How to build and deliver compelling tech demos

Ron: That was a very, very nice way of not directly pointing out grey that I'm beard, I should have more, but my family takes good care of it. So for those who have just joined, I've already said this, but you're going to see this QR code twice, once the beginning, once the end. The intention is that you can take the deck and review it later, look at some of this stuff, share it with your team. So feel free to do that. Also, this is going to be about two thirds lecture, one third discussion questions. Please pop into the question at any time you want to keep this as interactive as we can, but I'm taking what is about a week's worth of training, trying to condense it down into hour. So there's a lot of information. Again, you can take the slides home with you. Hopefully those helpful and this is a jumping off point for you to go and learn more.

If any of you want to be a little bit more interactive, think about a product feature or a feature set. Be your whole product or a problem, something that you might want to do a demo around. My recommendation is to keep it simple. One thing would be just to really focus in and then as we're going through this, either in your notes or your computer or just in your own head, because simplicity is key here. Just be thinking through it and then there'll be time of giving. You have questions if anybody has questions, specifically what they're thinking about. Sound good? Shall we begin?

Okay, so this is non-ag, one of the two non-ag magic tricks I talked about. Now this kid's actually doing a really good job and the reason that he's doing a good job is not the thing because everybody's seeing that unless you're three years old, that doesn't fool you. But if you'll notice little things like the way he's kind of bouncing his hands before he does it, that actually lends something to it. The camera zoom. Of course if you have the magic video editing, that helps a lot too. Really good stuff. This one is probably because it takes a bit tip for anyone who wants to practise whichever hand is in back, tilt those fingers forward and then as you start to curl, pull it back. Good stuff, good stuff. Okay, I am really, really hopeful that over today and tomorrow I see some people doing this around. First one won't be cool because everyone knows that, but this one's really cool. So hopefully we see some people doing that around. And again, you got the slides, you can come study.

Okay, so what in the world does this have to do with? The point here is that a good demo is magic. Now, from a very self-serving perspective, a magic demo is going to help you achieve whatever metrics. We all have different ones as we learned this morning, right? Whatever metrics you have. But the key thing that I think is probably the most important part of a good demo is that last one, the ability to maximise content retention. Retention is the key word, and we're going to come back to that theme over and over again. You can give an amazing demo and you can wow people and they can have such a fantastic time and say, that was an amazing demo. And then walk away and it's going, what was that thing? I don't remember. It was about, it was cool though. Those guys have cool stuff.

What does it do? How's it going to help me? I dunno. Should we buy the thing? Maybe go talk to the, so the question is how do you do this? How do you become a better storyteller? How do you get more with less IE, more results with less effort? That's what this whole concept is about. Most of 70, 80%, 90%, 99% of what you're going to see today, that's the bad news. The good news is the real secret isn't the stuff you know how to do. Everything. Talk about the real secret is how you put the pieces together and the right structure that techniques, because the magic is the result of preparation, experience, and technique. Preparation is just you being ready. I can't help you with that experience. It's time to get product, your community time in the field. I can't help you with that technique. Technique I can help you with. So that's what we're mostly going to focus on here.

Technique. What does that mean? Where does technique come from? What's his stuff? This is Ron Guy. Okay, I mentioned this earlier. This is not from me. This is not my brainchild. I just ripped off really smart people and I'm just sharing it with you because we're a community. But all of this stuff is based in human psychology. The way people learn, the way people remember information, we can actually see your brain a little bit. It's no test why people pay attention. How do you get past their filters? And most of this comes from this book, which is called Demonstrating to Win in Sales Engineering Circles. This is kind of like a classic. It's from a company called two, the number two win exclamation who does training for demo and discovery and other things, very sales focused. But the good news is it doesn't really matter because if you focus on the basic things and you take these very, very simple techniques and you use 'em properly, it works really, really well. So again, you don't have to believe me because it's not from me and there's lots of people who are doing this. So what about me? Why am I here and why am I talking to you about this and why should you come even consider possibly listening to me other than hopefully learning something? I have a theory. I come from a varied background we're going to see in a minute, and I spent some time doing solutions, architecture, sales, engineering, working with salespeople.

DevRel as we're talking about today is relatively different about give or take, 15 years. Sales engineering as we know it today is about 70 years old at least maybe slightly older depending on how you think about it. So we can take some of the stuff like we were talking about this morning from other departments and other organisations and pull them in and make them applicable for Depro. So we're going to steal how to do demos from sales engineering there. If anyone cares. That is my LinkedIn profile if you want to find me on LinkedIn or grumble or complain, if you want to go through and see the dates and try and calculate how old I am. Thank you, you're welcome to do that. But the key here is that through my career I've had this kind of organic learning. So I started off, spent a lot of time as a developer, so I'm sure a lot of us do.

Then I moved into that role as a solutions architect, sales engineer, worked in the field, worked for a large company with a number of product suites and a lot of crazy different things we were selling. Worked with very large organisations like Whole Foods, Tyson Foods, ConAgra, Nestle, department of Defence, a number of colleges all across the board, millions and millions of dollars worth of deals that I helped land. I can't take the credit, but I think a little bit From there I moved into a role as a principal solutions architect is kind of a lead on the team and then actually took over managing the demo team, which built the demos for the entire team and that's when I started not only working on teaching and training some of these things, but codifying those in those demo assets in the sales assets that we were creating.

