Peter Cohan is the founder of “The Second Derivative” and “Great Demo!” He helps software organizations achieve their sales and marketing objectives by making their demos crisp, compelling, and surprisingly effective. He has enjoyed roles in technical and product marketing, marketing management, sales and sales management, and senior management. In his most recent role prior to The Second Derivative, Peter founded a business unit in an organization and grew the business from an empty spreadsheet into a $30 million operation.  

Peter has experience as an individual contributor, manager and C-level team member in marketing, sales, and business development.  He has also been and continues to be, a customer.

• Most software demonstrations miss the mark by a mile. The main problem is that demonstrations are built to highlight every feature of the software. Effectively, this fails to convince the target audience, because every viewer has a specific need that ought to be satisfied. In other words, demos need to be tailored for the person and the level they are aimed at. A CXO does not need to understand all the basic features; rather the top level dashboard, analytics and financial features should be explained to them.  

• In his book “great Demo”, Peter Cohan shows how to create compelling demos for every level in the organization, and how to keep them crisp and clean. A great demo presents exactly what the customer needs to see— no more, no less. So when presenting to a C-level person, the demo should not be moe than 6 minutes. It should demonstrate only a few key dashboards, a few key reports, and that’s it— no more. 
• On the other hand, for managers, the demo may run into 20 minutes, and also include how they may assign tasks to team members. For staff the demos could get into details and run into an hour or more, explaining every feature, because they would need to see not only how it solves their problem, but also how they would use it on a day to day basis.

These and more insights in this new episode of Bits About Books with Peter Cohan. 

Run time – 53.53 mins.