Malcom Gladwell makes the case for a ten thousand hour path to expertise in his book Outliers.
Simple math tells me, with forty hour weeks, fifty weeks a year, you’ll reach that plateau in five years.
We’re in Pre-Sales. We haven’t got five years. We’ve got until the demo date, likely set by the sales rep.*
What can we do with one hundred hours? Invest it wisely. Now go!
*With an eye towards return-flight scheduling convenience.
And poorly placed pronouns are puzzling.
We owe it to our audiences to be clear, not confusing.
Clear:
When we start using Three Letter Acronyms (TLAs) and pronouns because we assume the audience knows what the TLAs mean or because we’re too rushed to type or speak the words out, we risk confusing them.
Confusing:
When we start using TLAs and pronouns because we assume the they know what they mean or because we’re too rushed to type or speak them, we risk confusing them.
We learn sequentially, getting stuck on what we don’t understand until we resolve that problem. If your audience is still working out what you’ve said and you’ve gone down the road, they’ll abandon the journey.
This is when it all comes together.
I have 44 minutes, a cryptic spreadsheet of 40 requirements, a briefing, and some customer knowledge to work with.
I’m going to mix it all together with some eggs, a demo, and a fresh powerpoint and bake a demo cake.
This is fun!
The other day my laptop crashed and I lost about an hour’s work* I’d invested on a presentation.
But did I really lose anything?
What I lost was a draft. It took me roughly twenty minutes to recreate what I lost, and it flowed more smoothly. What was necessary in the endeavor was to think, prepare, and rehearse.
—
*This was a shock, as I have through the years developed a nervous “ctrl-s to save” habit with my left hand. How I went that long without saving is a mystery to me.
In any system, there’s an infinite range of detail to be explored and understood, from the micro details of individuals screens, fields, and usability quirks to the macro concepts of departmental functions, business processes and strategic initiatives.
Our challenge is to set the depth of focus that best communicates to our audience. We need to meet them where they are and provide painless navigation down into the details. We need to pull them out of the weeds and sum those details back into high level value.
It might take a moment to find that focus for an audience, but it’s imperative they come away with what they need. So adjust your zoom until they can see clearly.
It’s not about what you want to say, it’s about what they need to hear.
“What will you be demonstrating in the booth at the customer conference?”
Well, how can you know? Who is going to walk up? What will their needs be?
And so, before demonstrating generic solutions to generic problems, engage in discussions about their business, their challenges, their needs.
Between the two of you, on a blank sheet of paper, draw circles and lines expressing a conceptual solution with the myriad players and processes involved. Then demonstrate specific solutions to their problems, hitting the points meaningful to them.
In the past you could tear off the sheet and hand it to the patron as a keepsake but these days they’ll just snap a picture with their phone and walk on.
When all the preparation is done, when all the stories are prepared, when all the data is set for stunning execution, it’s still the prerogative of the key customer in the audience to say something like…
“I don’t need to see the whole day-in-the-life demo and how a user goes about creating this or that- I just have a few key questions.”
That’s his prerogative, and it’s an invitation to step up and play some tough one-on-one.
It’s just you and him. You’re ready. It’s what you’ve really been preparing for. Knock him out with all you’ve got.
Have you seen the documentary Helvetica? It starts as a history of the font, then turns into a thought provoking discussion on graphic design.
Graphic design matters- it is the aesthetic.
Look around. When you’re aware of good and bad graphic design you’ll notice:
Can you see graphic design (or lack of it) now?
Turn your attention to our domain, enterprise software. Graphic design seems an afterthought, limited to trim-work. Look at the solutions you present. They are basically:
An opportunity?
Enterprise applications are going mobile. Decent graphic design is built into platforms (It’s pretty hard to screw up an iPad user interface).
In a world of free creative tools, anyone can take a picture, anyone can record an album, anyone can self-publish a book. In the hands of graphic design professionals, working alongside architectural and process designers, enterprise software can be inherently appealing and useful. Even beautiful.
Our audiences are sensitive to the aesthetic. It means usability, which means adoption which means return on investment which means value. Decision makers will choose the more pleasing option over the more functional if they can see themselves using the pleasing option.
When I was first learning to drive, my mother advised me to consider the comfort of my passengers as I sped up, slowed down, and took the corners.
The same applies to presentations and software demonstrations:
No-one should spill their coffee when you’re behind the wheel. They’re out for a scenic drive, so be their chauffeur through your solutions.
I had a list of questions I expected in the demo and knew I wouldn’t be able to answer; questions about configuration of this and that, system architecture, product road-map, etc.
I shared the list during the dry run, asking who would take ownership for each in the meeting proper. This vetting of the list helped make sure we had the right people in the meeting, and that answering the questions was quick, helpful, and professional.
Someone asked where the questions came from. “I made them up.” Hilarity ensued. “Seriously. I think these are the questions they’ll have.”
We’re so programmed to solve problems, to score well on the test, that these were presumed a list of requirements- yet another homework assignment- from the customer. And by answering formal questions with the best answers, we’ll be picked.
No.
This list of questions was ours. It was necessary. It was the result of thinking about the customer’s situation and what they’ll want to know, how they’ll perceive the solutions, how they’ll attempt to grasp our something different from what they have today.
The questions aren’t requirements. The questions are the poking and prodding the customer will do to understand our message.