And mother of all demos, anybody unfamiliar with mother of all demos? Good. We'll get there in a sec. Basically when our company was going and presenting to the analysts like Gartner and Forrester and those folks, I had the fun job of trying to figure out how to take our entire functionality of our full platform squeezed into an hour and a half story that shows them how we can do everything that they think we should be able to do to score highly in the quadrant or wave whatever they're doing and then coordinate with marketing and sales and all those other people. Very fun challenge. From there, I moved into director of technical marketing and now director of developer success head of DevRel here at. So hopefully that lets you know that at least I kind of know what, okay, sidebar, mother of all demos. Very, very sad that more people don't know about this, but more people too. I'd like you to just quickly look at this list that was in this demo, mouse gooey word processing, real-time editing, video conferencing, dynamic file management, context sensitive help input devices that were experimental that don't exist anymore, and then look at the date right there.

Very impressive. It's called the mother of all demos for a reason because it blew everybody's minds about what could possibly be done and it took another 40, 45 years to see some of this stuff happen. So this is just a link to Wikipedia, don't worry about it. You can check it out if you want. You should know about the concept of the mother of all dentals, what it was, where it was. If you want to go watch the video on YouTube, highly recommended. It's kind of the citizen. Okay, we haven't even talked about what we're going to go through all this time building up and me trying to explain why you should trust me. I didn't say trust me because you shouldn't trust people to say trust me. So this is basically the structure that we're going to go through. We're going to talk about limbic opening, what that is, why that's important, so which is a technique that you can use to help you identify the key points that you're trying to get across and what's actually going to be valuable.

Tell tell personal favourite value closing and then how all of these pieces are put together into a demo. So we'll jump straight in, talk about limbic open. The world is even crazier now and noisier than it was 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, and I don't think it's going to change. And so everybody's trying to figure out how do I break through? And even in a situation like this where we have people here that are actually hopefully intending to pay attention, keeping their attention and trying to figure out how can I connect with people, which I got to say doing presentations live is so much more fun than doing virtually looking at a bunch of names with blanks and you can't tell if I love the nodding yes, we all agree, hands up some of us, not all of us. It's okay.

So I told you there'd be a brain slide. This is the brain slide, the limbic system. This is why it's called the limbic opener. The limbic system is part of the brain that's primarily responsible for regulating emotion. It helps to deal with memory and writing the memory's long-term storage as well as the things that we tie into. We're being stimulated and with learning. Again, not me, WebMD bar authority. So the point of the limbic opening is to incite inspiration is to bring pleasure or curiosity or interest information keeping people engaged. You want to reach people on an emotional level. So does anybody remember my limbic opening for this presentation? Come on guys, it was like two minutes ago because that was interesting. It got your attention, now you're thinking about it and I tied that into the beginning. A limbic opening is what you do to grab people's attention.

Some people call it clickbait. That is a limbic opening and just be careful how you use it. So human beings, the way we're built and the way that we live in this world is that we respond to things in the world. Man, these transitions are so slow. I'm just going to go through all these are some of the things you can use to get that attention, and once you have that attention, your job is to hold it. That comes down to presentation skills, that comes down to your ability to actually be a good speaker. That comes down to understanding your audience. There's a lot to go here, but you can make the easy choice, which is to do something flashy and bold and get attention and then immediately switch over to being boring or unrelated to what you're doing. It'll help a little probably better than not, but ultimately you want that continuity. So you want to take something unexpected, something that grabs people's attention. Sometimes people will take a opinionated statement that maybe not everyone agrees with or some fact that you didn't realise or understand. I like humour. That's one of the things that I like to lean into.

And then we've got all of these slides. What's on here? I was wrong. I did have a demo. Look at that. That's why you can trust it.

So that was just a quick overview. We're going to go through these really fast so I have a lot of time of the limbic opening. So you want to disrupt people's thought process. You want to actually kind of jar them out. They're stupid because thinking about 20 different things at the same time, you want get them engaged and tied in. Just like I just reconnected over here with Robert because I remembered that he said something and that's why in person is so lovely. Okay, that's a limb. We can cross that one off the list. Next is, so what is anybody familiar with what this is referencing other than just maybe being young and bored or old and bored? So what is this thing? I used to have one of my managers when I was in pre-sales, really great guy, really awesome. His whole thing was so what?

Like, oh hey, yeah, Jacob, we're talking to so-and-so. It sounds like it's a really good fit and I think this product's going to be just what they need and I'm putting a demo together. So what do you mean? Why should they care, Ron? Why should they listen to you? What's going to make them actually consider buying a product? Well, because they should. No, no, you need to. So what? You need to figure out what is the pain? What is the problem that people have? What is the issue that's going to get them to listen and pay attention? So as an example, here's something that I might use as a problem at App Smith. Deploying and maintaining custom apps is a brittle process that requires specific setup and maintenance in its own. Now I put it on this slide trying to make it pretty tight, but in an actual conversation, that's something that I would be talking about.

Has anyone here ever had a problem trying to deploy an app, particularly with dependency hell or when you don't have the right version of yarn because somebody just updated something, right? Show of hands, anybody? Exactly right. Everyone's had that pain. So now that we understand what that pain is, then we can start talking about how does that impact your organisation and your team and how can maybe what we have help you right now people are paying attention to listing things, so benefits not features. I know we heard the opposite this morning, Joyce and I can have a discussion about that, but this is really what the so what means, right? The features that you have tell people what you can do, but it doesn't tell them anything about why they care. I can look at 20 different products in the same space and I can guarantee you 90% of the features were going to be either the same or I think they're the same, they're just written differently.

