Leveraging Attention-Retention Curves in Demos

A Never Stop Learning! Article

When does your audience pay the most attention during your demos?

At the beginning? In the middle? At the end?

When do they pay the least attention? And what do they really remember from your demos?

A simple exercise may provide answers that surprise you and convince you to consider turning your demos “upside down” to improve your win rates.

What’s in This Article for You

A simple experiment that yields intriguing and frightening results
How the Attention-Retention Curve impacts traditional demos
Why did Elvis leave the room?
What else do audiences “remember”?
Taking advantage of the Attention-Retention Curve

A List of Ten Words

Try this! It’s a terrific experiment you can run on your own:

Create a list of ten words. Here’s a list I’ve used previously:
1. Result
2. Data
3. Test
4. Study
5. Format
6. Answer
7. Number
8. Unit
9. Portion
10. Focus
Now gather a group of ten or more people together. Tell them, “I am going to read a list of words: Please listen carefully…”
Read the list deliberately, then pause a few seconds after the last word and say, “Now, please write down as many as you can remember…”
Let the group write down as many words as they can remember (no cheating, please!).
Create a grid with 10 columns and as many rows as there are people in your group (you might plan to do this ahead of time).
Working word by word, poll your group to determine how many people wrote down each word on your list: “How many of you wrote down ‘Result’? Great, thanks! OK, now how many of you wrote down ‘Data’? Cool… How many wrote down ‘Test’? Thanks…” etc.
Analyze your results…!

The resulting plot will probably look a lot like the following (I had 20 people in this experiment), with the words forming the columns and the number of people in the rows. In this example, 19 people wrote down “Result,” 18 wrote down “Data,” 12 wrote down “Test,” etc.

What happened? What does this mean?

It means that most people remember the first few things you say, and then they rapidly lose track. The middle portion of what you present is essentially lost. Finally, at the very end of your list, your audience regains an increased level of retention, but not as high as at the beginning. This should be both very instructive and very frightening!

Note that the list of words is psychologically similar to what is presented in typical demos: a list of undifferentiated pieces of information. I’ve run this experiment hundreds of times with consistent results, using different lists of words, timing, and even emphasizing some of the words. None of these changes impacted the results significantly.

Intriguingly, people who have been through the experiment previously and who knew what to expect still produced the same outcomes!

Everything else being equal also shows that the huge majority of what is presented in traditional demos is not remembered! In this list of ten words, only the first two words were remembered by nearly everyone, and the last word was remembered by three-quarters of the group. Five words in the middle suffered the fate of being forgotten by all but a few people.

If you draw a rough curve through the X’s in your plot above, you’ll get what is called the “Attention-Retention Curve.”¹ Let’s explore why this puts traditional demos at risk.

(Psychology folks will recognize these experimental results as wonderful examples of the “Primacy-Recency Effect” and the “Serial-Position Effect.”)

Traditional Demos and the Impact of the Attention-Retention Curve

In most traditional demos, the presenter begins by orienting the audience to the software. This often includes showing how to log in (yawn), the layout of the menus and navigation (yawn again), the ability to customize the “home” screen (looonnnng yawn), and other Set-up Mode options (snore).

This banal opening is then followed by a long, convoluted demo that embraces multiple prospect roles and workflows. Next, the presenter discusses the broad range of pre-built, yet flexible reports that are available in the software, frequently building an example from scratch. Finally, the vendor rep ended the demo by showing a slide with a huge question mark and the word “Questions.”

If this demo sounds familiar, be concerned! What happened to the audience’s attention during this process?

In the beginning, when audience attention was highest, the presenter squandered that opportunity by presenting some of the least interesting aspects of the offering. The audience quietly tuned out for much of the middle portion and then finally perked up at the end of the demo when they realized that their torture was nearly over! (Saying phrases such as “in conclusion” tends to awaken audiences from their stupor.)

Based on the Attention-Retention Curve we created above, what did the audience remember from the demo? They remembered two elements quite well:

They remembered the first elements of the “orientation” at the very beginning.
They remembered the “Questions?” slide at the very end.

Was this a successful demo? It was average, but not particularly successful, and an average demo is insufficient to effectively differentiate from the competition.

Could it have been even worse? Why, yes!

The Longer You Go the Worse It Gets!

That’s right: The longer you keep showing features and functions without a break, the worse the effect.

John Medina, in his terrific book Brain Rules, notes that adult humans can typically pay attention for about ten minutes. So, if you are presenting a 1-hour demo, you’ve likely lost your audience after the first ten minutes, unless you do something to refresh them!

A refresh can be as simple as offering an interim summary or a change of presenter from one person to another. More elegant refreshes can include the use of novel props or visual aids, letting your prospect drive, working from a whiteboard, or (for face-to-face demos) moving to another location in the room. Each refresh gives you another ten minutes and restarts the Attention-Retention Curve.

