How many times have you heard a presenter say, in a demo, “It’s slow today because…”? Likely hundreds! Here’s a quick cure for that frightening phrase…
Don’t say it.
The performance/speed of your software is generally out of your control, being dependent on a range of factors – your local network, internet connections, cloud servers, etc. “It is what it is.”
So, get over it. When you say, “It’s slow today because…,” there’s only one word your audience will remember: “slow.”
Your audience has no idea what performance should look like – you are likely the only person that noticed that things are not as speedy as you expect. Here are a few recommendations:
When you see that your software isn’t operating as crisply as you expect, fill the time with a description of what it is doing. For example, “Right now the software is searching millions of records using the filters you just set, doing the ‘slicing and dicing’ for the analysis, and will pass the refined results to your dashboard…”
Hopefully, your software will have painted the screen by that time, and everything will look natural. Have a series of filler sentences ready, accordingly.
What if your software still hasn’t completed its work by that point? Invite the comparison. You could say, for example, “The software may take a minute or two to finish this process – but I invite you to compare that minute executed automatically by the software vs. what has been taking you and your team two weeks, done manually…”
Very elegant, very professional!