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	• Demonstrating to Win!: The Indispensable Guide for Demonstrating Software Robert Riefstahl Xlibris Corporation, 2000 - 268 pages average customer review:based on 16 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Good advice on demos, but methodology is dated

Riefstahl 's book is all about doing demos; what works and what doesn't for doing software demos in front of prospects. You won't find a lot about the overall sales process found in so many other books, just giving good demos and closely related information.

The author is analytic, but is able to explain ideas in plain language. The compelling value behind this book is Riefstahl 's real world experience giving lots of demos, in different settings, with a few different products he's sold. He urges us to not think of great software demos as a mysterious art, but rather as the result of good preparation and smart tactics.

A recurring theme, and indeed the unwritten theme of the book, is to build a "bridge" for your prospect to cross over from their world of comfort (usually no change) to the one you are presenting. Things seeming trivial or obvious to us as demonstrators can be confusing or offensive to a prospect. The author fills the book with practical ways to put yourself in the clients' place, then design and execute a demo to show why the customer should trust you across the bridge they are so uncertain about. It's all about the prospects' needs, not just features the sales person likes to show.

The chapter called "Demo Crime Files" is about 20% of the book. This detailed list of 28 "what not to do's" such as bad PowerPoint slides, arguing with the prospect, how to make a boring/irrelevant demo, etc. helps make the book well worth the price.

Another 20% of the book is on "Discovery". Throughout the book, Riefstahl stresses the need to perform a deep and thorough discovery of your prospects' business, personnel, etc. before designing and presenting the demo for the buyers. He has successfully used this approach, but this is a topic where I have to get off his bandwagon somewhat. I don't disagree that at least some discovery is necessary, but my limited experience has been that the Discovery methodology of this book may not be feasible. I just don't think many customers today will give as much access to key personnel (and especially not executives) as the author assumes. Prospects will invest some personnel time (with a vendor they don't know very well) on the phone and some in person, but not a lot in either case. Riefstahl offers some good guidelines on how to get the most out of discovery and how to pitch it so it won't seem like an imposition. It's very important to him, so I should probably be more open-minded, but I am skeptical. What he advocates as a sunk cost Discovery could otherwise be billable as pre-sales professional consulting - it's that detailed. I think Riefstahl is tech savvy and experienced enough to pull this off for his deals, but I'm not sure it's a feasible approach for most of us.

One other assumption made is that the demo is very important to the prospect so they will give it a lot of their time. One and two day demonstrations just don't seem to happen anymore as far as I can tell, but the book is written as if they are common. In fairness to the author, I think the business climate has changed for software evaluation since this book was written. Today, the demo (especially an initial one) is just one more meeting in a process the prospects' key personnel have to work through (with multiple vendors) while trying to get their regular job done at the same time. My goal is for a product demo to be compelling enough to get a lot more of their time after they've first seen it; I can't assume this before they have.

I like the book and being relatively new to the sales field (as a tech sales engineer doing demos), I got quite a bit from it. There are several take-aways I can definitely improve upon. The book is an easy read and has a good index. I'm tempted to give it a higher rating, but I can't because of the assumptions about the initial demo being so long and important to the prospect (it's often not the case) and the access/skill required to do the full Discovery Riefstahl insists is vital. These assumptions are woven throughout the book and its method. Nevertheless, I have benefited from the book.

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Great Book! Buy it if You Are Not My Competitor!

I found many of my own experiences mirrored by this book. I learned quite a lot from reading it. See our UNBIASED info
on Business Software Selection at Excelco.com.

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Just Buy It

If you sell software, buy this book and read it, chew it up and digest it. As the other reviews say, this book is practical. Not some ivory tower theory on how to sell, it tells you exactly what to do and not to do. The margins in my copy are filled with notes. The front and back covers have to do checklists of ideas that I thought of while reading that I want to put into practice. Selling software is like no other type of selling. This book is the seminal work on the subject.

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The scenes you are about to read are TRUE!

After 17 years in the business of selling and demonstrating complex software solutions, I have never found a better, more practical book about both the art and science of the demonstration!

Your demos are the best, but they can be better

I found the way to do it much better. This book is really useful for my job: it helps me identify my own errors and to prepare my meetings with prospects much properly, not just "showing" but "solving". Read it !!

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