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A Never Stop Learning! Article
“There are no wrong turns, only unexpected paths.” – Mark Nepo
What’s in this article for you?
- How to prepare your Lunch and Learn demos
- Starting your sessions
- Executing your sessions
- Additional tips
Lunch and Learn demo meetings are terrific vehicles for securing renewals and driving expansion.
It can take enormous effort and energy to complete your initial order with a customer. As the incumbent vendor, growing your product footprint should be much easier. Lunch and Learn sessions are one excellent method to achieve this.
These sessions are organized after Go Live has taken place to serve as refresher sessions and to expose users to additional capabilities or use cases. They are typically presented by presales or customer success folks to three sets of audiences:
- Existing users
- Mixed populations of existing and new users
- New users only
Preparation
Understanding the nature of your audience will guide you toward what to demonstrate for each group:
- Existing users: Will be interested in new use cases and tips/tricks to improve their consumption of their existing use cases.
- Mixed populations of existing and new users: The above, plus introductions to all potential use cases. The existing users will often serve as internal references for the new folks.
- New users only: Again, intros to all potential use cases.
Accordingly, invest some time to determine the nature of the attendees before the session. How many are existing users and for what use cases? How many are new users and what would be their likely target use cases?
If you aren’t already intimate with your customer’s use cases, consider interviewing existing users to gain an understanding of how they are achieving or working towards their objectives, the problems they faced along the way, the capabilities needed and used, and the value enjoyed through the use of your software. Organizing your findings in Situation Slide format will enable you to present these use cases crisply and in alignment with your target audiences.
Lunch and Learn demos can be delivered face-to-face or over the web. Prior to COVID, many sessions were face-to-face, with the vendor bringing lunch to their customer’s site. (Pizza seemed to be a favorite choice!) If you are presenting over the web to your customer, consider having lunch delivered (this is easier if your audience is in a single location, of course). A free lunch is often part of the draw for the participants!
What about timing? Well, the name “Lunch and Learn” should provide one suggestion, but you could also call your sessions, “Breakfast Break,” “Brunch and Explore,” or “Snack and Sample.” One great title I heard was “Brains and Bagels!”
Starting Your Session
If you don’t have prior information, start your session with the following questions for attendees:
- What is your name?
- What is your job title?
- What are your objectives – and do you have any specific topics you’d like to explore?
The Menu Approach is a fabulous method for starting Lunch and Learn sessions. Organize what you plan to present in accord with the results of your Menu review and subsequent poll, starting with the use cases with the most interest (or highest-ranking job titles) and apply the Inverted Pyramid approach. If you run out of time, schedule another session to complete the list!
Note that what you learn from Question 3 above can help to populate your Menu. You can add items dynamically as they are raised and show the voting accumulations as well. Your Menu serves as the agenda for the session, providing you with a rank-prioritized list of the use cases of interest to your audience.
Pro Tip: You can also start your session with a timeline slide to outline the relationship between you and your customer to-date, showing purchase, implementation, Go Live, and other relevant dates. This is particularly useful when you have new users in your audience. I’d recommend following this slide by generating or presenting your Menu.
Executing Your Session
Work through your Menu, use case by use case. Using your Menu this way also provides you with a place to verbally introduce each use case and to deliver a summary before moving on to the next.
Use Vision Generation Demos to introduce the use cases. This terrific technique provides just enough information to generate interest in learning more (see Chapter 11 “Vision Generation Demos” in Great Demo!). Your objective is to sow seeds for expanded use.
You may need (or want!) to do a little discovery, particularly when working with new user populations. Remember to ask, “How does this compare with your situation when presenting Situation Slides in your Vision Generation Demos. Don’t assume that you already understand their specific situation, even if you do: Confirm it and identify any differences!
Pro Tip: Describe relevant Value Realization Events and the time-to-value for those events that current users within the organization have enjoyed. Use this to reinforce the value received by the existing users and describe how the new folks can leverage the existing implementation to enjoy the successes experienced by their peers.
Great Demo! Guidance: Start each use case segment with appropriate Illustration(s) to show and confirm the desired end results. Do It using the fewest number of clicks or steps when executing pathways, then Peel Back the Layers in as much depth as your audience desires.
Return to your Menu or agenda after you summarize each use case. This sets you up to take any further questions, close out that use case, and introduce the next. Very professional!
Additional Tips
Remember that these should not be positioned as training sessions; they should be perceived as introductions to new workflows and capabilities! It’s your decision as to how deep to go in accord with the available time and the (mutual!) objectives for the meeting.
Lunch and Learn demos are wonderful opportunities to practice your skills in managing questions. Let your audience ask the “Can it do X?” and “How do I do Y?” questions. Park questions that will drag you into the weeds and bore the balance of the audience. See Chapter 8 “Managing Time and Questions” in Great Demo! for specific guidance.
Many Lunch and Learn sessions are scheduled for an hour, but there’s no rule on length. Group sizes should be large enough to make your time investment worthwhile, but not so large that users feel uncomfortable participating or asking questions.
Finally, you may want to track who attends and, if possible, the number of participants who show interest in each use case. (The Menu Approach often yields this data directly!) This information can support and increase the value perceived by your customer.
Lunch and Learn demo meetings are fabulous ways of building relationships, increasing software utilization, and improving the user experience, all broad steppingstones on the pathways to renewals and expansion.
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