Read this European phone number to a colleague: +49692877693.

How did you present it?

Was it a single non-stop string without any pauses or groupings, or did you break it up into small sections, such as “+49 69 287 76 93”?

Chances are you broke it up into two- or three-number chunks. We do this naturally!

And, if you happened to present the phone number as a single long string, I’ll bet your colleague may have asked you to repeat it, tacitly expecting you to break it up into small, discrete sections.

Why do we break things up this way?

Chunking!

“Chunking makes our brains more efficient. The more you can chunk something, the faster and easier you can process it…”

– Kevin Maney

From Google: “We chunk information to bypass the strict limits of our working memory. By grouping individual pieces of data into larger, meaningful units, we reduce cognitive overload, make content easier to scan, and significantly improve our ability to memorize and process information.”

Very simply, we break things up into smaller components to make them consumable. Eating provides a simple set of analogies, for example. We cut food into bite-size pieces since we can’t fit anything larger in our mouths: This is a physical limitation.

Our brains suffer similar mental limitations. But traditional demos ignore these constraints, confusing prospects and vendors alike. Prospects are told “Now, this is really important…” dozens of times, while vendors don’t understand why prospects are confused.

Contemplate a traditional 1-hour SaaS demo (a stunningly awful Harbor Tour). How many features would you guess are presented? Forty is a good estimate, yet I’ve seen many demos that highlighted a feature per minute. That’s sixty specific ideas the vendor wants their prospect to remember.

That. Is. Impossible!

It’s like pouring a liter of wine into a glass that only holds 150ml: 850ml is wasted. (For folks in the U.S., that’s like pouring a quart of wine into a 5oz glass.) However, you can consume that full bottle of wine over time if you drink five individual glasses (please space this out over a few hours and I’m not responsible for your behavior if you do attempt this experiment!).

At best, your typical human can retain five to seven pieces of information at once. That’s a metaphoric generous glass of wine. Frankly, three ideas are what most people are comfortable with at a time, representative of a more consumable pour.

The point is that if you chunk things in the physical or mental worlds and present those chunks over time (with some additional strategies and tactics, below) you have a much better chance of enabling consumption and retention.

Time?

“You can have it all. Just not all at once.”

– Oprah Winfrey

Just as we need to pace ourselves when eating and pause between bites (teenagers excepted), retention of ideas improves when we give them time to get digested.

It turns out that the typical adult human can pay attention when receiving information for about ten minutes. That’s it. After that, our mental mouth is full; we need time to swallow and process before our next bite.

Now consider: How long are your typical demos? Thirty minutes? An hour?

For an hour-long demo, each mental bite of three (typical) to seven (exceptional) ideas is all you can handle at a time. Accordingly, you’ll need to break up your demo into (at least!) six bites – six chunks – of ten minutes each.

But that’s stretching your audience’s ability to pay attention. Chunks of a few minutes yield stronger engagement and spur a real conversation to take place.

Continuing our dining analogy, note that there are significant pauses between dishes in a multiple course meal. Each course represents a chunk and each bite a tasty, consumable component within that chunk.

But it is the pause, along with conversation and a sip of water that refreshes and enables us to start on the next chunk with our full attention. Let’s examine this more closely!

Losing Attention

“A college professor is someone who talks in someone else’s sleep.”

For those who went to college or university, recall your freshmen or first-year lectures. Large rooms filled with dozens or hundreds of students, often a bit too warm, with the lecturer at the podium beneath a huge screen.

As the class begins you are awake and ready to take notes. The professor presents the topic supported by the occasional slide or graphic. You are following along just fine.

But after a few minutes your mind wanders. Someone comes in late and you all turn to stare while the speaker continues, ignoring the distraction. You miss a section of the talk and glance at a neighbor’s notes to see what they captured. Gratefully, nothing important was lost and you turn your attention back to the podium.

After only ten minutes into the class you realize you’ve checked out. Not intentionally, it’s just that you are struggling to pay attention. And unless the lecturer does something to reengage you, you’ll miss even more of the topic. Ten minutes was all it took.

You need to be refreshed!

Refreshment

“Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.”

– Oscar Wilde

So, the typical adult human can pay attention for about ten minutes. If you want people to continue to engage, you’ll need to “refresh” them. You need the dining equivalent of a pause, a sip of water or wine, engaging conversation, or even standing up and stretching. What will refresh your audience in a demo?

Summaries serve as excellent vehicles to refresh your audience. Just hearing the phrase, “So, to summarize…” causes people to reengage. (Sometimes I believe audiences are relieved to hear this phrase as it indicates that the presenter is, finally, reaching a conclusion!)

But offering a summary at the end of an hour-long demo doesn’t help along the way.

What’s the solution? Provide interim summaries at the end of each chunk: “So, you just saw the key dashboard you said you need, enabling you to recapture $20,000 annually. Thoughts? Comments? Questions?” And now you pause to give your audience a moment to process and formulate their thoughts.

This combination of a crisp summary and a pause does indeed refresh your audience. In face-to-face demos you may even notice a change in their body language to a more alert posture.

And guess what? Now you’ve earned another ten minutes of attention!

Are there other ways to refresh your audience? Absolutely!

• Questions and comments from audience members: These are some of the most effective refreshment mechanisms. Very importantly, the act of your prospect asking a question or offering an observation increases their ability to remember your key ideas.When they ask a question, they have had to think about it, driving improved retention.

• Props and Visual Aids: Staring at software screens in an hour-long demo is tiring. Using props helps make the intangible tangible! (You can use props in online demos as well as face-to-face. I’ve frequently “handed” people objects via our mutual webcams!)
• Develop ideas on a whiteboard: In face-to-face demos this often requires your audience to physically turn in their chairs, which forces a physical refresh. In both face-to-face and online demos, the act of hovering a pen over an empty whiteboard causes your audience to wonder, “What’s going to be drawn?” That’s a terrific refresh!
• Take a brief break: If you see your audience lagging, invite everyone to stand up and stretch for a moment. They’ll appreciate it, particularly for longer demos. (In Great Demo! Workshops, I would also accomplish this by saying, “OK everyone, take a deep breath…” then wait a moment before adding, “…OK now let it out!”)
• Let your champion drive: This will really wake folks up and is extremely effective in proving ease of use.
• Customer Fill-in: Instead of you choosing options or filling information in a form, invite your prospect to make these decisions. Very effective, very refreshing!
• Stories: Crisp, focused stories will cause your audience to engage and lean in.
• Humor: A well-timed joke (preferably self-deprecating!) can refresh but be aware of cultural constraints!
• Using an agenda or working from a Menu: Both of these enable you to briefly move away from your software to support summarizing your last segment and introducing the next.
• Pauses: In addition to pausing after a summary, modest pauses by themselves can help refresh your prospect.
• Pro tip: Track what appears to work best for you and exchange your findings with your colleagues.

Are breaking your delivery into smaller chunks and refreshing your audience the only ways to improve attention (and retention)? Certainly not!

The Attention-Retention Effect

“It isn’t so astonishing, the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren’t so.”

– Mark Twain

Studies have shown that when presented with a list of ideas or facts, humans tend to remember the first one or two items quite well. They also recall the last element moderately well.

However, the balance of the list is remembered quite poorly. This suggests that each chunk should focus on no more than three specific ideas.

Even more concerning is how people “remember” information that was never presented! In these same studies, participants frequently invented or synthesized information on their own, yet believed that it had been presented.

Reducing the length of chunks helps to combat this, as does summarizing the (three) key points you want people to remember from each chunk.