But that still doesn't tell me anything. But you start talking about the benefits of how this is going to help me. I don't need to understand all of the features. I don't have to figure out how is this going to be applied to me? People are lazy. Get it? I'm lazy too, right? So what I really love is that when somebody else makes it easy for me to do what I'm trying to do. So the idea is that you want to actually not just say, Hey, we got all this cool stuff. It's going to help you, right? You want to say, Hey, these are the problems I bet you have. Is that right? Do you have other problems? Cool, great with those problems, we can help you solve those and here's how we're going to help you do it, and these are the features that are going to do that, but you don't care.

So if we look back before when I was talking about the deployments, I might sum it up by saying App smith speeds up custom development time with simple one click deployments. No more wrestling with build tools, dependency issues get more done, less time. Now I mentioned the feature, we talked at the beginning, everyone should have a feature. They're thinking about the feature here would be one click deployments, but that's not really the star of the show. The star of the show is you get more done with less, you have less pain, you overcome that bitterness, the solution, the healing, right? The sack. So here's a technique and the technique is called five whys, and Jacob Love the so what he loved the five whys even more and the concept is very simple. You take whatever you're trying to do and you ask the question why? It doesn't have to be five times, it can be three or four.

So to use that same example, you have this problem, this feature or a position, you ask the question why and you're trying to drill deeper down so that you can find the value. It is really hard when you know your product so well to put yourself in the person's shoes. It is really hard to say, well this is obvious. Of course the one click deployment is amazing. That should be why you buy it, right? People are like, what the heck does that even mean? So this process is what we can use to drill down. So if we use this one click deployment, why one click deployment? Well, it makes app development faster. Why does it make app development faster? Because the process is often brittle. It requires a lot of time. Why does it require a lot of time? Why does it brittle? Well, the build process takes time.

You got to set up and manage and run it. It changes. Sometimes things change under underneath you. Why? Well, because the tooling and the dependency management requires efforts and tools and blah, blah, blah. This is basically the process I went through in my head when I was very quickly putting together the problem and the benefit that we saw earlier and it becomes a habitual thing. Again, some of you're probably doing this to some degree, whether you call it five why's or not, but when you're talking to other folks in your team, when you're talking to product marketing, when you're talking to sales, pull out the five why's always really helpful and it can also sometimes really be frustrating for people, which is just a benefit because sometimes people need to be frustrated. So what we want to start with the problem, we want to start with the pain that they have and how what you're doing is going to solve that pain and then we want to make it so simple, so clear. Here is your pain, here is your solution. Boom, nice and easy. Yes sir.

Speaker 2: Is it fair to also say don't assume that they understand the pain the same way that you're trying to communicate it? Very fair. That was a big takeaway for the wises for me, is I constantly preach like don't assume they already know anything. Don't assume that they are articulating the problem the same way that you are thinking about

Ron: The same way that you are, which is another reason why in person stuff is nice. You can actually validate that and you can call an audible and switch gears. It's like, okay, I thought this but it seems like this team thinks about it this way. Okay, great. I'm going to adjust tack. Good, really good point. Okay, next section is the tellhow tell and the tellhow tell kind of the core of this whole strategy and approach that we have and it's a really powerful tool. Anybody before we go to the next slide, which tells you what that is. Does anybody here have a thought about what Tels Hotel market reference? It's okay, don't be shy. Show don't tell. What's that? Show don't tell or yes, basically yes. Thank you. So show don't tell is tied up in this idea. We just take it one step further, but that is the core of it. Totally agree. So tell show somebody what you're going to show them. Show them what you said, you would tell them what you showed them. That's it. Tell show over and over and over again because remember we talked about how this entire thing is based on human psychology, it's based on how we do things. So again, for us, we're experts in our product. In theory we should be

And so we get it. We know like, oh yeah, we have this feature, we have this thing, we have this benefit. This is what it's going to do for you. The audience is just getting deluge with information. Some of it sticks and some of it doesn't tell. Show tell is how you increase retention and we talked about the beginning, the retention. Because what we're effectively doing here is we're building a scaffolding in their brain and a memory mapping for the information for where it's going to fit and how it's going to tie in and how all the pieces go together. Very, very simple. Very, very powerful. When I first learned this, I've been doing sales engineering solutions architecture for about a year and a half. It was a pretty good demo and the guy that we paid tonnes of money to got up and told us this and in my head I was like, what flipping bozo man, what kind of clown nuns tell hotel. Seriously, if I sit there and tell somebody I'm going to show 'em and then show 'em and tell them again it's going to take a million years, people are going to be bored. We're done here. Then I actually tried it and I was like, oh wow, the experts do know what they're talking about.

So this is that secret to retention. As I said, you're going to build the scaffolding in their mind. You're going to guide them to where you want them to go. And the cool thing about it, especially for folks that have a developer background, it's just loops. It's just recursion. So it's a Tellhow hotel, it's not a Tellhow hotel. You can take it down as many levels as you can get away with and it's going to continue to work, okay? Typically, I like to keep my demos 15, 20 minutes, 25. If you have to have a longer demo, then you should at least internally, when I was doing those hour and a half long demos, that was typically more like four or five demos that were just structured. So one led into the next, but I had those loops going through there.

Like I said, super, super simple. It sounds ridiculous, but it's really valuable and if you only remember one thing today, this is the one thing I hope you take away the Tellhow tell, and by the way, especially in a live environment, this the one thing, it's a great technique because you're going to have something if you don't remember anything else I said, but you remember this, I'm calling your attention, I'm sticking a pin in it. I've built a framework in your mind, I've given you all the pieces. I've reminded you of what that framework looks like. Here's the information and this one is highlighted. Boom. If that's all they get, then that's valuable. So this is my one thing, so hopefully everybody remembers tell, show, tell. Sound good? Awesome. Love it. Oh look, if you don't remember anything else, just to be clear, if anyone didn't know, you should remember Tellhow Tale.

