It was a normal day in the startup. Started early, did some last minute bug fixes for the release next day, had a few demo’s, called a few prospects, created mockups for the future release, did some admin work like paying bills. Was already late and was tired but had to do one last and important task, make a customer live.
By now we had quite a few go lives, so there was less excitement but routine setup and then walked the customer through the application. That’s when the customer stopped and said “Your product is more exciting than it looked in the Demo”. This sort of woke me up.
Had mixed feelings, first was happy to get a compliment about the product (who wouldn’t be). But then started thinking, why was the demo weaker than the product while it was supposed to be other way around. Was I not doing justice to the team who had built such a great product.
That’s when I started analyzing my demo flow, my demo data. Looked at the customer screen multiple times to see what he would have liked. The day went late in the night but had a few good learning’s as below
- The most important aspect of the demo is the demo data. I realized the demo data I had was representative but not sufficient. So made it much richer
- Our application is a price optimization software for retailers, the product listing data I had was for a certain category but realized that the customer could not relate to it in the demo as much as he could with his own products. I am sure this is true for any application. Now have added products that are more inclusive and will try to showcase the product which are closer to the customer’s category during the demo and hope they relate it better.
- Knew this but realized I was making the same common mistake in a couple of demo scenarios, where I was explaining about the feature and not selling the value. Made tweaks to the script accordingly.
End result was satisfying as there was a happy customer, was glad that we have built a product that can awe a customer and most importantly had a good set of learning’s for the demo next time.
All in All was a very good experience!!!