But What Is a Good Chunk in a Demo?

“If all the economists were laid end to end, they’d never reach a conclusion.”

– George Bernard Shaw

In Great Demo! methodology, presenting a Situation Slide is a chunk. Presenting an Illustration is a chunk as well. And a Do It pathway is also a chunk, as are each Peel Back the Layers pathways. And note that the methodology prompts you to provide a summary and/or confirmation exchange at the close of each of these.

For those few unfortunates who have never been exposed (gasp!) to Great Demo!, the steps required to complete a simple task is a good candidate for a chunk. Accordingly, a chunk could be as short as a single mouse click, if that’s all that is needed to complete the task: That’s a great chunk!

Completing a typical workflow is also a good candidate for a chunk. But avoid driving yourself into the weeds by presenting “if” and “or” options.

For many SaaS applications, working within a single tab or module provides the outer frame for a chunk. When you move to a new tab or module, you are likely entering a new chunk.

Generally, the shorter the chunk the better. When executing any task or workflow in a demo, think in terms of how your current customers complete them: They use the fewest number of steps or clicks. No extra steps.

Another way to comprehend this is to remember the way you execute your required tasks on a daily basis. Do you add any unnecessary steps when you are working to get things done? Likely not!

Need to update the CRM after a call? That’s a chunk and you complete it with the fewest steps possible. File an expense report? Same process and that’s also a chunk.

Finally, consider breaking up long workflows into logical chunks. Handoffs, between people, systems, or tasks, represent ending and beginning new chunks.

Now it’s time to put these ideas into practice and assess how you are doing. Can you improve your chunking practices?

Speaker Switches Assessment

“Nature gave us one tongue and two ears so we could hear twice as much as we speak.”

– Epictetus

Analyze your demos in terms of the number of Speaker Switches and the length of time between Speaker Switches.

If you see just a handful of Speaker Switches in your demo, then you are overstuffing your prospect, like our food analogy above. If the duration between Speaker Switches is six or eight minutes or (gasp) longer, you are at risk as well.

Your target should be three or four minutes; even shorter is better. This helps your audience stay engaged and pay attention. Practice delivering demo chunks that fit within these constraints and remember to conclude each chunk with a summary.

Pro Tip: Inverted Pyramid

“The inverted pyramid doesn’t bore the reader. It gives them what they want straight away.”

– The Writing Cooperative

Inverted Pyramid, developed by newspeople, organizes and presents information in alignment with how people want to consume it. The most important material is presented first, followed by the next most significant, and so forth.

This enables consumers to explore in as much depth as they desire, without getting bogged down by details. We can (and should!) apply this same approach to demos. Executives only want the headline and the lede; middle managers continue for another paragraph or two, and staff members often want the details.

In demos, you can apply Inverted Pyramid in two dimensions:

1. Across the entirety of the demo: Which chunks are most important? Which are secondary? Which can be left out? Inverted Pyramid helps you organize the overall structure of a multi-segment demo to align with your prospect’s interests.

And if you don’t already have your prospect’s priorities from discovery, you can use the Menu Approach to accomplish this on the fly.

2. Within each chunk: This enables your audience to explore each topic in as much detail as they have interest.

This demo structure models a news website (or, for the ancient, a newspaper!). The headlines and photos enable you to choose which articles you want to consume. Many of us pursue some articles just that far: the photo and headline. That’s all we want to know.

For other articles, we read a bit further to get more context and development of the topic. And for a few articles, we read most or even all of the text (I hear this most frequently with sports topics!).

Also note that news services offer a Menu of their content: National, International, Politics, Business, Health, Entertainment, etc. The Menu lets you rapidly access the topic(s) of greatest interest to you.

Another Example or Two

“A good example is far better than a good precept.”

– Dwight L. Moody

This article is also organized in discrete chunks, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. Each subhead offers you an opportunity to pause, reflect, and refresh.

And I hope you also noticed that the periodic quotes are designed to accomplish the same goals!

A Final Chunk

So, we’ve explored the importance of chunking in demos to increase engagement and retention. We’ve identified ways to architect chunks and listed several ways to refresh your audience both within and between chunks. And finally, we examined how you can apply Inverted Pyramid across the entirety of your demo and within each chunk.

That’s three key ideas I hope you remember and apply!

Bonus Section: Great Quotes about Chunking

“Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.”

– Henry Ford

“We’re not in a world of information overload, we’re in a world of filter failure.”

– Michael Lazerow

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.”

– Jean Baudrillard

“In this age of information abundance and overload, those who get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out.”

– Austin Kleon

“How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time…” (But please don’t, we need the elephants!)

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

“Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

“Little strokes fell great oaks.” (Again, please be mindful of these beautiful trees…!)

“If you’re overwhelmed by the size of a problem, break it down into smaller pieces.”

“Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs.”

Resources:

Great Demo! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C9SNKC2Y/

• Chunking – page 239, 249
• Props and Visual Aids – page 376
• The Water Bottles Story – page 313
• The Menu Approach – page 285
• Inverted Pyramid – page 16
• Online Demos – page 306

Let Your Champion Drive

https://greatdemo.com/demo-do-let-your-champion-drive/

Storytelling

https://greatdemo.com/effective-storytelling-in-discovery-demos-and-more-a-never-stop-learning-article/

The Menu Approach

https://greatdemo.com/the-menu-approach-a-truly-terrific-demo-self-rescue-technique-3/

Customer Fill-in

https://greatdemo.com/customer-fill-in-a-truly-terrific-demo-tip-2/

The Attention-Retention Effect

https://greatdemo.com/leveraging-attention-retention-curves-in-demos/

Inverted Pyramid

https://greatdemo.com/why-structure-demos-like-a-news-article/

Avoiding If and Or

https://greatdemo.com/stunningly-awful-demos-two-words-to-avoid/

Monty Python, “Three shall be the number…”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IOMNUayJjI

Copyright © 2026 The Second Derivative – All Rights Reserved

Their annual report.
Their recent news.
Their industry pressures.
Their competitors.
Their likely initiatives.
Their probable challenges.

Yet despite having more information than ever before, many discovery conversations are becoming less meaningful.

Why?

Because information is not curiosity.

That observation became the focus of a series of conversations between us about discovery, customer engagement, AI, and what separates average sellers from exceptional ones.

One discussion in particular centered on the TEDW framework, a simple yet powerful approach to structuring open-ended questions. Ryan introduced the framework during one of our conversations, and it immediately resonated because it provides a practical way to apply one of the most important elements of discovery: genuine curiosity.

Those discussions ultimately led to a shared conclusion:

As AI makes information easier to obtain, curiosity becomes more valuable.

What follows is our perspective on why curiosity is becoming one of the most important skills in modern selling and why it remains fundamentally human.

The Real Discovery Problem

Most sellers do not struggle with discovery because they lack a methodology.

Frameworks and methodologies such as MEDDPICC, Command of the Message, Great Demo!, and Peter E. Cohan’s Doing Discovery provide valuable structure and proven approaches for customer conversations. They help sellers understand what information matters and provide a structured way to capture relevant insights.

Yet no methodology can make you genuinely curious about another person’s business problem.

That is the real gap.

Discovery is not about asking a list of questions.

It is about understanding what matters most to the customer, why it matters now, what happens if nothing changes, and who is affected.

Done well, discovery uncovers the customer’s Critical Business Issue: the problem or opportunity important enough to drive action.

When we understand the Critical Business Issue, everything else becomes easier. We can align conversations to outcomes, demonstrate relevant capabilities, and build a business case that matters to the customer. Yet when done poorly, discovery often devolves into a polite interrogation followed by a generic demo.