Breaking a traditional demo up into chunks where each chunk has a clearly defined beginning, middle, and summary at the end is a very successful mechanism to refresh your audience. Math time! A 1-hour demo should be broken up into at least how many chunks? (Email me your answers…!)

So, a long, linear, traditional demo suffers severely due to the effects of the Attention-Retention Curve. And the longer you go with refreshing your audience, the worse the effect.

But there’s another impact to consider…

Elvis Has Left the Room

When do your prospects’ high-ranking people arrive at a demo meeting and when do they leave (e.g., C-level, VPs, Senior Directors, etc.)?

If you answered, “late and early” you are both cynical and largely correct!

High-ranking participants at demo meetings typically arrive right on time. When face-to-face, they often take a seat, quietly, in the rear of the room. They may ask a question or two. But if they don’t see something that compels their interest and engages their attention, they’ll often leave the demo after 10-15 minutes. This can be even shorter for online demo meetings.

In a traditional demo like the one outlined above, high-ranking executives won’t stay very long. Even worse, they’ll only see and remember some of the least important aspects of your offering. Here’s a graphical view of what happens in a traditional demo, with the percentage of information retained on the vertical axis and time on the horizontal:

The traditional demo strategy is to “save the best for last.” If the high-ranking prospects have left the room (or virtual room), only the lower-level players will see those screens, and only if the vendor hasn’t run out of time!

Summary? In traditional demos, many of the most important capabilities and messages are delivered towards the end of the demo when executives are often gone, interest is low, and retention is poor. While this may be considered “normal,” it is not particularly effective.

But Wait, There’s More…!

To make matters even worse, let’s revisit the exercise and its results. Ask everyone, “Did any of you write down a word that was not on the list?”

Yes? What did they write down? How many words that were not on the list were “heard” by the team?

In a group of 10-12 participants, you can expect that 4-6 words were written down that were not on your list. Holy cow! That’s more incorrect words than the 3 or 4 correct words that the team remembered well. Frightening!

When hearing or seeing undifferentiated pieces of information, people synthesize items on their own. The same is true in demos: They synthesize capabilities that don’t exist in your offering (and miss capabilities that are present). Prospects frequently confuse multiple vendors’ offerings when they’ve seen demos from each. “Now which vendor had the cross-tab function? I think that was Acme, wasn’t it?” And it turns out that only Yoyodyne Corp. offered that capability (or no one!).

So far, we’ve seen that the first two items in a list of undifferentiated information are remembered quite well, the last item is retained moderately well, and audiences synthesize and “remember” ideas that were never presented. Additionally, high-ranking prospect players tend to leave demos well before the meeting’s end, negating the strategy of “saving the best for last.”

How can we take advantage of the Attention-Retention Curve while minimizing its negative effects?

Great question!

Do the Last Thing First

How can you utilize audiences’ tendency to remember the first one or two items presented in a demo? Present your most compelling visuals right at the beginning!

How can you leverage audiences’ ability to retain the last piece of information presented? Summarize!

The Great Demo! methodology is based on turning a traditional demo upside down. A Great Demo! starts with the biggest “Wow!” for the targeted audience members right at the beginning, then peels back the layers of your offering in accord with your audience’s depth and level of interest.

By starting with the most interesting aspect of the software, the payoff, your audience becomes more interested, and attention and retention improve. Making the demo a conversation with your audience rather than a monologue also improves both attention and retention. Interestingly, prospect executives tend to stay longer in the demo when the Great Demo! strategy is employed, and these executives are more engaged.

Here’s an unexpected additional outcome: Practitioners of the methodology report that the overall length of their demos is shorter. Why? Because the demo focuses on meaningful capabilities as opposed to “the same flow we always show.” Most importantly, organizations that have adopted Great Demo! report that their win rates increase and that they do fewer demos overall to get the business.

Here’s a graphical view of the Attention-Retention Curves in a Great Demo!, again with the percent of information retained on the vertical axis vs time shown horizontally:

Starting with the payoff engages your audience right away. Sometimes you can actually see people lean forward in their seats! As audience members begin to participate in the demo conversation (“That screen is great – can it be modified to show more columns…?”), interest oscillates in small waves. By summarizing as you conclude each section, you refresh your audience and cause attention and information retention to increase.

A final summary at the end of your demo, recapping the highlights of the material presented, tends to drive attention and retention levels upwards again. As you summarize, you can often see people nodding their heads as they recall your key points. The Capabilities and Attention-Retention plots tend to stay tightly together for the full demo and executives are much more likely to stay longer and remain engaged.

The moral? Contemplate turning your demos upside down and enjoy higher win rates!

¹ The Attention-Retention Curve and exercise was developed by Michael Blanchette and is used with his permission.

To learn the methods introduced above, consider enrolling in a Great Demo! or Doing Discovery Workshop. For more demo and discovery tips, best practices, tools and techniques, explore our books, 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.

Leveraging Attention-Retention Curves in Demos