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How to Make Your Software Look Complicated, Confusing, Overwhelming, and Expensive
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How Setup Mode Is Destroying Your Demos!
A Never Stop Learning! Article
Vendor: “Programming this system is so simple a six-year-old could do it!”
Prospect: “Great: Find me a six-year-old!”
What’s in This Article for You?
- An Astonishing Demo
- A Few Thought-Provoking Questions
- What Is Setup Mode?
- Monday Morning
An Astonishing Demo
I watched a ninety-minute recorded demo and noted two rather astonishing things:
Astonishing Thing Number One:
Approximately half of the demo was consumed by setup and configuration items, including setting up the environment, configuring the application, creating and editing templates, forms, reports, dashboards, etc.
This wasn’t astonishing on its own, perhaps, until…
Astonishing Thing Number Two:
At the end of all this setup activity the vendor said proudly, “Of course, you won’t have to do any of this. We take care of it during implementation. It’s all done by our Professional Services team…”
Wait. What did you say?
You just spent forty-five minutes showing stuff your prospect will never need to use? (Enter your choice of an appropriate exclamation of surprise and astonishment here ______.)
But wait, there’s more: A bonus Astonishing Thing!
I called the presales manager who had sent me the recording and asked, “Why did half of the demo present capabilities that your prospect will never use?”
They responded, “Oh! We’ve been told that these are key differentiators and that we must include them in every demo!”
“Hmmm,” I thought to myself. “This edict must come from the ‘Sales Prevention Team!’” And that’s what prompted me to write this article. Let’s move away from software demos for a moment to put this in perspective…
A Few Thought-Provoking Questions
When it’s time to cook dinner, do you start by rearranging your kitchen?
When it’s time to get dressed, do you begin by reorganizing your closets and drawers?
When it’s time to draft a document on your computer, do you start by readjusting all the preferences and settings?
Nope to all three! These are things you did once, when you first completed setup.
What Is Setup Mode?
“Set it and forget it.”
– Professional Service Implementation Specialist to a customer
Most software has the ability to configure the product for each customers’ specific desires. However, once the system has been configured, most organizations rarely change the settings. And while a system administrator may make periodic adjustments, the consumer users are highly unlikely to interact with the configuration screens.
Setup Mode includes three sets of operations:
- Implementation, configuration, data loading, and integration with third party tools
- Definition and construction of templates, dashboards, forms, and workflows
- Enrollment of users and associated privileges and restrictions
Now consider:
- Implementation is done only once.
- Construction of templates, dashboards, etc. is also done during system setup for the majority of entities. Occasionally, there may be changes to existing components or creation of new ones, but this work is generally done by the system administrator, not consumer users!
- Similarly, initial user enrollment occurs during setup, with occasional changes, adds, and drops done thereafter, but again typically executed by the system admin.
Executives never touch the configuration screens. Nor do ninety-nine percent of middle and front-line managers. And individual contributors are often prevented from accessing the config screens, for fear that they’ll break something! These are all consumer users and none of these groups care about setup capabilities.
So why do so many demos consume time showing, often in gory detail, “Here’s how to set things up?” Why, indeed?
Victims of Momentum
Inertia
- a tendency to do nothing or to remain unchanged.
“We’ve always done it that way!” answered one presales practitioner. They could easily be speaking for the hundreds of others who would give the same response. In many cases, showing Setup Mode is part of an organization’s “standard” or “gold” demo, and onboarding often includes having new hires walk through the full list of capabilities to pass demo certification!
The presales manager who described setup features as “competitive differentiators” offers another explanation. Sadly, showing Setup Mode items is definitely differentiating, but it’s negative differentiation! The time invested in showing Setup Mode features to any of the consumer users just makes your offering look complicated, confusing, overwhelming, and overly expensive.
Imagine having to set up your laptop or desktop computer from scratch each time you want to use it, as if you just took it out of the box. You want to check your email? Sorry, first you’ll have to update the operating system, install a mail application, establish an email account, and set up your preferences for that tool!
So, what should you show in your demos in place of Setup Mode?
Daily Use Mode
Daily Use Mode is what most users do in their day-to-day work. Executives consume reports and examine dashboards to view projects and KPIs’ status, uncover trends, explore opportunities, and investigate exceptions. Middle and front-line managers do similar activities, plus they identify problems and assign resources to tasks. And individual contributors execute predefined workflows, often over and over.
Those activities are what comprise daily use for these consumer users. Interestingly, they consume the results of Setup Mode!
Examples of Setup Mode including creating a dashboard, report, or workflow: something that is typically done only once for that specific dashboard, report, or workflow. Daily Use Mode is when users consume this previously created dashboard, report, or workflow in their day-to-day work, which might happen multiple times per day, or daily, weekly, monthly or on some other cadence. Create once, consume many.