And we all know how that ends.

The seller presents.
The customer nods.
The opportunity stalls.
Everyone pretends to be surprised.

Curiosity Is the Differentiator

If discovery is so important, why do so many teams struggle with it?

Many organizations have a discovery methodology. Far fewer have built a culture of curiosity around it.

The best discovery practitioners, whether in sales, consulting, medicine, law enforcement, or investigative journalism, share a common characteristic:

Genuine curiosity.

They are not simply trying to get through a list of questions. They are trying to understand.

That distinction changes everything.

Curious people ask better questions. They listen differently. They follow threads instead of agendas. They stay engaged when the conversation takes an unexpected turn.

Most importantly, they continue digging long after others believe they have enough information.

That is often where the most valuable insights emerge.

And the payoff extends beyond any single deal.

Curiosity doesn’t just make you a better seller. It makes you a better learner, a better teammate, and a more interesting person.

Dale Carnegie said it best:

“To be interesting, be interested.”

A Simple Framework for Curiosity

Originally popularized by Nikki Anderson in user research and qualitative interviewing, TEDW provides a simple way to structure open-ended questions that encourage customers to tell their story in their own words.

TEDW stands for:

• Tell me about…
• Explain for me…
• Describe for me…
• Walk me through…

The authors also suggest one additional prompt: “I’m curious about…” We’ll use it later.

Instead of asking:

“Is your current process inefficient?”

Try:

“Walk me through your current process.”

Instead of asking:

“Are reporting delays causing problems?”

Try:

“Tell me about how reporting works today.”

Instead of asking:

“Would faster access to data help?”

Try:

“Describe what happens when your team cannot get the data they need.”

The first version points the customer toward your answer.

The second version creates space for their answer.

That is where discovery begins.

Yet open-ended questions are not the destination. They are the starting point. Their purpose is to create opportunities for expansion.

In fact, there are three types of discovery questions most sellers are familiar with, yet most only use two of them.

Open questions create space and invite the customer to tell their story. That is what TEDW delivers.

Closed questions confirm understanding and create forward motion, though used too early they shut the conversation down.

Between them sit expansion questions, sometimes called investigative or layering questions, which help us explore what the customer just said.

That middle layer is where curiosity lives, and it is the one many sellers skip.

The Power of Expansion

One of the most valuable concepts in Peter E. Cohan’s Doing Discovery is the use of expansion questions.

Most customers begin with symptoms.

“Our reports take too long.”

“The process is manual.”

“The team is frustrated.”

Those statements are useful, yet they rarely reveal the Critical Business Issue.

Expansion questions help us move beyond symptoms to understand consequences, business impact, urgency, and value.

A seller can ask:

“Walk me through your process.”

Customer:

“Our managers spend hours every week reconciling numbers manually.”

Many sellers stop there and immediately pivot to a presentation.

“Got it. Let me show you our dashboard.”

That is what we call Premature Elaboration Syndrome: jumping to a product pitch before you’ve understood the problem well enough to make it relevant.

Curiosity leads us somewhere different.

“I’m curious, how often does that happen?”

“Tell me who else is impacted by this.”

“What does that cost the business?”

“Explain what happens if the problem continues.”

“Walk me through why it has become important now.”

Notice the transition.

“I’m curious about…” is how you go deeper without it feeling like an interrogation.

“I’m curious about the data access piece you mentioned. Can you tell me more about how that’s managed today?”

It signals genuine interest, not a pivot to pitch.

Those questions help uncover the Critical Business Issue: the reason the customer is willing to spend time, money, and political capital pursuing change.

Discovery finds the problem. Curiosity finds the weight of it.

Where Does AI Fit In?

AI isn’t leading conversations or building trust with your clients.

It doesn’t know which thread to pull in real time. It hasn’t heard the hesitation in a customer’s voice, noticed what they didn’t say, or understood the human implications behind a seemingly simple answer.

That gap is the whole point of this article.

Use AI before the conversation, not during it.

AI is exceptional at helping you understand a company’s business model, recent news, likely pain points by industry, and the personas you’ll be meeting. Do that work in advance so you walk in informed.

But the moment you’re in the room, or on the call, put it down.

The customer doesn’t need you to recite what their 10-K said.

They need you to be present.

AI gives you the foundation to become curious faster. It doesn’t replace curiosity itself.

The sellers who will win in an AI world aren’t the ones who automate discovery. They’re the ones who use AI to show up prepared enough that they can spend the whole conversation being curious and actually listening.

How Do We Get Better?

Curiosity improves the same way any meaningful skill improves: through deliberate practice, honest feedback, and repetition over time.

1. Practice with specific role plays

Start with role play, but make it specific. We like to call the exercise “Have You Met TED?” The reference is intentional, and the format is simple:

• Set a realistic customer scenario.
• Pair people up.
• Have one person play the customer while the other practices turning closed questions into open and layered questions.

The goal is not to perform perfectly. The goal is to notice where you stop digging and why. Make it a habit, not a one-time exercise.

2. Use AI as a practice partner

AI can do more than research accounts. It can help sellers practice. Run a discovery scenario, ask AI to play a skeptical economic buyer, and then debrief where you led the witness instead of following the customer’s thread.

The feedback is immediate, and there is no ego in the room.

3. Review calls for missed opportunities

Record discovery calls and listen back, but do not listen only for what you said. Listen for what you did not ask:

• The follow-up question you skipped.
• The thread you dropped.
• The moment you pivoted to pitch because the silence felt uncomfortable.

That is where the real coaching lives.

4. Invest in discovery as a craft

For teams that want to go deeper, the Doing Discovery Workshop led by the Great Demo! team is built on a seven-level repeatable methodology designed for exactly this purpose.

The sellers and SEs who treat discovery as a craft, not a checkbox, are the ones who compound over time.

Coaching for Curiosity: A Leader’s Role

Leaders can teach questioning techniques quickly. Coaching genuine curiosity takes longer. It requires a more deliberate, systematic approach.

The guidance above applies to individual practitioners. For leaders, the challenge is helping others build the habit of curiosity and use it consistently in customer conversations.

1. Make it safe not to know

If your team feels pressure to have the answer in every customer conversation, they will stop asking questions and start presenting.

Create room for responses such as, “I don’t know. Tell me more.” Treat that as a sign of discipline, not weakness.

2. Debrief the questions, not just the outcome

After a discovery call, do not stop at, “What did we learn?” That question matters, but it is not enough.

Ask questions that reveal how the conversation developed:

• What question opened the conversation up?
• Where did we stop digging too early?
• What thread should we have followed further?

That is where the real coaching lives.

3. Model curiosity in the moment

If you are on a call and something genuinely interests you, ask about it. Let your team see you follow the customer’s thread instead of forcing the conversation back to your own agenda.

Over time, that example teaches more than any coaching framework. It shows that curiosity is not a technique. It is a leadership behavior.

Curiosity Compounds

Customer-facing team members and leaders who commit to curiosity don’t just close more deals.

They build sharper instincts, stronger relationships, and careers that hold up over time.

It’s also the hardest thing to teach, which means the people who develop it deliberately have a real and durable edge.

That’s the whole point of discovery.

Not to extract information.

To genuinely understand someone well enough to help them.

Be curious. Everything else follows.

About the Authors

Paul H. Pearce is President of Great Demo! LLC. He works with sales and presales organizations to improve discovery, customer engagement, and demonstrations that align to business outcomes.

