Ask HN: How to give product demos that don't suck?
I&#x27;ve been giving live demos and product walkthroughs for years—here are a few brief reflections and things I&#x27;ve learned:<p>1. It helps to be a good conversationalist. You can small-talk for as long as it takes to get everyone dialed in. You know when to pause and listen, you know how to answer multiple questions from multiple people one after the other, you remember to double-back on something someone asked earlier in the conversation and address that question at the right time.<p>2. People appreciate it when you speak quickly and clearly. You want to keep the conversation going. There is nothing worse than a slow, monotone speaker—someone who takes forever to get to the point.<p>3. How you&#x27;re connected to the meeting matters. In my experience, you want people on camera so that you can see faces. I much prefer meetings where there are multiple people in one room in an office, and my ugly mug is up on one big screen in front of them—it&#x27;s more fun and it&#x27;s easier to address the group. I&#x27;ve also found that when people are in the same room, they&#x27;ll hold each other accountable during the call, they&#x27;ll interrupt politely, they&#x27;ll ask each other for follow-up questions, etc.<p>4. I&#x27;ve never used a script, but once you&#x27;ve done hundreds of demos, you&#x27;ll find words and phrases that help move the demo forward from one feature to the next. I always ask the group at the start of the call how they want me to begin: Do you want a top to bottom overview? You want me to go deeper on one a specific use case and show you how the product can help? And, before I begin I let them know that I don&#x27;t have a sales pitch—I&#x27;ll tell them what the product is good at and where it falls short. It&#x27;s my job to make sure the product is a good fit for their business, and if it isn&#x27;t, I&#x27;ll let them know.<p>5. About the lack of sales pitch: I try to identify areas where the team needs to change the way they&#x27;re working. &quot;You are doing it this way, that&#x27;s silly, let me show you how to think about this differently, then let me show you how our product handles this scenario.&quot;<p>6. When someone explicitly <i>asks</i> for a sales pitch at the end of the call—and it does happen—I always reiterate that I don&#x27;t have a sales pitch, and I usually close with something like this:<p>&quot;Listen, I don&#x27;t have a sales pitch—truly, you have to pick the product that works best for you and I am happy to help you do that. If it&#x27;s not our product, no hard feelings, I&#x27;ll point you to the product that&#x27;s a better fit. But based on the conversation we just had, I think you folks would be a great fit and I&#x27;d love to work with you. That said, if you REALLY want a good reason to make the switch: I can promise that you&#x27;re not going to get someone on the phone like this anywhere else. You&#x27;re not going to have access to competent humans who can chat with your team to troubleshoot and help out—our support team is fucking fantastic. And at any point you need something, you get me. You&#x27;ve got my email, you&#x27;ve got my number, I&#x27;ll take care of you.&quot; I&#x27;ve been fortunate to work at companies with excellent support teams, and this is often one of the biggest differentiators and competitive advantages—I try to drive that home.<p>7. Use a separate browser window with a clean tab bar, silence your notifications, etc. Make sure as you&#x27;re moving between tabs, you don&#x27;t have any personal history visible, you don&#x27;t have any sensitive business information on screen, you get the idea. I&#x27;ve attended demos where the person presenting had family photos scattered on the desktop, there were open VRBO tabs on the screen, etc. When I join calls like this and someone shares a messy working environment, I think that person is a slob and they couldn&#x27;t be bothered to tidy up before presenting—it&#x27;s an automatic turnoff.<p>8. If you can, populate your demo account with a lot of test data. People want to see what the product will look like in use. Take time to set it up the same way someone in a particular vertical might use the product. If you have a robust reporting feature, you should have enough data in the demo environment to show off the reports. If you have a search feature, make sure you&#x27;ve got content to highlight search capabilities, yada yada.<p>9. Follow-up immediately after the call with any links, documentation, additional videos to watch, answers to questions you couldn&#x27;t address: &quot;Thanks for taking time to chat today! Here are some additional docs to read through, and in regard to your questions about XYZ, here&#x27;s the scoop...&quot;<p>Food for thought!