Traditional demos squander far too much time (and audience attention) in Setup Mode showing how to build these dashboards, reports, and workflows, versus showing how these deliverables can be easily consumed.
How can you move your mindset from Setup Mode to Daily Use Mode for your demos? Think about what you and your prospects do on Monday morning!
Monday Morning
It’s Monday morning and you’ve just arrived in your office. What’s the first thing you do?
- Build a brand-new dashboard, report or workflow
- Set up your user account and preferences for software you already use everyday
- Configure the options for another software tool you use everyday
- Browse your web favorites and bookmarks
- Check your email
For most people and for consumer users in particular, the answers are as follows:
- Nope
- Nope
- Nope
- Likely
- Highly likely
What do you do when you start your business day on Monday morning? What do your prospects do when they start their business days on Monday morning with respect to your software? These are the activities that are most important for your demos!
Show the executives the richness and ease of accessing the dashboards and reports they need to manage their businesses. Present how middle managers can identify problems and manage resources using similar deliverables and brief workflows. Show the individual contributors how much more crisply and effectively their workflows run using your tools.
A moment ago, I noted that checking email on Monday morning is highly likely for nearly all users. This suggests an idea!
Start Your Demo in Email?
Oh, yes!
What do most people do when they arrive at their desks on Monday morning? They check email. (Yes, and some browse their favorites/bookmarked websites first, and then they check their email!)
So, consider starting the Daily Use Mode portion(s) of your demos in email, if possible.
For example, start by saying, “It’s Monday morning and you’ve just arrived in your office…” You then show an “unopened” message, open it to reveal a link, then click the link to launch a browser that takes the user to the dashboard, report, or appropriate portion of a workflow. The user then consumes the deliverable or enters an associated process in accord with what your software enables.
That’s the way most people start their day: Why not map to it?
Additionally, note that this demo clickstream is typically very short, perhaps just a couple of clicks. Hooray! You’ve just made your software look really easy to use!
For Great Demo! practitioners, the above pathway of starting in email and proceeding to the dashboard, report, or workflow element is a truly terrific “Do It” pathway, leading crisply back to a compelling “Illustration.” Delightful!
Are there other tips to make your software look easy to use?
New vs Save As
How many times have you seen someone build a new dashboard or process flow from scratch, step by step? How many times have you done this in a demo?
I’m always amazed to see three sets of mistakes:
- Showing all the options and possibilities, which makes the process look complicated and only suitable for experts
- Similarly, this extended pathway makes the effort take much longer than necessary
- The presenter often never finishes the project, leaving you without a vision of the deliverable or its value!
While not strictly Setup Mode, this unproductive demo pathway is presented frequently. Amazingly, it is often highlighted by vendors in their demos!
Most of us rarely start from scratch, particularly if good examples already exist. For instance, how often do you open an existing document, spreadsheet, or other entity, and choose “Save As”? Your next steps are often simple edits to the existing entity.
Doing this in your demos makes your software appear much easier to use than if you started with a blank page. “Save As” is a terrific strategy!
Best Practices
Many vendors tout how their software can be easily configured vs requiring extensive (and often expensive) customization. This is wonderful and can be an enormous advantage. However, many vendors also show all the nuances of their extensive configuration capabilities early in their demos, which, as we have seen, is out of alignment with their prospects’ interests.
The moral? Show Daily Use Mode first; show Setup Mode items only if requested by your prospect (and you may want to park these requests to address them towards the end of your demo meeting). Additionally, many or most Setup Mode questions can be answered verbally, without ever moving your mouse.
But wait, there’s more! Which prospect team members will be making the buying decision, and how important is their opinion?
- Executives and senior management: extremely high and have the authority to buy
- Middle and front-line managers: may recommend purchasing, but often do not have the authority to buy
- Individual contributors: may provide an opinion that is considered in the decision-making process
- System administrators: may also contribute an opinion
Bonus moral? Satisfy your audience constituents in the following order:
- Executives and senior management
- Middle and front-line managers
- Individual contributors
- System administrators
Put the Setup Mode portions of your demos “behind your back,” metaphorically. Have answers ready for Setup Mode questions (or park them for later).
Traditional vs Great Demo!
“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”
– Winston Churchill
Vendors’ traditional demos follow an ill-conceived “logical progression,” showing how to configure the system, then set up forms, reports, dashboards, templates, workflows and alerts, and then specify those workflows in gory detail. These vendors often struggle, in the final few minutes of their demos, to cram in showing the reports, dashboards, and other deliverables actually desired by their prospects.
What’s the result? Demos that are perceived by prospects as complicated, confusing, overwhelming, and expensive.
Guidance? Turn your traditional demos upside down: That’s the Great Demo! methodology, validated in studies of thousands of demos!
Your results will be crisper, aligned, surprisingly compelling demos that map delightfully to audience interests, delivered in accord with audience authority and interest.
How much Setup Mode are you showing in your current demos?
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