Ryan Garrett is a technical sales leader known for his thoughtful approach to customer discovery, coaching, organizational learning, and the practical application of AI. He is passionate about helping teams improve customer engagement through curiosity, effective questioning, and continuous learning.

A Note from Paul

One of the unexpected benefits of teaching, coaching, and working with sales teams is the opportunity to learn from others.

Ryan’s willingness to challenge assumptions, connect ideas across disciplines, and focus on understanding what truly matters to customers was a significant influence on this article. Our conversations about curiosity, discovery, and AI pushed my own thinking and ultimately helped shape many of the ideas presented here.

If the ideas discussed in this article resonate with you, I encourage you to connect with Ryan on LinkedIn and continue the conversation with either of us. I believe you’ll find him to be as thoughtful, insightful, and generous with his ideas as I have.

You reply, “Does it typically go smoothly? What happens when someone is on vacation?”

“It’s a mess! We literally have tickets piling up on people’s desks…!” divulges your prospect.

Congratulations! You’ve just deepened and broadened your prospect’s pain using the essential discovery skill of Expansion Questions. So, what are they, how do you use them, and when?

Expansion Questions are a series of interrelated questions designed to span five of the seven discovery skills levels, from uncovering pain to reengineering vision. They are a simple, yet essential skill to master in doing discovery enabling you to extend, deepen, and quantify your prospects’ pains and related impacted areas.

Expansion Questions leverage your experiences with other prospects and customers, providing you with lists of likely problem areas, impacts, and outcomes to explore with new prospects.

An Example

Let’s return to the conversation above. A skilled vendor and their prospect are talking about the prospect’s current workflow that handles customer requests and issues. Let’s listen:

Prospect comments, “It’s a manual process…”

Vendor responds, “Sorry to hear this – what takes place today?”

Prospect explains, “Well, each request is entered, reviewed, processed, escalated, and closed in a series of steps, with each step done manually by an individual, then passed to the next person in line.”

The vendor asks an Expansion Question, “Does it typically go smoothly? For example, what happens when someone is on vacation?”

The vendor knows, based on previous experience with similar prospects, that vacations often have serious negative impact on these workflows.

Prospect replies, “It’s a mess! We literally have tickets piling up on people’s desks…!”

Vendor responds, “What happens then?”

Prospect offers, “At minimum, it causes delays in response time which impacts customer satisfaction.”

Our vendor makes a note to come back to this impact statement later, but focuses on the current issue for now:

Vendor asks, “I see… How many folks are involved on your team?”

Prospect says, “We have a total of 12 people doing this, and it is far too many!”

Vendor pursues, “Understood. And what would you like to reduce this to?”

Prospect states, “I’d love to get this down to two people. There’s plenty on the team’s plate that needs to be done in addition to this process!”

Note that our vendor has quantified a desired outcome – a Delta – reducing the number of people in the workflow from twelve to two. Next, knowing that manual processes typically result in errors, our vendor introduces another Expansion Question:

Vendor queries, “I see – how often do errors creep into your process today?”

Prospect declares, “Oh, all the time…!”

Vendor expands, “And what happens when errors occur?”

Prospect admits, “Well, we often have to go back, find the error, and then rework the downstream portion of the workflow. It can get pretty bad!”

Vendor quantifies, “Sorry to hear this – how often does this occur and how long does it take to correct, on average, for each occurrence?”

Prospect notes, “At least once a week and it can consume hours to fix each one.”

Vendor offers, “And I’m guessing you’d like to reduce this to zero or near zero, if possible. Is that correct?”

Prospect responds, “Absolutely…!”

Note that our vendor has now quantified two aspects of the manual process, so far, capturing the prospect’s specific numbers. Our vendor then explores more impact through another Expansion Question, again based on experience with other prospects:

Vendor asks, “And what happens downstream? Who else is impacted?”

Prospect notes, “Oh, it ripples throughout the organization, resulting in sending the wrong patches, incorrect documentation for customer success managers, mistakes with our product roadmaps, inaccurate renewals forecasts, and the worst cases can result in very unhappy customers, which we know contributes to churn!”

Vendor asks, gently, “Do you get grief from these other teams, as a result?”

Prospect admits, “Yes, it’s added a lot more pressure to fixing this problem…”

Vendor confirms and moves towards a discussion of solutions:

Vendor resumes, “I see. So, this is really impacting the organization broadly. Let’s change gears back to your current manual process: are you looking to automate this following the existing workflow or do you have any other changes in mind?”

Prospect says, “The individual steps are all fine, we just need to get rid of the manual work and physical hand-offs.”

Our vendor realizes that the prospect is unaware of the range of possible solutions and expands using a Biased Question to explore Vision Reengineering with the prospect:

Vendor notes, “Interestingly, many of the other companies we’ve worked with found that the ability to both automate their workflows and implement AI rules-based processing and alerts not only eliminated the errors and handoffs but also resulted in dramatically reduced churn and increased renewals. Some of our customers report 10-20% less churn and 5-10% increases in renewals and add-on sales. Is an AI rules engine something that might also be useful in your practice?”

Prospect responds, “Wow, I hadn’t thought about that. Yes, that would be really cool! How does that work?”

We’ll leave the conversation at this point and let our vendor and prospect continue on their own…

Are You Leading the Witness?

Yes, absolutely…!

Expansion questions take advantage of your knowledge about other, similar prospects’ situations. Any time you know, from your experience, that another aspect of your prospect’s pain is likely, that’s a candidate for an Expansion Question.

Here are a few logical examples:

• Manual processes: are likely to have errors which propagate and associated delays which probably impact others.
• Paper processes: are subject to similar issues, plus lost papers and transcription errors (what do these impact?).
• Email communications: may suffer from lost or ignored messages and vague assignments (what happens then?).
• False positives or false negatives: can represent a world of pain on their own!
• Poor CRM hygiene: results in false forecasts, pipeline uncertainty, and scrambling customer success managers.
• Inaccurate documentation: can yield substantial rework, delayed invoicing, unhappy customers, and more.

Expanding to Level 5 of Discovery

In the brief example above, our vendor moved the prospect gently (but firmly!) through five levels of discovery, using Expansion Questions to drive the process:

Level 1: Uncovers statements of pain:
– Manual process.

Level 2: Explores more deeply:
– [Expansion Question] Vacations?

Level 3: Broadens the pain and investigates the impact:
– [Expansion Questions] Errors? Downstream impact?

Level 4: Quantifies:
– Reduce from 12 people to 2; eliminate weekly errors that take hours to fix.

Level 5: Reengineers vision:
– Introduces the AI rules engine using a Biased Question.

Expansion Questions, along with Biased Questions and related probing techniques, are fundamental discovery skills and are key components of a cohesive, integrated discovery methodology.

Four Stages and Discovery

The classic set of Four Stages of Competence is particularly apropos for doing discovery:

Stage 1 – Unconsciously Incompetent:
They don’t know what they don’t know. Many (most?) sales and presales folks are in this category but are unaware…!

Stage 2 – Consciously Incompetent:
They understand that they need to do better or operate differently, but don’t know what or how to accomplish this.

Stage 3 – Consciously Competent:
They know what to do but have to consciously think to execute properly.

Stage 4 – Unconsciously Competent:
They do the right things without extra thought.

For example, are you aware of and apply the following skills?

• Ranging Probes
• Biased Questions
• Provocative Questions
• Empathy and Quid Pro Quo
• Vision Reengineering
• The Curse of Knowledge
• Wants vs Needs
• “Why?” Questions
• Avoiding “No Decision”

Where are you and your team on the competency spectrum?

