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A Never Stop Learning! Article about Personal Growth
“I believe that there is always something new to learn, in fact, that is one of the three reasons that I chose to become a chef, that my education is never over.”
– Anne Burrell
With respect to doing discovery and delivering demos, are you a cook or a chef?
What’s the difference? Cooks follow recipes, chefs create recipes! Cooks specialize in one or a few functions; chefs manage the entire menu and kitchen operation.
In doing discovery and delivering demos, most customer-facing team members are like cooks: They execute the prescribed skills and follow the established processes over and over, seeking to achieve consistent, high performance. Their objective is to minimize mistakes and follow best practices.
A few folks, on the other hand, are like chefs seeking to improve processes and pursue new methods. They generate and test new ideas, exploring new dimensions and going beyond existing boundaries. They welcome making mistakes and the information and experiences that those experiments yield.
We need both types; in fact, we need many more cooks than chefs!
Cooks and Execution
“A recipe has no soul. You, as the cook, must bring soul to the recipe.”
– Thomas Keller
Cooks practice following recipes until they are consistent and predictable (and hopefully tasty!). It takes time and repetition to execute even simple recipes to acceptable standards. The same is true, or perhaps harder, for delivering demos and doing discovery!
It often takes six months or longer before a customer-facing team member is considered “ready” to present a demo to a prospect or customer. And that demo will likely follow the established recipe rigorously!
Like the simple process of frying an egg, there are numerous nuances that impact execution, including customer preferences, ingredients, and the kitchen itself. Regarding customer preferences, some people desire their eggs “over easy” with yolks that barely touched the pan while others would gag when seeing these on their plate! That later group wants eggs that could bounce after cooking, which the first group would claim are “ruined.”
Ingredients are another dimension to consider. Fresh eggs vs been-around-for-a-while? Fertile or not? Jumbo, extra-large, large, medium, small, or peewee? Butter, bacon fat, other oil, or none? Garnish or plain? And how many eggs does the client want?
These choices map to the many options for demos. For example, executives prefer crisp demos with a focus on outcomes; middle managers want to see capabilities that map to their interests; and end-users yet another set. Each has their needs and preferences. Oh, and system admins probably want their eggs uncracked and uncooked, sitting on the shelf in the fridge, ready to be “configured!”
The nature of the kitchen, or kitchens, yields yet another set of learning challenges that find equivalents in demos and discovery. Gas stove, electric, wood, or other source of heat? Non-stick or cast-iron pan? How much heat and for what duration? Spatula, another tool, or none? Is it your kitchen or someone else’s? And what plate will you use to serve?
These parameters have their equivalents in demos and discovery. Your computer or someone else’s? Over the web or face-to-face? Your facility, your prospect’s, or a third party? Well-established and characterized demo environment or new and untested? (Untested? Oh-oh: Not advised…!)
And consider the complexity of the dish. How many ingredients? How many steps? What preparation and execution are required for each step?
Like learning to cook, that six-month investment in onboarding and training your new team member is just the start of their journey to demo and discovery proficiency. For demos, for example, once they have absorbed the standard demo script, they begin to ascend through the ten levels of increasing skills and knowledge:
- Level 1 : Follows the standard demo script
- Level 2 : Customizes based on the prospect’s market/industry
- Level 3 : Customizes based on the discovery information uncovered
- Level 4 : Communicates tangible business value
- Level 5 : Applies both Vision Generation and Technical Proof demos
- Level 6 : Manages and explores prospect questions
- Level 7 : Uses Biased Questions to outflank competition and reengineer vision
- Level 8 : Applies storytelling techniques to reinforce key ideas
- Level 9 : Applies these skills to the broad range of demo scenarios required, including demos for prospects occupying different portions of the Technology Adoption Curve, transactional sales cycles, expansion opportunities, Executive Briefing Centers, presenting new products, lunch and learn sessions, tradeshows, demos for analysts and third parties, channel partners, internal demos, and other scenarios
- Level 10 : Captures and reuses demo success scenarios, and integrates, aligns, and leverages the skills above into a cohesive demonstration methodology.