That's good. Does everybody remember Tellhow Hotel? Yeah, I got one more slide that says, okay, so we talked about Tell Hotel. Now we're going to talk about value closing and I think you're starting to see how there's a pattern here, right? Like opening, we figure out how to structure things, we put it in some order and then we figure out how to have a nice closing, how to wrap things up. Everybody loves happily ever after. Even the biggest cynics among us and I could see some out there, love the happily ever after. So give people what they want, give 'em a fairytale ending. Okay, what does this mean? This means that you're going to make it really easy, so your value close is your opportunity to restate the value that you've already imparted, and the best part is you have the opportunity to do that in a way that goes back to the beginning so you can remind them of the pain that we started with.

Remember we talked about the pain of rid deployments? As you've seen through this demo, we have this one click deployment. It works really, really well here. You've seen how it's going to solve your problem. You guys agree that this could be helpful, right? Then you get the nodding heads, it's like awesome. Maybe we don't get the business win. Maybe they don't actually buy the product, but if you're doing a demo, you absolutely want the technical win. I want you to understand and agree that this will solve your problem. That's it. If I can do that, I've done my job. Whether or not you buy, go talk to a salesperson, right? I don't deal with that stuff. That's for them to do.

The other thing is that having gone through the demo, if you follow the structure well and you've done it well, you've earned the right to share valuable data. How many folks here have been in a presentation particularly with sales where slide number two or slide number three is the NASCAR slide with all the logos, they talk about all the numbers and the great things. That is a very important thing to do. It's very valuable. I'm not saying it shouldn't be at the beginning. What I'm saying is that if you're showing me this, you haven't earned the right for me to believe you yet. So sometimes it makes more sense to put some of your most compelling supporting data at the end, not always. Sometimes quotes from the customers stories, use cases, facts, numbers, metrics, really good juicy stuff that's going to make people just really set the hook that this is something and it's going to validate that.

Okay, so the value close is the closing of the circle. So ideally by the time you get to the end, just like any good story or film or play or song or anything that you create, there's a theme and you come back around and you have unity and you could have a create something ridiculous like something silly with some guys doing some hand tricks that look weird and then you just put Dr. Strange pictures up with magic and you say demos magic. It works right? It doesn't have to be great, but you want to tie back through the beginning if you can. If you can't, that's okay as well. This is also sometimes a last chance to delight or inspire or engage or get the attention of your audience, which can be super, super helpful, particularly if you've been dealing with people who maybe have fallen asleep.

You've got a mixed blend of group where there's some developers and there's some executives and there's some marketing people, and so now you're talking to one group and then the other start to fall asleep, so you go talk to them and then you're just spinning plates. This can be a really great way to kind of bring everybody back around again and again, if it's at the end, it's a reward, it's a treat. Look, you got this lovely little thing because you stuck around to the end, which is so great. The other part, this is technically a separate thing, but I'm folding it into one because I just want it to fit here. Call to action. You should always, always, always, I'm not going to say tell people what to do, but make friendly suggestions what they might consider doing that be useful to them. You should never just say, this is great, this is cool. How much did you like that mic drop amount? I mean you can do that if you want. I'm not your mom, but the idea is that when you get there, again, you've earned that, right? And the topic you're on, this would be where you do the like and subscribe or share this such and such or do this thing or check out this other tutorial on this if you want to dive deeper.

We had this concept, I don't know if we came up with it at AB Smith and de team, we talked about this idea of micro funnels. So this idea that every piece of content should actually be part of a small funnel, two sum bottom of the funnel thing. So if you have a video that should probably reference or tie into a tutorial, we should probably reference or tie into a template which is hopefully going to get you to actually get onto the product. So this is part of that thing constantly not pushing people but allowing them to go further with what you think they're interested in and hopefully a lot of this call to action is going to lead somebody to something that's going to be useful, like a bottom of the funnel piece template starter kit, sign up for something, fill out this form and I'll send you stickers.

Awesome. Okay. I will say this. This is where I think in DevRel we can learn from but also differentiate ourselves from some of our siblings in sales and marketing. We talk about CTA, it might be a little bit different than what they talk about. I personally believe that DevRel is about community. It's about helping people. Yes, we could use our product, but we want them to use our product because we honestly think it's valuable and useful and it's going to help 'em. So things that are going to be most useful for people. So we talked about the value closing and a really helpful thing. You've probably heard this phrase before. Begin with the end in mind. Really, really helpful as you're putting a demo together, and I can't speak for everybody. For me it's a very organic process changes and it evolves. I come up with something great once I kind of know where I want to go. I don't always end up there, but that's when I need to go back, close the loop and make sure all the pieces line up when we get there. Creative process. So let's put all of this stuff together. We're about halfway through, so I'd say we've probably got another 10 minutes or so slides and then we can have some conversations and we can talk about and ask questions. Sound good? So what does this all look like?

I have a very lovely little diagram I guess for you that kind of takes all these pieces and puts it together. You could consider this an outline for what a stereotypical demo would look like. Okay, it's Olympic opening. You set the agenda, which by the way is your first tell you do your demo, which is a series of tellhow tell loops. You talk about what you did with your closing agenda, which is your big tell, your final tell, and then you get to your value closing, which should tie back to your limbic opening and complete the circle and your CTA, which is associated with the value of closing, but I made it separate just because it kind of is. The great thing here is that this structure forces you to simplify. It forces you to, that's why the so what and the five why's are so important because it forces you to take your demo and your message and distil it down to the most pure or the most useful thing, and that process is very limiting, but it ends up giving you something that's a lot more consumable and something which is easier to retain.