Resources in Doing Discovery:

Expansion Questions – page 173

Ranging Probes – page 172

Biased Questions – page 183

Provocative Questions – page 253

Empathy and Quid Pro Quo – page 199

Vision Reengineering – page 217

The Curse of Knowledge – page 274

Wants vs Needs – page 164

“Why?” Questions – page 180

Avoiding “No Decision” – page 234

Resources in Suspending Disbelief: A Collection of Sales, Presales, and Marketing Stories (and Lessons Learned)

The Credit Card Story – page 7

“But You Already Know Their Workflow” – page 9

“You Know You Already Closed Me” – page 19

Who Is Mr. Big Ears? – page 53

“Let Me Close My Door” – page 59

The Million Dollar Demo and the Good Little Salesperson – page 74

A Prospect’s Tale – page 90

Copyright © 2021-2026 The Second Derivative – All Rights Reserved.

.

“We’re gonna need a big discount…” declared the prospect.

“What? Why?” reacted the salesperson, clearly surprised.

“In the demo, you showed us a lot of stuff we’ll never use, and we don’t want to pay for capabilities we won’t use, so either remove those capabilities or cut the price.” stated the prospect.

“But they represent more value…!” the salesperson spluttered.

“Not for us,” was the prospect’s response, “I’d say we’ll use about 30% of what you showed in the demo, so we’ll expect a 70% discount.”

The salesperson’s jaw worked wordlessly and then said, “I’ll see what I can do…”

The deal did close, and the prospect did enjoy a substantial discount.

I remember this story very well, because I was part of the vendor team. In fact, I was the one who presented the demo!

How Much Do You Use?

We all know that we use a small fraction of the software we purchase. Think about your use of Google Docs, MS Office, your CRM system, and other products: what percent of the available capabilities do you actually consume?

A general estimate is twenty percent!

Customer success knows this. Customer service knows this. Product management knows this. Sales and presales know this as well, but somehow that knowledge is often ignored when vendors pitch their wares.

This unforced discounting is known as Buying It Back and it is counterintuitive for most people. After all, the value of your software increases with the number of capabilities included, right?

Nope! The value of your software is based on your prospect’s perceptions of what they’ll use and the nature of the solution it delivers.

In a demo, the more capabilities you show that your prospect doesn’t need, the more you are at risk of Buying It Back. How do you know if you are at risk?

What Prospects Say

If you’ve ever heard these objections, you were probably Buying It Back:

• “We don’t want the Cadillac; we just need a Chevy!”
• “It’s way more than we need!”
• “We don’t need all the bells and whistles.”
• “We’re looking for the bare bones.”
• “A workhorse, not a show horse.”
• “We need utility, not luxury!”

(Folks in Europe, Latin America, Asia-Pacific, and elsewhere, what are the phrases you hear?)

So, if you get these responses after (or worse, during!) your demos, consider how your prospects view their desires vs your feature set.

Wants and Needs

In a traditional demo (and in any demo done without sufficient discovery), each capability you show falls into one of the following categories:

• Must have
• Nice to have
• Neutral
• Don’t need it
• Really don’t need it

The “must have” and “nice to have” capabilities are the Specific Capabilities desired by your prospect. But what about “Neutral,” “Don’t need it,” and “Really don’t need it”? Each time your prospect sees these in your demo they think, “Well, I don’t need that and I certainly don’t want to pay for it.”

And since they have just seen these demonstrated, they know that they will be paying for these features as part of the license fee. One or two small capabilities isn’t much of a risk, but when their perception grows to where there are many features they won’t use then prospects get concerned.

It’s even worse when vendors highlight key differentiators as particularly important or high value, but the prospect has the opposite opinion.

They wonder, “Why should I have to pay for all of these if I’m not going to use them?” And when it is time to negotiate the price and license fees, your prospect says, “You know, you showed us a lot of capabilities that we’ll never use, so you need to reduce your price accordingly. We don’t expect to pay for things we won’t use.”

An Analogy

You are in a restaurant and ask for a glass of wine. Your waiter brings the glass and a full bottle of wine to your table, places the glass in front of you and starts to fill your glass. You are gratified when they fill it right to the top. You are very surprised, however, when they continue to pour! The wine overflows onto the table and then splashes onto the floor. The entire bottle has been emptied, but the only portion you can consume is contained in the glass.

What would you say if the waiter charged you for the full bottle?

Tangible vs Intangible

When you buy something physical like an automobile, you frequently encounter situations where features are bundled. If you want a sunroof on your new SUV, you may have to purchase the “sports package” that includes upgraded wheels and trim, in order to get that sunroof.

You are annoyed that you have to buy the more expensive wheels and trim, but a least they are tangible assets. And if you resell that car in a few years, you can market it by highlighting the upgraded wheels and trim, in addition to the sunroof.

In the world of software, however, all features are intangible! And you have no possibility of recouping the cost of the software with all those capabilities you didn’t want or need by reselling it (unless license agreements have changed markedly!).

Good News

“What they don’t see won’t hurt you!”

There’s a remarkable difference between software and physical products: In software demos, unwanted or unnecessary features can be invisible!

In the world of video and movies they say, “If the camera doesn’t see it, then it didn’t happen…” Interestingly, the same is true for demos. If the prospect isn’t shown capabilities they don’t exist, at least in their minds.

Clearly, this is one of the most important objectives of doing discovery: to understand the Specific Capabilities needed and desired by the prospect. This gives you the list of what should be presented in a demo and the list of capabilities to ignore and leave out.

When you execute effective discovery, you identify exactly which features are “must have” and “nice to have” and plan to show those in your demos. Leaving everything else out of the demo makes the remaining, unwanted capabilities invisible.

What you don’t show, they don’t know!

Intriguingly, we as customers are comfortable with the knowledge that we’ll only use a small fraction of the software products we purchase. We’ve come to accept that using only 20% of the available features is just fine or at least acceptable.

However, this only works when we don’t know about those extra capabilities. When we are forced to see them in a demo is when Buying It Back takes place.

Value?

As noted earlier, most vendors believe that “The more capabilities; the more value…” This is part of the reason vendors traditionally try to pack as many features and functions into demos as possible. These vendors believe that by showing more, the perceived value of their software should similarly increase.

Instead, they are buying it back with every additional click!

This is why traditional “overview” and “end-to-end” demos put you at risk. And organizations that train customer-facing staff to learn their standard “Gold” demos perpetuate the problem. These demos ignore discovery and emphasize vendors’ perceived differentiators.

An Example

Human Capital Management software is a hotly contested space with vendors who often present “hire-to-fire” demos, showing how to:

• Open new hire requests
• Create and post job descriptions
• Review applicant resumes
• Extend offers
• Onboard new hires
• Manage certifications
• Assess employees’ skills
• Provide and track ongoing development
• Execute and track performance reviews
• Identify high performers
• Implement succession plans
• Establish workflows and approvals
• Communicate internally
• Manage time and PTO tracking
• Track employee satisfaction
• Offboard employees
• And more…

Furthermore, many of these vendors’ packages are monoliths: you get everything, even if you don’t need it.

Now imagine that you are the prospect watching this demo and you only need or want three quarters of the functionality presented. The salesperson has stated an annual price of $144K, based on the size of your organization of 120 users at $100 per month. You would arrive at two conclusions:

1. This is way more than you need;
2. You don’t want to pay for the capabilities you won’t use.

Based on this, how much would you be willing to pay on an annual basis? (Hint: ¾ of $144K is $108K). The vendor’s price is based on the full suite of capabilities, but you will only use 75%. Your argument is irrefutable! The vendor just lost $36K by Buying It Back.