And that’s all just to become an accomplished cook with respect to demos! Achieving this can take years and for many people it is a lifetime journey.
We need proficient cooks; we need many of them in our customer-facing roles!
Chefs and Creation
“Cooks seek to avoid mistakes; chefs embrace them.”
– Me
When I try a new recipe, I endeavor to follow it as written. I may play a bit with choosing a plate or bowl for presentation and I’ll likely add some kind of garnish. But my first attempt at a new recipe follows the script, just as a newly certified vendor rep follows their demo script.
Regarding food, I’m a cook.
There are a number of dishes that I’ve made many, many times and I do continuously work to improve the outcomes. I’d like to get my biscuits just a bit crispier and more flakey. I want to get that fresh tuna fillet seared evenly all over, with that gorgeous gradient of the cooked edges changing to sushi-raw inside just right!
On the other hand, I don’t think my wife has ever followed a recipe verbatim. For her a recipe is just a starting point, just a suggestion.
Somehow, she visualizes (or more accurately, the taste equivalent of visualize!) how different ingredients impact a dish. Intriguingly, she also has a mental image of what is available to her in our kitchen. It’s like she has an active database that she works with in her head. She’ll pull ingredients from cabinets I didn’t even know we had! And she intuitively understands what works well with other components.
This goes far beyond a few grinds of pepper or grated nutmeg. Za’atar, yuzu, Manuka honey, and Tahitian vanilla are staples for her! (Try these; they’re really terrific!)
And it is not just ingredients that form the basis for chef’s experiments. New cooking methods have been introduced and refined over the past decade, including sous vide and air frying, which have since become commonplace; but also less-known methods like ultrasonic-assisted, infra-red, and ohmic heating techniques.
It takes a chef to depart from the norm.
Does everything she make turn out wonderfully? Mostly, but there are occasional mistakes, some of which she can correct, but all of which she learns from!
Cooks seek to avoid mistakes; chefs embrace them.
You: Cook or Chef?
“Be yourself; everyone else is taken.”
– Oscar Wilde
I’m not suggesting that everyone should endeavor to become a chef with respect to demos and discovery. Quite the contrary! We need skilled practitioners to execute well-proven methods and processes consistently and with high fidelity.
In fact, we need many more cooks than chefs in our customer-facing teams. Great restaurants may have several or many cooks, but typically only one real chef (restaurant job titles can be deceiving).
But back to the question: Are you a demo and discovery cook or chef?
This likely depends on two sets of factors:
1. Your personality.
2. Your experiences.
Your personality often determines what gives you the most pleasure and sense of accomplishment. Many of us focus on constant improvement of our practices, seeking to make our demos just a bit better, and our discovery conversations just a bit more mutually informative. Generally, we are working towards best practices.
In the ten levels of demo skills above, most customer-facing team members are delighted as they progress to higher levels of execution. They get great satisfaction from learning and then mastering new skills and scenarios.
Most people struggle the first few times that they present in Executive Briefing Centers; they’ve never dealt with an audience that consists solely of executives! And vendor personnel who have been demoing for prospect Innovators and Early Adopters are initially surprised at the much more skeptical responses they get from Late Majority prospects. But they then do work to improve and tailor their demos for those specific audiences.
It’s like the breakfast restaurant cook who has been promoted to work the lunch menu: The recipes are different, but well-documented. The kitchen is the same, but the customers have significant differences. The cook embraces the challenge, and a few weeks of concentration and repetition yields consistent positive outcomes.
Your experiences, like the change from breakfast to lunch, can impact your pathway as well. In one case, you might find you enjoy the challenges of changing from breakfast to lunch recipes. In another, you might find you’ve been pushed into a whole new dimension!
Imagine you’ve been a skilled breakfast cook for a while when suddenly your restaurant has to close its doors! You scramble (no egg pun intended) and find a new position at a Thai cuisine restaurant. Now, you have an entirely new kitchen, new cooking methods and equipment, new ingredients, and new customers. You’ve got a lot to learn, but over time you gain competence and, finally, are getting smiles from the owner as you dish up tasty Pad Thai, Tom Yum Goong, and Som Tum.