That's how you get the retention rates up and that's how you get from 14 points of touch until someone actually tries your product to maybe down to 10 or eight. That's how when we talked about the flywheel effect and people asking their peers, well, what do you use even if they've never used it, what do you recommend? If they have retention of your product? Well, maybe you should try on AB Smith. Yeah, I heard they have a thing and they do this stuff. Yeah, you should check that out, right? That's what we're trying to get to, especially from a de perspective. This structure forces you to choose what you're going to talk about, what people care about, and again, as we've talked about audience, very important to know your audience really hard in the digital world where it's like one to many YouTube blog posts, it can be really difficult, but that may also be a time when you make the same video three times for different audiences and figure out how those things go together.

Simple is easy to remember the best demos, the best presentations are the one where the person doesn't need notes because I've got five things that I want to talk about and I broadly know what I'm going to say about them, so I, I could actually sit down right now and give you a blitz, a 20 minute talk about AB Smith without anything because I've already got that structure embedded in my head. It's not that hard. You could take the deck, which is included at the end of this deck if you care, and you could do the same thing very, very quickly, not just for you but also for your audience. Again, retention, I'm going to say that again and everything else. Complexity is always going to creep in, and so the more that we force ourselves and encourage ourselves to focus on simplicity, the more we can word it off. As a funny little note, this section was originally called Kiss my demo, keep it simple. It just didn't quite fit the way I wanted, but it was fine, so that's why I decided to say it anyway, so again, this structure, this poses this limitation. It forces clarity, optimises for attention. This is science.

Speaker 2: One of the things I see frequently is people going into demos. Their products aren't necessarily simple. The problem statement may be very complex, and so when you look at the fact that complexity is going to show up depending, be involved, backstory, that maybe at what point in your experience are you saying this should be two separate things because of our agenda or because there is a prerequisite knowledge that needs to be had this story to make sense. What's your experience of recommendations to us on

Ron: Really, really good question. So show of hands, how many people here work for or represent or a company with a product that is fairly complex? Now show of hands, for somebody who has a product that's super simple, sells really well and it's going to make 10 million a day, nobody, everything's always more complex. That's why I personally love this approach because when I started, I actually remember it was one of, I was probably in my first six months as a sales engineer, a solutions architect, and I had this big pitch and I went and I did the demo and it was great, and my VP happened to join us. It was a big account and they were bringing executive in, so we sober. They walked us out of the building, we're going sit in the car. I was waiting for one of the sales guys to come back.

I'm sitting in the car with my VP and he said, Ron, he said, can I give you some advice? I said, please, yeah, absolutely. He said, what was your point with that demo? I said, well, the point was to show him how cool our stuff is and how it's going to help them. He said, that's not what happened. I was like, did you notice when somebody asked you can you do x? I was like, yeah, there's so many ways to do it. He's like, exactly. He said, there's five different ways to solve this problem with their product. I was like, as a developer, I love that. He said, do you know what? They were thinking? Wow, this sounds complex. Wow, this sounds hard. I don't think I can figure this out. And they tuned out and I was just kind of like, oh, wow, I just actually shot myself in the foot five different times. So to answer your question, what I would say is simplify it, simplify it, simplify it, and that's why the CTA is so important. And you can also have a prerequisite knowledge slides like, Hey, if you don't understand what Kubernetes is, this is maybe a little complex, so just know that because digging into some details here.

Speaker 2: So my immediate feedback on all of that then is there's a box above the LU opening that is so what the is

Ron: Ever present. So what? Yeah, but you're right. Yeah, that's what the is and understanding your audience and how to apply the so what? Yes. I

Speaker 3: Don't know if it's okay to start asking questions, please. So I used to do demos like this in a previous role where we talking to somebody who has a problem and you can typically identify what that problem is and address that with benefits and do the process. And Deborah, a lot of times I'm talking to somebody who maybe I'm in a booth or just met or don't have that context and it's a lot tougher for me to talk to the benefits because I don't know what problems they specifically have and I think that's why I fall back on, well, here's a feature, would that solve your problem or how would you use this maybe? And so I am curious if there's a good way to simplify or sometimes I'll try to just ask a couple of really quick questions to do some prospecting first hit one pain point. But yeah, I'm curious if you've been able to condense this into a five minute in any kind of way or that's just not

Ron: Possible. So first off, what I've left out of the official stuff is how you can and should use demos as a discovery tool because it just didn't really fit the bill of what we're doing, but absolutely correct, asking questions, giving those things at the end of this deck, and there'll be another QR code if you want to get the slides, I have a link to another deck which I made that we use at App Smith. It's like a product tour, some animated gifs and stuff. It is basically the, I don't know what your situation is, I don't know what, I don't know anything, so I'm just going to give you this and I think it's probably about a 15 minute, maybe 20 minute, but I can distil it down into five minutes by this this, and based on the response, I can leave one section out or move another section forward.

But that exercise, especially if you're thinking about booth duty of, can I come up with a product tour that can fit into 5, 10, 15 minutes is perfect, and I would say that the problem is the opportunity in that case. So highly recommend everybody think about going through the exercise. I promise it'll be valuable. Okay, so the other nice thing about having this structure is it frees up more of your cognitive ability to focus on presentation. So all of the little things like burying the pitch of your voice and being very different and modulating things so people will see things and then talking about what Robert said and talking about what Joseph said and bringing those things around. Your demo is kind of locked down and pretty tight. I'm more of an improv. I don't like a script, but I like a nice outline, so I just kind of will flow around it.