It Gets Worse

The mindset for many demo presenters often compounds the problem and increases the risk of Buying It Back. I frequently hear presenters say at the beginning of a demo, “Stop me if you have any questions – I want to make this interactive.” But they don’t really mean it!

What is going on in the mind of the presenter is often a different reality. They’re thinking, “Please don’t ask any questions! Because if you do, I won’t have time to get through all of the content I want to show…” These demos are typified by truly awful talk-to-listen ratios and infrequent speaker switches.

This mindset of “show as much as possible” results in some of the worst Buying It Back experiences.

Differentiating?

Many sales and presales teams are taught to present their “competitive differentiators” in their demos. In the absence of doing sufficient discovery, your differentiators may actually be negative differentiators!

If you present a key differentiating capability that your prospect needs, that’s a good thing. But what if your prospect doesn’t want that capability? Well, you’ve just differentiated negatively and added that key capability to the Buying It Back list.

Sadly, the trouble often begins before the demo with corporate overview slides that announce, “How We Are Different,” citing capabilities that are differentiators from the vendor’s perspective. Again, if those capabilities are desired by the prospect, you are moving in the right direction. But if they are not needed or wanted, you’ve set the stage for a negative outcome. Presenting those undesired capabilities in the demo completes the Buying It Back drama.

Discovery should be done prior to the demo with a specific focus on your differentiators to determine whether to include them as Specific Capabilities or to rule them out as Buying It Back candidates.

What About Discovery on the Fly?

The tendency of vendors to fall into this self-made Buying It Back trap is huge and happens far too frequently. The temptation to dive further into your software is extremely high once it has been launched! It takes enormous discipline to avoid showing capabilities that the prospect doesn’t need or want (or pay for!).

There are two solutions to avoid Buying It Back when doing Discovery on the Fly:

1. Introduce your capabilities in the form of a question before showing them.

If the prospect responds positively, then you can say, “Well, we have that capability – would you like to see it?”

On the other hand, if your prospect’s response is, “No, we don’t really want that….” or “We can’t see situations where that would be valuable,” then you simply move on. Don’t show that capability!

Note that if the negative response happens too frequently, you are still at risk of Buying It Back, since your prospect will begin to assume that all of these capabilities will be in the software they purchase from you, if they move forward.

2. Use a Vision Generation Demonstration instead of trying to do traditional Discovery on the Fly. A Vision Generation Demo is designed to satisfy the prospect’s desire to “see what’s possible” while moving the prospect (gently, yet firmly!) into a discovery conversation. (See Chapter 11 in Great Demo! for details.)

The subsequent discovery dialog should yield the list of Specific Capabilities your prospect wants and needs, enabling you to present a Technical Proof Demo that is tailored precisely and avoid Buying It Back. (Chapters 5-9 in Great Demo!)

Summary

Buying It Back is an insidious and often unrealized problem in B2B software demonstrations. Many traditional sales and presales playbooks and processes actually intensify the risk.

Great Demo! methodology helps you successfully avoid Buying It Back outcomes. Vision Generation Demos replace old, ineffective overview demos. Situation Slides help you guide discovery conversations to capture the Specific Capabilities you need to deliver targeted and highly compelling Technical Proof Demos.

Stop Buying It Back…!

Copyright © 2022-2026 The Second Derivative – All Rights Reserved.

1. Nothing.
2. Way too much.

Far too many salespeople contribute far too little – or far too much – in demos with their team members. They handle introductions (often too limited), inflict corporate overview presentations on their prospects, then apparently disappear during the actual demo, only to magically reappear for the final few minutes of “next steps” discussions. Others feel an urge to “pile on,” adding unnecessary comments in an effort to reinforce the presenter’s statements.

Too little, too much!

Salespeople have a specific and carefully choreographed role in demos when following the Great Demo! methodology. Here are some of the key ideas:

0. Before the demo: Ensure that sufficient discovery information has been uncovered and communicated to the balance of the team and especially to the person presenting the demo, along with the other pre-demo information on players, timing, location, etc.

This includes agreeing on what should be shown and what should not be shown in the demo!

1. Introductions: Sales should ask or confirm the Three Questions (What is your name? What is your job title? What would you like to accomplish in our demo today?).
2. Situation Slides: Sales should present the Situation Slide(s).
3. Illustrations: Not required, but highly recommended! The best salespeople can competently and confidently present Illustrations. This also enables them to deliver Vision Generation demos, as well (without the need for another vendor resource to be present).
4. Questions: Sales should field and park questions, as appropriate. Salespeople should also be tracking what was asked and answered, so that they can be properly prepared for the Final Summary. Sales may also need to gently step in and ask clarification questions, before other vendor team members head off into the weeds…!
5. Intermediate Summaries: Sales should be ready to deliver summaries after each major “chunk,” if the demo presenter does not. Doing so also gives the presenter a breather!
6. Business Value: Far too often, demo presenters discuss “what” their software does and elaborate on “how” it works but neglect to communicate “why” it is important – they miss communicating the Business Value. Sales needs to include this key idea in both interim and final summaries.
7. Rescues: Sales should be prepared to “rescue” the demo presenter, when needed (e.g., bugs, crashes, getting lost in the weeds, parking questions, etc.).
8. Final Summary: The salesperson should deliver the final summary, including a review of the questions asked, answers provided, action items to be pursued (for both the vendor and the customer), and discussion of the Mutual Action Plan.
9. Follow Up: The salesperson needs to track on the action items and Mutual Action Plan steps, communicating with the prospect as well as the vendor team.

Delivering demos should be perceived as a “team sport” when two or more people are involved on the vendor’s side. These players will typically include a salesperson (in ultimate control and with the ultimate responsibility for preparation and success of the demo) and one or more technical players, generally the person most likely to “drive” the software (presales, customer success, marketing).

Discover, communicate, plan, prep, deliver, and follow up!

For comparison and amusement, here is a list of what NOT to do:

0. Before the demo: Communicate little or no discovery information to the balance of the team. Just say, “Show them the standard demo…”
1. Do detailed introductions of the vendor’s team, but nothing about the prospect.
2. Present a corporate overview presentation that is longer than one slide or one minute.
3. Check out while the demo is underway.
4. Tell the presenter to show “that really cool thing…”
5. Pile on (adding an additional answer to every question already answered by someone else). For a really amusing experience, get two salespeople who naturally pile on in a demo and watch them try to out-do the other. Great fun, if you have no desire to win the business…

So, regarding the role of sales in demos, do just enough and do it well – it’s a team sport!

Resources:

– Situation Slides: A Swiss Army Knife for Sales and Presales
https://greatdemo.com/situation-slides-sales-and-presales-swiss-army-knife/

– Doing Discovery
https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Discovery-Important-Enablement-Processes/dp/B0B8RJK4C2/

– Illustrations
https://greatdemo.com/illustrations-doing-the-last-thing-first/

– Vision Generation Demos
Great Demo! Third Edition Chapter 11
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C9SNKC2Y/

– Managing Questions
https://greatdemo.com/the-elegant-art-of-managing-questions-and-time/

– Business Value
https://greatdemo.com/lets-talk-about-value-uncovering-the-delta/

– Storytelling
https://tinyurl.com/yc7rsrmy

– All of the Above
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C9SNKC2Y/

Copyright © 2017-2026 The Second Derivative – All Rights Reserved.

Are you or your colleagues unwitting members of the Sales Prevention Team?

