The Art of Demoing – Lessons Learned

What is the best way to demo something to potential customers? Since our company founding, we’ve tried everything from death by PowerPoint presentations to slightly less morbid slide shows and from simple webinars to custom built getting started guides. Finding what works for us has been an adventure and a series of lessons-learned  in disguise.

The best trait of a startup is its natural tendency to always find the path of least resistance. And let’s be honest, that usually means being speedy, thrifty, and constantly aware of how to best maximize output for the minimal amount of input. To convince potential customers on the value of our product, on the simplicity of settings things up, and on our vision for the future, we needed to experiment with different methods of demoing.

Since reaching out to people via cold emails in our earlier days to actively receiving customer emails during our now rapid growth, demoing has always been, and always will be, a core part of our support offering. Looking back, we were able to pinpoint several patterns:

Phase 1 – Familiarity

Everyone knows what PowerPoint is. We chose PowerPoint because it was free, easy to make, quick, required no engineering resources, and anyone can open a PowerPoint presentation. During our early days, we were willing to sacrifice polish and glitter for these benefits.

Phase 2 – Length

Boredom kills. We realized that while people were appreciative of our willingness to walk them through a PowerPoint driven demo, it was simply too long and too boring. The people we talked to didn’t mind the PowerPoint medium as much as we had originally expected. Being a startup probably helped quite a bit. Based on feedback, we shortened the presentation quite a bit and turned it into a PDF file.

Phase 3 – Accessibility

Downloading attachments suck! I can’t believe we didn’t think of this earlier. So we signed up for a free account at SlideRocket and uploaded our demo. We also finally took a tiny bit of engineering resources to build a dedicated page for hosting our slideshow to make it even more accessible. This proved to be a success and the uptake for hopping on the phone to chat rose dramatically. Customers found sharing a link easier than forwarding around a PowerPoint presentation or a PDF file. Duh.

Phase 4 – Polish

As our pitch and proposition matured, so did our product. We understood what customers were looking for, what issues needed to be addresses, and what direction we were headed in. This meant that demoing needed to take on a different shape and function. We sat down, talked through what customers needed, what results we wanted, and started hacking our first “Getting Started” guide. Since finding the ability to convince potential customers to sign up, we’ve diverted our attention to a) introducing Reamaze functionality and b) prompting customers to take actions simultaneously. Our experiences in the past led us to believe that not only do customers want to “Get Started”, they also want a solid lay of the land before diving in.

Phase 5 – Experience

Our “Getting Started” approach has been working out wonderfully. Confused customers are at an all time low and we’re getting compliments for the simplicity. But what about hesitant customers who are still having trouble grasping the concept? As someone who understands the need to kick the tires before actually buying it, I can totally relate. These customers needed to experience Reamaze. I took half a day to create a Reamaze mock account under the company name: Daffy Widgets. This truly interactive experience demonstrates every single Reamaze functionality using real user emails, real Twitter accounts, real Facebook profiles, and even a real YouTube channel. The goal is to send potential customers the staff login credentials, have them send and receive messages, and truly experience every inch of Reamaze as a small business. You can access contact our demo account at http://democentral.reamaze.com/admin, find Daffy Widgets on Twitter @DaffyWidgets, like the page here, and look through the demo knowledge base at http://democentral.reamaze.com.

Demoing has been one of our most effective ways to convince businesses that we are indeed the right solution for them. The combination of interactive guides and tangible experiences is working for us and we will continue to iterate. It also helps that we get to work with small businesses of shapes and sizes. Hearing their concerns, questions, and feedback during a demo run is just about the best way to maximize returns. We are truly grateful to be serving this market segment.