People with a “cook” personality take great pleasure in achieving and ultimately mastering their new skills. And so do chefs, but chefs start asking questions and experimenting: “Wow, I wonder about using lemongrass in breakfast offerings, such as sausage? (Yes!) Could tamarind be added to orange juice and champagne to make an intriguing mimosa? (Oh yes!)
What are the key attributes of your personality? Are you focused on pursuing best practices or establishing new ones?
What about your experiences? Has your trajectory pointed you towards being an excellent cook or launched you into the role of a chef?
In my case, I was a demo and discovery cook (a good one, thank you very much!) for over fifteen years before an event took place that forced me to revisit my practices. I had been the “go to” person, in many cases, for demos for the products that I represented. I was skilled and comfortable with the results and output of my discovery conversations. I felt I was at the top of my game…
Until I became the customer!
It was when I was leading a business unit and needed to purchase a CRM system that I woke up and smelled the coffee: instead of being the cook, I was now the patron. The vendors we engaged were largely awful with respect to doing discovery and their demos were appalling Harbor Tours!
But what I also realized was that we, as a vendor, were applying the same poor practices in our sales efforts! We were just as bad. It was like realizing that our fried eggs were greasy and served cold (yuck!). Our “best practices” clearly weren’t “best,” they were simply our current practices.
This experience triggered a reexamination of our discovery calls and demos, yielding the Great Demo! methodology and, a bit later, the Doing Discovery methodology. (See “The Great Demo! Origins Story” in Suspending Disbelief for the full, enlightening story!)
Become an Excellent Cook First…
“They say that nobody is perfect. Then they tell you practice makes perfect. I wish they’d make up their minds.”
– Winston Churchill
In the kitchen, you need to be a consistently successful cook before you can become a chef. The same is true for doing discovery and delivering demos. You need to execute your current best practices consistently and successfully before you contemplate making substantial changes.
The prerequisite before exploring new ideas is to establish a clear baseline, enabling you to determine how your investigations compare. Before you add tamarind to your sausage, you must have a repeatable sausage recipe that delivers consistent results with your customers. Otherwise, how can you tell if adding tamarind is an improvement or not?
This doesn’t preclude you from ideating new methods or processes, of course. It simply says that you, or someone, needs to be able to determine if a change is better, worse, or the same as the status quo.
Incremental or Step-Change?
“Necessity is the mother of invention.”
– Plato
In the kitchen, change can be driven by the absence of an ingredient, tool, or other entity. We ran out of brown sugar for a recipe and substituted smoked brown sugar, instead. The result was perceptibly improved taste and scent. Not a big change, but the result was a noticeably better, so we amended the recipe accordingly.
Was this a big change? No, it was an incremental improvement, and it represents one small step in the transition from a cook to a chef. Note that the high-performing cook would have headed to the store to buy more regular brown sugar; smoked brown sugar is not the standard recipe!
The same principle applies to demos and discovery. An example incremental improvement in discovery is learning to explore “pain” more deeply than the simple acknowledgement of pain by the prospect. “How long has this been going on?” “Is the team frustrated?” “Tell me more about what is going on…” These small additions elevate vendors from Level 1 to Level 2.
A step change represents a more radical departure from the norm. I was getting ready to roast a rack of lamb (special occasion!) and had planned to use my typical set of herbs and spices, which had served me well over the years. (I’m a cook, here, obviously!)
My wife suggested I prepare a glaze based on harissa, which I had never heard of before. “What’s harissa?” I asked. “It’s a hot, spicy paste made from peppers…” she explained. “It’s in the fridge. Here, I’ll show you…”
She guided me to the proper location in the fridge where a jar resided, purchased previously by my better half unbeknownst to me. “Try it!”
I did.
And now I have a new standard recipe for rack of lamb! She’s the chef; I’m the cook.
In the world of demos, traditional practice was to “save the best for last” and show the prospect how your system worked. During my experiences buying the CRM system I realized that prospects want to see deliverables before learning how the vendor’s system works. And in many cases, particularly with high-ranking prospect players, they aren’t interested in how the system works at all; they are concerned about the solutions, outcomes, and deliverables the tool provides or enables.