But the big thing is on telling this story, the simplicity is going to give you the freedom to focus on being a good presenter, and I think that's one of the things that as DevRel, it's kind of a superpower that we have and that we can develop. The structure takes care of the information, but the really important things that because it gives 'em that structure in their head, they can then own the information and the reason you want them to own the information is because you want them to carry it with them. So I'm here not to give you this information. I told you there's a book. It's way better than this. There's classes that you can take, go take their training. It's amazing. We had all of our DevRel do the training. Super helpful. I'm here to tell you a story. I'm telling you a story about these things and the hope that you are remember and that it'll be useful for you.

And human beings are storytellers. I mean, I don't know if you guys have seen, there's been some stuff in the last few years about how we think that maybe human language primarily evolved as a tool for gossip, right? Because we love to talk about ourselves and about other people, but we love to tell stories. And before we had the written word, we had these narratives that were passed down from ear to mouth to ear to mouth to ear to mouth for thousands and hundreds of years. Some of them are still going and they've changed over time. Humans are storytellers. Our job as Deborah, I believe is to do all that preparation work and all the experience work so that we'll have the raw materials to tell a really good story. And every time you tell a really good story, you'll get really good results.

Which brings us to the power of sharing, as we talked about earlier with the flywheel, with the referrals, with recommendations, everybody knows the best referral you can get from somebody that isn't with your company telling somebody to use your product because that means there's a really good chance they'll at least check it out. So the question is how can you make that happen? If you have a good structure, it's easy to remember. You tell a good story. That's going to put somebody else in the give them the ability to tell the story. I would like to think I could be wrong. I would like to think that at least some people in here are going to tell someone about show tell or the Olympic opening or the value close or the entire structure because you found it interesting because you found it useful. I'm going to believe that some of you will do that, which is ultimately my goal with this whole presentation is to take the stuff that I've gotten and collected and used and found valuable and give it to you, and then you go fuse it and find it valuable and then you go pass that stuff on as well.

Another thing that's really great as a leave behind, so this deck is my lead behind. That's why I have the QR codes. We had one at the beginning. We'll have one at the end, and there's some slides in here that we're not going to get to. We might get to 'em if we have time, but I'm not intending to get to them because I'm expecting that that's going to be something that you can use and you can take. So sometimes that's in the medium that we use a video or a blog post. Sometimes that is the leave behind, but A PDF or a diagram, people love to share diagrams online. Those things are great. A, a code snippet. These things are leave behinds or valuable things that we can give, which people, if they're actually valuable, are more likely to share and spread. We just really want to get the gossip going.

Did you hear about these guys at have Smith? They're kind of weird. They got a story. It's a good story. You really want to make sure that people can tell your story when you're not in the room. That's ultimately the goal. And if you're really good, I'm not saying that I am, but if you're really good, then someone can hear a really good engaging, enticing demo that keeps their attention, that teaches them something new, that tickles this little spot in the back of their brain, and then they'll go and they can retell your story with 80% fidelity. They won't know the details. They won't need the details. They'll have the structure, but they'll be able to pass that story on with a reasonable accuracy. Ultimately, I would say if we're doing our job as DevRel, developer relations, developer advocacy, develop evangelism, however you want to frame it, this is one of the success factors that you can't really measure but is so critically important when we get it right.

So tell a really good story and your audience will be able to share it, tell a really good story. I guarantee they will share it. Okay, so we went through the limbic opening, the so what, the tell show tell by closing and how it all comes together. Quick raise of hands. How many people here realise that I've been using this exact same structure from the beginning? Anybody want to say when they figured that out? Was it right at the start or two slides ago, right when you asked about your Olympic opening? That was it. That was a hint, Chris. I might've made this up, but I feel like you showed the

Speaker 2: Same slide before and

Ron: After a section. Those were my yes, that was my little tellhow tell loop. Exactly, and you'll see the structure and again. Okay, so good point, Chris. We saw the agenda and for each section we had an intro slide, went through the things and a closing slide for each one. How many people felt like that was overkill? You can be honest, one of my feelings.

Speaker 4: Some

Ron: Sometimes, but not horrible, right? No, no. And actually helpful for that retention, which you may or may not notice. I'm not very good at this. The opening slide for each section had a subtitle that was different from the closing slide, and I tried to make it kind of problem solution. I didn't spend as much time on it as I would like to, but you guys can do much better than me. Okay, so what we're missing now is the value closing. So let's get something very interesting. This is a chart going back to September of 2021. I just used social play for for our YouTube channel and the subscribers that we have. Does anybody notice anything juicy or interesting or compelling about this chart? Yeah, it was very stable and steady for a number of years, and then it just has recently shot through the roof. What could possibly have changed so drastically

Right here when the DevRel team took this very same training. Now that is not a hundred percent of what this is Kevin and Joseph in the back. Joseph is our mad scientist. Kevin is our video expert that runs our channel. If you have questions about video stuff, he's got a whole separate playlist on YouTube on how he does stuff. It's amazing. He's giving all the secrets away for free. So there's a lot that we have done that's not just this, but I personally believe, and you can talk to them later and they can disagree. That's okay. I personally believe that even though this doesn't always apply to every video, to every blog post, the concepts here are now part of what we're talking about and we're going through and giving feedback on a video and it's like, oh, hey, I really think we need to see the agenda for the video earlier. I think we might be losing people. Or, Hey, what are you thinking about for your Olympic opening on this? How are you going to give this attention? What's your CTing value closing this thing? Really, we can tell. So very, very useful. We've seen an impact. I had that as a hypothesis. I convinced leadership to invest the money in it. I don't know how, but they did, and the results are great and we're just going forward from there. So another animated gift just because this is super fun.

