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Telling Your Story - How to Develop Engaging Corporate Presentations, Product Demonstrations and Support Tools
By Sarah Bellrichard, Chief Information Architect - Busse Design USA
May 2003
Do your potential customers have difficulty understanding what your product does, how it works or how and why it solves a pressing business need? Or are your existing customers having problems using your products and services and therefore flooding your call centers with routine questions? An online demonstration or tutorial can help! Whether the aim is to help you improve your sales results or to reduce support calls, an online demonstration or tutorial can successfully sell or train potential and existing customers without tapping heavily into your internal resources. Some key advantages are:
- Reduced sales cycles
- Reduced call volume to customer support centers
- Increased cost savings for sales and support departments
- Reasonable development costs
This means that with a single initial investment, you can increase sales, reduce call volumes and effectively circulate your brand, resulting in significant ROI for an invaluable member of your sales or support teams.
What's in a Name?
An online demo can take on different shapes and augment a variety of sales, marketing and training efforts, depending on your individual business needs. Some of the most effective incarnations include:
- Sales Presentation — A sales demo can give viewers what is commonly called the "elevator pitch" - a 2-3 minute summary of what your company's services and/or solutions are and why they are valuable.
- Product Demonstration — The product demo can provide a guided tour of a product's features and functionality or it can actually interface with the product itself to create a controlled environment in which viewers give the product a test drive.
- Wizards & Tutorials — Online demos can also function as tutorials or task wizards for existing customers who need additional information and instructions.
Demos can be developed to accommodate "on the fly" modifications, allowing sales reps or trainers to customize their presentations for specific audiences. The result is something much more visually engaging than a Power Point slideshow.
And demos don't even have to be "online" — they can be delivered to potential and existing clients on CDs and via email. They can live within your sales team's laptops or travel as part of your traveling roadshow for industry conferences, exhibitions and expos.
Can It Tell The Story?
So we know that every product, service or solution has story. And some stories are pretty straightforward but, as technology advances, some stories become increasingly difficult to tell. Who hasn't run into a product that somehow defies a simple explanation? Sometimes the language most easily used to describe a product is highly technical and difficult for a non-technical decision maker to understand. Sometimes just words alone leave potential clients confused about how a particular product or service streamlines a process or results in cost savings.
An online demonstration has the advantage of pairing words with animated illustrations. Instead of your sales rep having to turn into a human pretzel trying to explain how Widget ABC can dramatically increase network stability or how Manufacturing Gizmo XYZ reduces work duplication on the production line, an online demo can provide a visual metaphor depicting the identified problem and how your product or service provides a solution. Likewise, this type of resource can help your existing users understand and process the steps needed to complete their tasks more quickly and effectively. Blending the words with the pictures also typically has the effect of streamlining your message so that it stays concise and easy to understand without confusing the viewer.
View Example - RouteScience: Sales Presentation
When Does It Sleep?
One of the most valuable features of online sales presentations, product demonstrations, and web-based tutorials is that they truly never sleep. As long as your ISP is still in business and your servers are up, potential customers can have on-demand access to a tour of how your product works or why your services are valuable. More importantly, this tool can simply explain to them how your offering can save them money and make their work lives easier. What's even better is how patient online demos are. They are more than willing to tell the same story over and over until someone understands it, they never get frustrated, and they are consistently direct and concise. Always awake and always aiming to please — the online demo.
How Much Does It Cost?
Given that this tool will work for you around the clock, will never complain and will clearly and concisely evangelize the benefits of your products and services, the one-time investment for demo development can carry with it a healthy return on investment. The cost of developing an online demo can vary based on a variety of factors. Demo length, complexity of animation sequences, use of professional voiceover talent as well as integration points with transaction engines or other external applications and products. These are all elements that affect development cost and timeline, but by creating an evergreen overview of your services or solutions, even the most complex creation can pay for itself (and more) very quickly.
What About My Existing Collateral?
Because online demos are intended to support your sales efforts and increase visibility for your products and services, it is important that the demo support your brand and messaging by extending the feel of your existing collateral. The demo should share a consistent voice with the company web site, corporate letterhead and business cards, brochures and other advertising. The result should be an addition to a well-crafted collection that positions your products and services with a unified message that is clearly understood. This also allows designers to easily leverage existing imagery and branding from other pieces of collateral for integration within the demo. This means that creating a demo doesn't mean having to redesign all of your existing assets; rather, you are creating a powerful tool that can neatly fit into your existing suite of sales, advertising, or training utilities.
View Example - Peribit Networks: Sales Presentation
Reduced Sales Cycle? Increased Cost Savings?
Since they are such excellent storytellers, online demos can help salespeople get face-to-face appointments faster because potential clients and customers can easily understand what your company offers and determine if there is a need and/or fit after a quick viewing. It may take a sales person 10-30 minutes to adequately explain the features and benefits of your products or service; an online demo can often successfully deliver the same message in 2-3 minutes.
It can also assist people who influence the internal decision-makers within the companies to which you are pitching your products or service. If an IT manager can show his or her VP of Information Technology what your product does in 2 minutes and really make them understand how your offerings could be of value in addressing their internal needs, it can accelerate the decision making process and reduce the number of in-person visits for your sales team. In longer sales cycles, online demos can again save time and money by substituting demo presentations (sales-guided or self-guided) for initial face-to-face visits by your sales team.
So what are you waiting for? Get that active and enthusiastic salesperson or trainer working for you today.
Additional Tips & Tricks
- Avoid vague messaging or unclear concepts. Have you ever watched a commercial that left you confused about the company's purpose or didn't clearly relate to the product's function? Unless you're Coca-Cola and all you have to do is flash a logo to explain your product, be sure that your imagery, sounds and messaging clearly focus the user on what your products and services actually are.
- Use voiceover to reinforce the message. Having a voice that fits the mood of your demo's imagery and accompanying sound effects or music can have a significant positive impact on the viewer's understanding of the message you are trying to deliver.
- Beware of confusing navigation or difficult to use controls. Users should be able to intuitively view and navigate your online demo just as easily as they would your web site.
View Example of Difficult to Use/Understand Controls (Updated: this URL has been extracted from the original website): While this demo supports the Microsoft brand nicely and the graphic design and voiceover are engaging, there is a significant lack of actionable hints or directions on how to use the left-hand navigation controls to continue moving through the demo.
- Steer clear of over-animation. While imagery and animation can help to better explain your products and services, too much of good thing can overwhelm the viewer and result in a diluted message. Be sure that animation, sound or voiceover and copy are balanced to maximize the effect of each and deliver an engaging, easy-to-follow presentation to your viewers.
View Example of Over-Animation: In this example, the introductory text animation is slow and difficult to read. The text animations continue for such a long time (without any background sound or music to otherwise engage the user) that users may lose interest before they get to the content!
- Engage your users at all times. Viewers sitting and waiting for a file to download will often times lose patience and move on, particularly for sales and product demonstrations. If your online demo requires animations or sound to load before it can run, be creative with your "download" sequence. Downloading should be largely transparent to the user so start your demo with low-impact messaging or animation that will keep the viewer engaged for 5-15 seconds while all the necessary components of your demo load.
View Example of Lost Opportunity(Updated: this URL has been extracted from the original website):This demo needs more interactivity and enthusiasm. Since it is only used for an introductory animation, the Flash portion seems like an unnecessary extra. The jump to a set of HTML slideshow-like pages is a bit awkward and has the potential to confuse users expecting a single, streamlined product demonstration/explanation.
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