Peter E. Cohan
The Second Derivative
P.Cohan@comcast.net

The name of the game in remote demonstrations is interactivity! Your ability to attract and compel your audience's attention is your recipe for success.

How many times have you been on the receiving end of a web-based (remote) demonstration and found your attention wandering? Worse, do you find yourself flipping over to read email, or muting your telephone speaker to talk with colleagues, or simply dropping out of the demonstration?

Now turn the picture around and imagine yourself giving a remote demonstration. Is your audience paying attention? Are you losing people? Are you achieving the objective of your demonstration?

Remote demonstrations are a doubly difficult challenge in the sales, marketing, and deployment of software. It is hard enough to create a compelling demonstration that addresses your customers' key interests without the added complexity of executing the demo over web and telephone connections.

Let's explore some proven methods to increase the probability of success with remote demos. First, we'll offer a few pragmatic guidelines for when to use remote demonstrations. Then, we will provide ideas for how to prepare before the demo and how to generate interactivity to compel your audience to pay rapt attention during the demonstration itself.

Best and Worst Practices

The good news is that remote demonstration tools and technology now offer the means to connect with your audience and demonstrate your offerings without stepping onto an airplane. This can greatly reduce the cost-of-sales as well as reduce the time otherwise lost on the road.

Additionally, the ability to schedule a remote demo in minutes means that you can react very rapidly to time-sensitive opportunities. A customer who says "We need to make our decision by tomorrow?" might previously have been lost to the competition. Now you have a fighting chance to make yourselves equal, if not better, well before the deadline.

Finally, remote demonstrations are a terrific vehicle for offering "delta" updates--presenting the key capabilities of a new release, for example, to a customer who has already been exposed to the product.

The bad news: pundits have offered that remote demonstrations are for "when you absolutely, positively want to lose the sale?!" While this statement seems harsh, there are larger risks in remote demonstrations than in face-to-face demos. The reasons are clear: there is little or no direct interaction with your audience. You lose the feedback you would otherwise receive from facial reactions, puzzled looks, and pending-but-unspoken questions. Customers are less likely to speak up and ask questions in a remote demo than in a face-to-face situation.

If a key sale depends on the success of a remote demonstration, then you must find a way to increase the likelihood of connecting effectively.

When To Use Remote Demos

For an important demonstration, your best bet is to split your forces. For example, your technical resource can remain at the headquarters and perform the demonstration remotely. However, you will be most effective when a representative is also present with the customer, so he/she can assess the audience's reaction and monitor the pace. A key advantage of this approach is that the customer will be compelled to pay attention, since the representative is there making sure it happens!

The next-best situation is when you already have a good working relationship with your audience. The respect and credibility that you have already earned buys their increased attention.

However, it is unrealistic to expect that you always either already know your customer well or can have a representative present for the demo. Let's explore how to improve your odds in any remote demo situation.

Generating Interactivity is Critical!

You can use "Outbound" tools to increase the level of interaction with your audience. Toggle between a Roadmap (e.g. in PowerPoint) and your software to provide guidance, keep the audience on track, and break up the demonstration into easily consumable segments.

Use the "pen" or similar tools in PowerPoint or the collaboration software to underline, highlight and emphasize keep points. The act of a new graphic dynamically appearing wakes people up and draws their attention.

"Bidirectional" tools offer even stronger links with your audience. For large audiences, use the "polling" tools in collaboration software to enable the audience to vote and express opinions. People are inherently curious to see how the results compare with their own ideas, and they will pay attention as a result.

Here's a terrifically powerful tip: give control of your desktop to an audience volunteer and have the volunteer "drive" for a while. The volunteer naturally becomes intimately engaged, and the balance of the audience will be on the edge of their seats to see what will happen--will the volunteer make a mistake?

This is a really, really powerful technique. It has the added advantage of tacitly proving that your software is easy to use--"if the volunteer could do it, so could I!"

Another strategy is to ask questions verbally as you go along and make sure to respond to the answers. For larger audiences you can pose questions that can be responded to using the 'chat' capabilities.

Preparing Before the Demo

Here are simple steps you can implement ahead of time to improve your success rate:

Check out customer firewalls, networks, and other infrastructure before-hand. Confirm that it works before the demo begins! Many collaboration tools now enable this to be done automatically.

Set your screen resolution to the audience's lowest common denominator. Many collaboration tools map your screen resolution downwards, which means that if you have a high resolution screen and your customer has a low resolution screen, they may only see the upper left-hand corner.

Monitor performance on a separate 'audience' machine in your office. This enables you to respond and adapt as you proceed. It can be very surprising to see the actual performance from the audience's perspective, compared to what you see on your machine.

For improved audio quality, use a headset with a microphone. Speaker phones sound like you are talking in a tunnel. Even worse, your voice may drop out if you move your head to face away from the speaker.

Before you begin, be sure to clean your desktop and your "File Open" windows. You may not want the customer to see your last meetings. It is amusing (but sad) to see remote demos that show where the vendor was last selling...!

Consider dedicating a computer to remote demonstrations. That way, it will always be ready to go.

During the Demo

Have your best, most compelling screen up and ready when you begin sharing your desktop. Start with the end in mind... Conversely, don't leave a logon or start-up screen up during a verbal introduction. Nothing bores an audience more than watching a blinking cursor in a 'Login' box!

Move your mouse slooooowwwly and deliberately. Remember, there is often a lag time between what you see and when your audience sees it. What appears to be a smooth motion on your machine may be ragged and uncomfortable to watch on the customer's machine.

Ask questions as you go. Do this even when person from your organization is present at the customer site. Don't assume the customer attendees are awake and paying attention. You can inject humor to help, such as threatening to "include it on the test" or similar....

Here's an amusing one: resist the urge to point at your own screen with your finger? We've SEEN this...! Shockingly, the customer can't see your hand?

Finally, summarize early and often. The act of summarizing helps ensure that the audience is with you and provides them an opportunity to ask questions.

The name of the game in remote demonstrations is interactivity. The better you engage, the higher your probability of success.

When you are compelling and interactive and you demonstrate the capabilities your audience needs, they will say, "Wow! That was a Great Demo!

Peter Cohan is principal of The Second Derivative, a consultancy focused on helping software organizations improve their sales and marketing results. He authored "Great Demo!", a book that provides methods to create and execute compelling demonstrations. Before founding The Second Derivative, Peter worked in business development at Symyx Technologies, Inc. which creates technologies for high-speed materials discovery. There, he built the Discovery Tools? business from inception into a $30 million operation in four years. Prior to Symyx, Peter served in product management, marketing, and sales positions at MDL Information Systems, a leading provider of scientific information management software.