So you're going to be David Blaine and all of your audience and prospects are going to be this kid who is just blown out of his mind with this amazing stuff that you've done. This is you and this is your audience moving forward. It won't always be this good because we don't always have time to make things perfect. So sometimes somebody would be like, okay, that was pretty cool, but I saw you flipped the quarter into your sleeve. I saw that, but it was good. It was well done. So you don't have to do anything perfect. Oh, look at that call to action. Fantastic. Next steps. Get the slide deck. I haven't counted how many times I've suggested that through this, but I've suggested it more than one. All the stuff is here. You can come back to it later. You can use it. There's some extra stuff at the end.

Use these techniques in your next demo. Tell hotel with the opening. If your next demo's in five minutes, you can still do that. You can say, you know what? I was just in a session with this really weird dude, Ron. He was trying to teach us magic from gifts. I don't know, but I'm going to teach you something real fantastic. Let the go practise, practise, practise. Now, practise can take many forms. A lot of times what we do, I feel the creative aspect can be very individual. I'm writing a blog post. I'm creating a video. I might ask for feedback on the outline or I might ask for feedback on the Fitch product, but usually there's not a whole lot that I can do. We were talking earlier about the Garner Conference and no, no, not Chris, the guy behind,

And I remember their company's name because someone from their company came up, I thought was asking about our product, was actually trying to sell me his product. And it was noteworthy, and I remembered, right? But it was actually the Gartner conference and having to have that same conversation in five minutes over and over again, that helped to really refine in my own head that product tour that I then put together from that learning. So get in front of people, talk to people. Conferences are great, meetups are great. A really great way to start figuring out, and then you can take it to the next level. You take that generic structure and you start to break it down. Well, when I'm talking to developers, this actually works better. When I'm talking to executives, this works better. I'm talking to DevOps, this works better.

Then you should practise more obviously and share your results. So DevRel demo, if you have a really cool video or blog post or something, let's make this a thing. Hashtag DevRel demo. And then other DevRel folks will be like, oh, cool, I want to check that out so that I can learn and improve my skills so that I can give my fellow DevRel people really good feedback and say, Hey, that was pretty good. I think your tellhow tells a little money though. Maybe you should work on that questions. But before we do questions, just let you guys know. We will come back to this. There are some additional things. Understand the audience. Demo crimes. This is not all of them. There's four. Don't do the demo crimes guys. Learn what they are and avoid them. There's no demo police, but is that one of the demo prompts? That is. That's one of the double prompts. Yeah, that's a double. Yes, actually, all of these things is a good call. Thank you. And then at the end, I've got a real example of that product tour I told you about if you guys want to see what it looks like.

Okay, so you've seen that we've gone through, we've created the structure in your brain for how you utility, good demo you have, what's the first thing? Nice. And then to understand how you should do things, you should ask the question and you should use the technique of the, and you guys are amazing. I should have done quizzes.

And then after you kind of understand how you're going to talk about it and the simplicity of what you boiled it down to, what are the loops? Nice, nice. The one most important thing you should remember. And then at the end, you should always use a value closing. Value closing with call centre. Amazing. Okay, anybody want to go give this presentation next? So we have a few minutes left. We've had some really good questions along the way. Any other questions? Anybody want to be super brave and sit up and the thing they've been thinking about for their own product? Want to say what you're tell is? Okay. One sec question.

Speaker 5: Yes, an observation and a question. Yes. That you address people by their names and people love names. They really do. I think that's one way engage. These really help. Yeah. The question I had is a demo versus workshop, right? Sometimes I want give a workshop. I want people perform their laptop and run, but they're like here just looking at, and it's even harder on virtual setting, how you help people, make people join your workshop, not a,

Ron: So you already gave one really good example, and that's call people out by name. So whether it's in person or if it's virtual, if I ask a question and I get crickets, I'll be the bad teacher and I will call on somebody. It's like, okay, John, what do you think? It's okay. We're waiting for John to get off mute. Come on buddy. Don't be shy. What do you think about it, John? That's a good way. Another way is to humour again, works for me, but also to invite people to engage with. Does anybody remember how many times I asked people to raise their hands? Couple. That's a way to get people engaged. So in Zoom or something you say, Hey, give me a thumbs up if this makes sense. Give me a smiley face if you think I'm full of it. And then inviting people to bring their experiences. Yes, sir.

Speaker 6: Different question if that's okay. Sure. I liked your idea about borrowing from sales engineering and that kind of a background, but having now gone from sales engineering into more of a DevRel space, is there a difference in how you do demos between those two?

Ron: There is. I was actually going to try to squeeze this in, but I couldn't. I said, I have a hypothesis. So 5, 10, 20, 30 years ago, sales was very different than it is today. Especially tech sales. Most people have, if they don't have a freemium or a trial, they at least have very expansive videos to kind of show you what the product is. But we want to get in people's hands. That didn't happen. And especially if you look generationally, boomers and Gen X and even millennials to a degree are more amenable to a traditional sales cycle. Kind of like wine and dine. You take 'em through and you have lots of meetings, but a lot of Gen X, a lot of millennials and almost all Gen Z and beyond, they don't want to talk to you until they're ready to talk to you. They do the researcher journey and that's dark.