However, making the change from “save the best for last” to “Do the Last Thing First!” required reconstructing demos. It’s a step change that offered major improvements.
We invested several years testing, tuning, and validating the new practices in hundreds of demos across a broad range of parameters until the new methodology was “production hardened.” The results showed consistent substantial improvements in demo performance (based on our own experiences and, later, as reported by Great Demo! Workshop customers):
– Gains of 10% or more in improved close rates overall
– Demo win rate increases of 25-75%
– Reduced “No Decisions” by half
– Reduced sales cycle length by 50%
– Reduced of cost-of-sales by 25%
– Reduced “wasted demos” by 50%
– Eliminated or reduced the need for POCs and evaluations
– Free POCs and evaluations transformed into paid events
– Increased deal size and breadth by 2x – both licenses and services
Chefs, whether in the kitchen or doing demos and discovery, often look for step change opportunities!
Accepting vs Solving
“Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
– James Baldwin
Great chefs go far beyond simple exploration like trying a radical new ingredient: They solve problems.
The sous vide cooking method originally arose to make food preparation safer, by enabling pasteurization and sterilization of quantities of food for large commercial operations. Separately, a French chef (not the French Chef!) wanted way to prepare foie gras while retaining as much fat as possible; sous vide was the solution. (I’m personally not a fan of foie gras…!)
Restaurant chefs wanted a way to speed meat preparation. They found it through precooking and holding various meats using sous vide, then finishing as needed on the grill, sauté pan, etc. Doing so saved a great deal of time and expense, while yielding a superior product, in many cases.
Cooks generally simply accept the status quo: “We’ve always had this problem…” Chefs see problems as challenges to be overcome.
In the world of demos, one of the biggest complaints as a presenter is being asked to deliver an “overview” demo with little or no discovery information. Most people just complain, shake their heads, and then present their “standard overview demo” (aka Harbor Tour).
I looked at the problem as solvable and invented the Vision Generation demo, successfully designed to satisfy the prospect’s (or sales rep’s!) desire to “see what’s possible,” but doing so crisply while leveraging existing customer success stories. Vision Generation demos result in a rapid connection between vendor and prospect and segue smoothly into a productive discovery conversation. (See Chapter 11 “Vision Generation Demos” in Great Demo!)
Problem addressed. Here’s another example…
Vendors with many product offerings traditionally present long, painful product overview presentations and/or even more painful end-to-end demos. (“How long do you need for your demo?” asked the prospect. “How much time have you got…?” replied the vendor!)
I borrowed a simple, but very effective tool from the world of restaurants to solve this problem: the menu!
When you sit down in a restaurant, the waiter hands you a menu (or you use a QR code to read on your phone). In moments, you can see what’s possible from the list and make your choices. Very simple, very logical.
You can apply the same method for demos and discovery: Present a menu of the solutions you offer. Your prospect chooses what is most interesting or important to them, giving you guidance about what to pursue.
The Menu Approach (as it is known) enabled a step-change in engaging prospects, saving incredible amounts of time and enabling a crisp focus on prospects’ specific interests. (See “Origins of The Menu Approach: A Demo Survival Success Story” in Suspending Disbelief for the engaging tale!) Applying the Menu Approach at tradeshow booths and stands was a high-productivity refinement of the method.
In the kitchen, I am most definitely a cook. With discovery and demos today, I would claim the chef title!
Dessert
“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.“
– T. S. Eliot
Individuals: Are you a cook or a chef? If you are a cook, keep pursuing those best practices, expand your skills, and acquire knowledge. And be very proud to be a cook!
Leaders: Who are your cooks and who are your chefs? Develop the former; nurture the later. Engage their unique strengths and talents. Doing discovery and delivering demos requires truly great cooks to follow best practices and truly great chefs to define new ones!
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To learn the methods introduced above, consider enrolling in a Great Demo! Doing Discovery or Demonstration Skills Workshop. For more demo and discovery tips, best practices, tools and techniques, explore our blog and articles on the Resources pages of our website at https://GreatDemo.com and join the Great Demo! & Doing Discovery LinkedIn Group to learn from others and share your experiences.