Many organizations have a “Sales Prevention Team:” people or people-defined processes that lengthen sales cycles and lose deals. Here are a few examples of Sales Prevention Team demo practices to shock and amuse you:

• The Terrible Tabs Death March
• An Online Oops
• “Here Are All the Different Ways to…”
• Setup Mode Horror
• Help, Mr. Wizard…!
• Demo Desperation
• The Guessing Game
• Founders’ Frustration
• Diagnose and Ignore?
• Premature Elaboration
• More Premature Elaboration: A Competitive Oops!
• The Overrun Overview

Each mini story includes a Moral plus one or more resources to help you avoid joining this sadTeam. Enjoy!

The Terrible Tabs Death March

“The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.”
– Ernest Dimnet

I joined a face-to-face demo where the vendor presented a screen with ten tabs and then proceeded to march through each of them, one by one, in detail.

It was very interesting to watch the body language of the audience as this demo progressed. The response to the initial page was positive. It was a well-constructed dashboard, and it looked good.

The next tab was received with moderate interest, but by the third tab many of the audience members were visibly sagging in their seats!

By the fourth and fifth tabs nearly everyone had checked out (perhaps even the presenter, who had clearly presented these tabs many, many times!). And there was an audible sigh of relief as the final tab was described.

This was a classic case of the presenter following the old, established, traditional demo pathway: a slow, painful march towards no sale!

The Moral? Focus on the Specific Capabilities your prospect needs to solve their problem!

Resources:
See Chapters 5-9 in Great Demo!

An Online Oops…

“It’s the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen.”
–  John Wooden

A lack of situational awareness can be costly.

I was watching an online demo a while ago when one of the prospect team members asked a question. The salesperson chatted to the presenter, “Ignore that question, that guy is an idiot!”

Sadly, the salesperson didn’t realize that he had included “Everyone” in the chat, not just the presenter.

End of demo, end of sales cycle…

Moral: Be careful of what you chat and to whom!

Resource:
Chapter 13 in Great Demo!

“Here Are All the Different Ways to…”

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify!”
– Henry David Thoreau

I was watching a demo of a data visualization tool and things were going well until an audience member asked, “Can we change the color elements of these dashboards?”

The presenter answered, “Oh, absolutely! I’ll show you…!”

And with that, the presenter showed not one, not two, but three separate ways to configure the dashboards, including drag-and-drop, editing pane display options, and (I’m not kidding) writing code to execute complex filter searches. These explanations consumed about fifteen minutes of the one-hour demo.

Now here’s the sad portion: all the prospect wanted to know was if they could change the color scheme of the panes! A simple “yes” would have been sufficient.

The Moral: Listen carefully to how people ask questions; you may only need to respond, “Yes!”

Resources:
The Elegant Art of Managing Questions and Time
Chapter 8 in Great Demo!

Setup Mode Horror

“Life is too short for you to be the caretaker of the wrong details.”
– Alexandra Stoddard

I watched a ninety-minute demo recording and noted two rather astonishing things…

Astonishing Thing Number One:

Approximately half of the demo was consumed by setup and configuration items, including setting up the environment, configuring the application, creating and editing templates, forms, reports, dashboards, etc.

This wasn’t astonishing on its own, perhaps, until…

Astonishing Thing Number Two:

At the end of all this setup activity the vendor proudly declared, “Of course, you won’t have to do any of this. We take care of it during implementation. It’s all done by our Professional Services team…”

Wait. What did you say?

You just spent forty-five minutes showing stuff your prospect will never need to use? (Enter your choice of an appropriate exclamation of surprise and astonishment here ______.)

But wait, there’s more: A bonus Astonishing Thing!

I called the presales manager who had sent me the recording and asked, “Why did half of the demo present capabilities that your prospect will never use?”

They responded, “Oh! We’ve been told that these are key differentiators and that we must include them in every demo!”

Moral: Don’t take guidance from the Sales Prevention Team!

Resource:
Stunningly Awful Demos – The Painful Irrelevance of Setup Mode

Help, Mr. Wizard…!

“Tell me, old friend, when did you abandon wisdom for madness?”
– Gandalf to Saruman

Software wizards are intended to make a complex workflow simple to use, but only if a reasonable path is followed! Here’s another true story:

The presenter started a wizard to execute an analysis of business data and was still walking me through the options sixty minutes later!

Once he’d finally completed that portion of the demo, I asked him to show me how to execute that same workflow using the wizard the way someone would typically use it on a day-to-day basis.

How long do you think it took?

Two-and-a-half minutes start to finish.

Moral: Execute all demo pathways with the fewest number of clicks!

Resource:
Page 157 in Great Demo!

Demo Desperation

“Wait! Don’t go away, we haven’t gotten to the best stuff yet!”
– Vendor rep watching people leave the room…

It was an important opportunity, and the vendor organized a two-hour face-to-face demo with the prospect’s team of twenty to make sure there was sufficient time to cover everything. Sadly, discovery had been limited to the confirmation of the prospect’s general “pain,” a few demographics about the number of users, and tech stack requirements.

With this limited information, the vendor began the meeting with fifteen minutes of corporate overview presentation followed by their standard demo, starting with system configuration, then general navigation, followed by function after function in a long, linear flow. It was a perfect example of a stunningly awful Harbor Tour!

A few minutes into the demo portion, one person excused themself and left the room. And since the vendor never asked for introductions of the prospect’s team, the vendor had no clue that they’d just seen the key executive leave the room!

Ten minutes later two more prospect players quietly headed for the door. As the meeting reached one hour, several additional people mumbled something about “having another meeting…” and also slipped away.

It was at this point that the presenter begged, “Wait! Don’t go away, we haven’t gotten to the best stuff yet!”

Now only eight of the original twenty remained, one of whom commented to their neighbor, “I’ll stay as long as the donuts hold out!”

Important opportunity squandered, with no sale resulting.

Additionally, because it was an important opportunity, the vendor had sent a team of four folks to the meeting (including a salesperson, solution consultant, product specialist, and professional services rep) incurring the costs of airfare, lodging, rental car, and food to the tune of ~$5,000, not to mention the associated opportunity cost (pun intended)!

Moral: Do the Last Thing First!

Resources:
Illustrations: Doing the Last Thing First!
Why Structure Demos Like a News Article?
The Menu Approach – A Truly Terrific Demo Self-Rescue Technique

The Guessing Game

“I think equation guessing might be the best method to proceed to obtain the laws for the part of physics which is presently unknown. Yet, when I was much younger, I tried this equation guessing, and I have seen many students try this, but it is very easy to go off in wildly incorrect and impossible directions.”
– Richard P. Feynman

Vendor: “OK, so that wasn’t interesting for you? Well, how about this? Or this? Wait, we’ve got much more…”

Moral: Do discovery!

Resource:
Doing Discovery

Founders’ Frustration

“But there’s so much to show…!”
– SaaS Founder in year two

“When you first released your MVP [Minimum Viable Product], how much time did you schedule for your demos to prospects?” I asked this of a founder who told me her demos weren’t getting the job done.

“An hour,” she replied, “and we generally used all of that time.”

“And how long are your demo meetings now?” I enquired.

“Still an hour…” she noted, “and I’m rushing through the software, but I can’t show everything I want to show!”

I pursued this with, “How often do your development folks release new features?”

“Every few weeks,” she responded.

“And do you incorporate these new capabilities in your demos?”

“Oh yes! I try to show everything!” she confirmed.

“I believe we’ve found the problem,” I told her. “It’s like you’re trying to pack two weeks of clothes for a trip into a bag that only holds one week’s worth.”

