Solution Engineering: The Best Kept Secret Of Demo Prep

It's your worst nightmare.

Friday afternoon. Your customer has dropped the long-awaited list of demo scenarios into your inbox. And you only have a few days to prepare.

You could ask for an extension. But you already used up that card for an extension to your written response. And besides, it might highlight that your solution isn't quite as out-of-the-box as your customer hopes.

The Solution Engineer's Dilemma

Sound familiar? It's not uncommon to receive a long list of detailed demo scenarios with too little time to prepare. For many reasons it may not be possible to extend the preparation time before the day of the demo. And to make things worse, you have limited resources to help prepare.

What do you do? The three most common human reactions are fight, flight or freeze. But there's another way. There is a secret to handling this all-too-frequent situation that's worked for me time and time again.

The Secret

The secret is simpler than you think ...

Spend a disproportionate amount of time on the early scenarios in your customer's agenda. I call this the 50:20 rule. Spend 50% of your prep time on the first 20% of scenarios. So, if you have 10 scenarios, over-prepare the first two.

This sounds crazy and suicidal, but bear with me.

When you embark upon a long day (or more) of demo scenarios it's critically important to establish trust and rapport early. If you don't achieve this it's an uphill and painful battle.

Over-Preparation

When I say over-prepare, I mean it. Look at your demo from every angle. Is it robust? Can you deviate from the script if the customer asks tough questions? Do you have other customers using this 'use case' successfully? What are the projected benefits of your solution in this area?

Make sure you rehearse your value-based narrative (see my previous blogs on this - links below). Ask your colleagues from sales and pre-sales to act as Devil's Advocates. Get them to throw you all the tough questions and critique your responses. Over-prepare!

If you do this successfully, you will invoke three immutable laws of demo scenarios.

Law #1: The Halo Effect

Simply put, the Halo Effect is the belief that if you're great at doing one thing you''ll be great at everything. If you're a brilliant Solution Engineer, you'll be a fantastic chef. It doesn't make much logical sense, but it's a quirk of human nature.

So if your first few scenarios are delivered confidently and to a very high quality, then all of your demo scenarios will be equally brilliant.

(By the way, the opposite of the Halo Effect is the Horns Effect. This is equally easy to be labelled with and just as difficult to shake off. If you do a bad job of your first few scenarios, your customer will be all over your demos with forensic scrutiny until they find holes!)

Law #2: All Demos Agendas Overrun

In my experience, most if not all demo days will run out of time to complete. This is especially true if you purposefully over-deliver the first few scenarios. Since you have over-prepared you will undoubtedly take as many questions as your customer wants to ask and cover the scenario from every possible angle.

Customers will be slow to return from refreshment and lunch breaks. The inevitable trajectory is set.

And after the first few scenarios are complete, people will start doing little calculations in their heads. ("If two scenarios took 80 minutes, then ... ...") They will be keen for you to speed up and pick up the pace.

Law #3: Cognitive Short-Cuts

In hist best seller, "Thinking, Fast and Slow", Nobel Prize winning author, Daniel Kahneman describes how people often take cognitive short-cuts to make quick judgments and rapid conclusions. Often these will be based on very little evidence. And what evidence there is could be largely anecdotal.

When under the inevitable pressure of time (Law #2) and with the cognitive bias of the Halo Effect (Law #2), customers will ask if your solution can meet their requirements. And you can tell them without showing them, then move swiftly on. Of course, you must be honest with your responses during this box-ticking stage, but the slick demo part can be dispensed with. I've seen this happen time after time.

That's it!

But Daryn, I hear you say ...

Isn't This "Smoke & Mirrors"?

And the answer is no. I define "smoke and mirrors" demos as creating the illusion that your solution can achieve specific business results when you know that it cannot. You will always be found out eventually.

However, if your customer has put you under intense deadline pressure to prepare for a long sequence of scenarios (that you know you solution can meet), then this is just good time management.

What's The Alternative?

I've seen plenty of demos that go like this ... You allocated equal time to each scenario and ditch the rehearsal to do more solution configured in the time you have left.

The result: Your demo drowns in a sea of mediocrity. And your rehearsal happens in front of your customer. This is a painful death, I assure you.

Final Cautions

The 50:20 approach to demo prep produces stunning results when executed correctly. However, I can't stress enough that you really need to over-prepare the first few scenarios. Leave no stone unturned. And never skip the rehearsal; it's your safety net and essential quality assurance.

You need to deliver this with supreme confidence. If you're anxious about the later parts of the agenda then this will negatively effect your entire performance. Be bold and have fun.

Let me know how you get on and if you can add more techniques to this approach please leave a comment. I will reply to them all.

I enjoy blogging about Customer Experience, Digital Marketing and, of course, Solution Engineering.

Related articles:

• 4th Generation Solution Engineering
• Who Wants To Be A Solution Engineer?
• Why Solution Engineers Quit
• Is There Life After Solution Engineering?
• The Solution Engineer's Essential Guide To Objection Handling
• The Solution Engineer's Guide to Banishing The Feature Function Show (#FFS)
• A Solution Engineer's Brief Guide To Value & Purpose

You can view my other blog posts here. And why not follow me on Twitter: @CxDaryn