This past Friday, Ronda and I had the opportunity to demo a product we’ve been working on for the past couple of months. Our contact is a potential future buyer, and we thought it important to bring them in to the conversation while the application was still in the early stages. Here are four observations and lessons we learned from our conversation.
We concluded early on that the most important thing we could do was to let our contact know exactly what to expect. The product is currently pre-alpha, so we had to make sure they expected to see the occasional broken page and very little “chrome”.
When a page or a flow didn’t work quite right or when something went awry, it was no big deal. If we hadn’t set the expectations early on, our contact might have expected far more than what we were able to deliver. Consider all the movies you went to see which failed to live up to the laurels the public had lavished upon them.
We prefer to under-promise and over-deliver, rather than the other way around.
As you take your contact through the demo, make sure to share the ideas you have for the future of the product. This serves three purposes: 1) The contact - if the contact is knowledgeable about the business for which you are building a product - can let you know ahead of time if it is worthwhile or not; 2) If the ideas are “worthwhile” they can generate excitement for the product; 3) By involving your contact in the process, commitment to your project can be established and built upon.
During yesterday’s demo, I mentioned what I thought was a small feature that we were planning to add to the system: sorting by distance from a zip code. The contact got really excited and shared with us that no other vendor had thought to add it, and that it would be a very welcome feature. If I hadn’t shared our future plans, I wouldn’t have found out about that little advantage.
You know your product, you’re heavily invested into it, and you think it’s going to change the way people do business, or work, or play, or something else. And if the contact would just shut up for two seconds, you could show them that your product is what they need. Whoops.
I made this mistake yesterday. There was a lot I wanted to show and a limited amount of time to show it. If it wasn’t for Ronda slowing me down, I would have likely steamrolled over our contact and lost them forever. Instead, Ronda kept asking questions, listened to what our contact had to say, and then scheduled another meeting in a couple months like it was the obvious thing to do.
Regardless of how you see it, when you demo a product, you’re selling something. And in order to make a sale, you have to meet the needs of the party being sold to. But how will you know what their needs are if you won’t be quiet and listen?
I’m very passionate about what we are building and I can talk for some time about the product, the industry, my experiences, and my ideas. But because I’m so close to the product, I don’t always build the necessary bridges to take people from where they are to where I am. That’s why you have a spokesperson.
Your spokesperson needs to be someone who is okay taking a winding journey across many bridges in order reach a final destination. They need to be patient and able to listen, and they need to be able to put themselves in the shoes of the other person. If you’re really lucky, they’ll know how to keep you from speaking too much, and navigate around mistakes you might have made while you spoke (yes, there is a reason for this last sentence.)
At Phalanx, we have Ronda Mullen. She has years of experience in sales, education, and instruction; she’s the perfect spokesperson.
In Agile development, we use the term “retrospective” to refer to that time which we take to look back on our previous actions to see what went right, what went wrong, and how we can learn from it. Our first demo was a remarkably positive experience, but there are still opportunities to learn. As we continue to do retrospectives, we’ll continue to share what we are learning. After all, why learn something if you aren’t going to share?