this is how I learn software- if I know WHAT it can do, I can usually find out HOW to make it do that)