Speaker 7: They have

Ron: No idea what they're doing. So that's why DE is so incredibly important, the ones that are talking to them. So actually it's kind of now flipped. We're now we're technically kind of doing sales engineering before the sales call because when they show up, they already know about your product. They already know what they want. They want pricing information. They want to know about specific integrations. They want to know, can you do this thing that I haven't been able to figure out? And that's valuable, but very, very important. So I'm of the belief that a lot of folks who have done sales engineering are really just people dying for a change. Yes, sir. Did you have

Speaker 8: Something for us or just a question? I have one observation and one question. Yes. One observation. I appreciate Dr. Strange references, but sir, look like a Scott Derrickson director of the First Copper Strange, which is also very interesting. I'm going to take that as a compliment. Thank you. Actual question, what's your thoughts about live coding? Live coding? Yeah. Whole demo is just like a person standing there and doing stuff kind of funny in front of your eyes.

Ron: We've dabbled with live coating. I think if you have the constitution that it takes to walk the highwire and be okay screwing up in front of people, I think it can be really, really helpful because people will see the mistakes and they'll see how you solve the problem and they'll follow along. We're seeing a lot more, I dunno if you guys follow, is it Theo and then there's the guy who used to be at Netflix Prime Gym. No, no, I'm thinking of, yeah, prime Gym. Thank you. Yeah, we're seeing a lot more of that for, they're actually live streaming a very long thing where they're doing stuff and then they'll make their little snippets. It depends on the audience. I think some younger audiences are more open to what a livestream time commitment might be or popping in and out. But I would just suggest if you're going to do it, lean in, make it part of the thing you do, and then also make it part of that micro funnel where you are pulling out shorter snippets for people who don't have the time or who are older like me and have a bedtime and I can't sit around for four hours.

So just give me the 15 minutes. A really good point. What was the training that your team actually took for this? The demo to win the two win that I showed you? Yes. It's pricey, but really valuable. Oh goodness. You the handsome man in the back, sir. I don't know. You of course. Great boss, great leader.

You know what? I think I would make a great boss. I think you're right. Thank you. So for those who know, that's Kevin Blanco and our team, AKA Mr. White, he's the star of our YouTube channel. Really cool guy. If you want to know about video, he brought a whole hard case thing full of cameras and drone and GoPros and we're going to take a couple of days and do a project and he's going to film all of it and make a series or something. I dunno. It's totally fine. I have a question that maybe I

Speaker 9: Wanted to ask you on the spot. Go for it. You talk about the tell show hotel structure, but I wanted to ask you about timing because the younger generations, they have shorter respect attention and you know me, I can go very crazy speaking about a subject. I found myself in moments where my first tell show tale, it's around 10 minutes and I'm like, should I screw it up? So can you tell us about, not at a specific timeframe, but I'll that each individual tell should have.

Ron: Again, I'd like to keep the whole thing 15, 20 minutes and that attention span thing, although you can make it shorter. A tellhow tell loop can just be one loop. It's possible. Another thing that I learned earlier in my sales engineering career, I was working with a sales guy who on paper is the complete opposite of me. He's now my best friend. I just gave it TOA at his wedding two weeks ago, and we text and talk like Greek. We came out of a demo and it was really good and he said, Ron, I don't ask you a question. When they asked about such and such a thing, you gave 'em a really long answer. I was like, yeah, it was very detailed and there's a lot of stuff he said, but if it was a yes or no question, what would you say? Well, yes, it's like, just do that. They want or need more information, I'll ask. And so I started practising that. Really distilling down, well, hey, can you support asynchronous logging with using Splunk and such and such? Yes. Well how do you do that? I'll tell you what, let me send you a log post on that. But no, that's my hardest thing.

Speaker 10: So related to that, I trying, I'm trying to tell a big story. I do want to do it in these iterative little chunks. Maybe YouTube beautiful. I think I do show I do the full circle in one minute. Or is that

Ron: Bad? Can you, I think you can. I believe in you. I think it's possible now. I mean you've got to adjust, right? Some things might not make sense. Maybe your value closes, Hey, this is going to help you. Here's a link, click on this. I started doing this. I think my value closes started being show up for the next one. But that's not really. Yeah, but what you could say is 87% of our community feels that these videos are really impactful for helping them learn how to improve. As a developer, I would invite you to subscribe and come back so that you can make 88%. That was like 15 seconds. So work on it. Practise, practise, practise. I told you it was my weakness. Any other questions? I think we're at time. Cool. Well listen. Oh, one more real quick. You talked

Speaker 7: About getting and then having a one hour story, how you apply, the example you gave was have one feature. You go through the whole process. How do you get all the product features and then apply that there.

Ron: So that would be different videos in a playlist, different blog posts in a series C, part two C, part three, breaking that out depending on the medium. The one thing that I would say is if you're thinking about that kind of stuff, really try and focus on thinking about it. It's a novel, right? So sometimes instead of telstro tell loops, we'll say this chapter, and I don't want more than five chapters in this particular book, but book two is going to have five chapters. Book three is going to have three chapters book. And so then when you start to outline it, you can start to see how those pieces go. You don't have to get super detailed, you don't have to be waterfall about this. But if you have a broad idea of how you're going to take this big thing and break it up into those memorable digestive chunks, bonus points, if you can identify different audiences for some of those chunks, maybe you'll get really good results. So I think that's more like content, right? But what about a single same thing, the medium doesn't really matter. The structure still is the same, whether it's written or it's live or it's video, same things. But I know we're at time, we're over time. So anybody has any other questions? Constructive criticism, unconstructive criticism, you want to geek out? You want to tell me where I was wrong? Please find me. My name is Ron and thank you so.