I continued, “You’re going to have to prioritize what you show based on your prospects’ needs and wants. Show the most important capabilities first and confirm that they solve the problems. Then show the next sets of relevant features in accord with your prospects’ interests and the meeting time constraints.”

“Just like that too-small travel bag,” I explained, “you’re going to have to leave some things out of your demo!”

Resource:
Why Structure Demos Like a News Article?

Diagnose and Ignore?

“You can ignore reality, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.”
– Ayn Rand

The prospect had invested in several hours of discovery with the vendor, but the vendor’s demo didn’t reflect any of what had been learned…

I was preparing to coach this vendor’s sales and presales teams and had been reviewing a number of discovery conversations and associated demos. In this particular case, I felt the discovery calls (there were two) were quite good. They had uncovered and confirmed several important use cases.

Unfortunately, it appeared that either this information wasn’t communicated to the demo presenter, or the presenter chose to ignore discovery and present their standard demo.

Fascinatingly, about forty minutes into the demo meeting the prospect lead player said, “So, we spent hours with your team outlining our needs and situation. You appear to be ignoring everything we said!”

He paused, looked annoyed, and observed, “You’re showing use cases that are irrelevant and referencing scenarios that we don’t need. You’re like a doctor who did a terrific job diagnosing a specific illness, but your prescription is for diseases that we don’t have!”

He then terminated the demo meeting, ending the sales process for that vendor.

Moral: Map your demos to your discovery information!

Resource:
Situation Slides: A Swiss Army Knife for Sales and Presales

Premature Elaboration

“Chirp chirp chirp chirp…”
– The sound of crickets in an empty room

Because he’d heard prospects ask certain questions repeatedly, he chose to incorporate the answers into his demo “script.”

The result was not what he expected! The more questions that he anticipated and pre-answered, the less successful his demos were.

Before making this change, his audiences appeared engaged as they asked their questions. But now the prospects were quiet and seemed uninterested. By pre-answering questions, he had turned his demos into monologues, removing the possibility for a two-way, bidirectional conversation.

Moral: Encourage a real conversation by letting your prospect ask their questions!

Resource:
The Elegant Art of Managing Questions and Time

More Premature Elaboration: A Competitive Oops!

“Competition whose motive is merely to compete, to drive some other fellow out, never carries very far. The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.”
– Henry Ford

I was the prospect listening to a vendor present their offering. The salesperson was working his way through their product presentation and entered a section about “Competitive Differentiation.”

One slide listed several competitors, and the salesperson began to discuss how his product was superior to the others. I perked up and made a quick note.

Seeing this, the salesperson asked me what I thought about the various competitors.

I responded, “Well, I didn’t know that [Vendor C] had an offering in this space. Many thanks for letting me know – I’ll check them out!”

And [Vendor C] did have an excellent product that, for our needs, was the best fit – which we purchased and enjoyed for years!

Moral? Beware of Premature Elaboration!

Resource:

Stunningly Awful vs Truly Terrific Competitive Differentiation – What, When, and How?

The Overrun Overview

“So, I said we’d only take thirty minutes – but, wow, it looks like I’ve been talking for two hours! Um, hello, are you still there…?”

Moral: Every Moral above!

Resource:
Why Structure Demos Like a News Article?

Preventing Sales Prevention

The Sales Prevention Team is, unfortunately, only too alive and well. To avoid joining this team, even briefly, we recommend a Great Demo! and/or Doing Discovery Workshop, Seminar or consuming the Great Demo!, Doing Discovery, and Suspending Disbelief books.

What Sales Prevention Team practices have you seen?

Copyright © 2026 The Second Derivative – All Rights Reserved.

For more articles on demonstration effectiveness skills and methods, visit our website at https://greatdemo.com/.  For demo tips, best practices, tools and techniques, join the Great Demo! LinkedIn Group or explore our blog at https://greatdemo.com/blog/.

“Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.”

– Robert Frost

Remember newspapers, the analog version of web-delivered news? We can take an extremely valuable page from their playbook and apply it to our demos…

Structure your demonstrations like a news article!

News organizations have been presenting information for several hundreds of years, in print and for the past three decades via the web, and they have learned some highly effective practices that we can employ in demonstrating software.

Think about the news articles you read and consider:

1. How you select which articles to read.
2. How the articles are written.
3. How much you consume of each article.

Enabling Clever and Efficient Consumption of Information

Imagine you’ve just browsed to your favorite web news site (or, for those who still are killing forests, you just picked up today’s newspaper). From their home page (or newspaper front page), what is presented to you and what do you explore? How much do you explore?

You are shown perhaps ten to twenty headlines, many of which are paired with images (think Great Demo! Illustrations). You scan these for stories of interest to you.

You browse some headlines but never click into the articles. For others you read the headline, click into the article, and consume a paragraph or two and then exit. And for a few intriguing articles, you read most or even the entire story!

In this method of communication, you are enjoying two highly effective strategies:

1. The Menu Approach.
2. Inverted Pyramid.

The Menu Approach is applied as you scan the headlines and images, seeking stories of interest to you. It works (literally!) like a restaurant menu: It shows you what’s available and lets you choose which items you’d like to pursue.

News websites (and newspapers) organize information in a hierarchy of consumable components that can be accessed rapidly, explored as deeply as desired, and then exited at any point to move to the next topic of interest. The top level of the news hierarchy is the home page, followed by the list (another Menu!) of sections: sports, finance, international, entertainment, technology, health, comics (my first-thing-in-the-morning favorite!), weather, etc.

The homepage and each section’s start page are beautiful examples of the Menu Approach in action. Now, let’s examine the construction of the articles themselves!

Each individual article is cleverly organized to enable readers to make rapid decisions about their depth of interest. The headline presents the topic, providing a binary opportunity for readers to pursue the story or move on. In a well-written news article, the first one or two paragraphs summarize the story concisely (known as the lede). Many readers are completely satisfied with this amount of information and read no further, returning to scan for other headlines.

The subsequent paragraphs in an article drill deeper and relate the story in more detail. Readers who are truly interested in the topic are the typical consumers of this level of information.

Inverted Pyramid

This article structure and presentation of information is known as the “Inverted Pyramid” style of writing. It presents the most important information right at the beginning, starting with the headline then followed by the overall summary of the article in the first one or two paragraphs.

Material in subsequent paragraphs is more and more detailed and of less importance. Reading on towards the end of an article we generally find the finest levels of granularity and smallest details.

In the bad old days of paper and ink, newspaper editors were able to cut articles to fit the space available (or to sell more advertising) by cutting from the bottom of the article upwards. That way they knew they’d be removing the least important information.

News organizations have evolved the Inverted Pyramid method of presenting information over hundreds of years. Why not take advantage of this learning?

What Happens in Demos Without Inverted Pyramid?

Have you ever heard a demo presenter say, “We have lot to cover so I’ll go really fast…”? Have you ever said something similar yourself?

Have you ever been unable to get to the “best stuff” because time was short or a corporate overview presentation consumed part of your time?

Many of us respond by moving very rapidly through our demo (while also telling our audience that “we want this to be as interactive as possible, so please ask questions…”). Are we surprised when we don’t get through the material and our prospects don’t ask any questions?

We shouldn’t be, we’ve turned the demo into a one-way monologue!

Organize Your Demos Using Inverted Pyramid

So, take a page from the news services. Present the demo equivalent of a headline or photo succinctly and rapidly. That’s the top of the Inverted Pyramid, and in Great Demo! methodology we call this an Illustration.

For some prospect players, particularly executives, this may be sufficient!

For those interested in the demo equivalent of the first couple of paragraphs (the lede), present the key capabilities using a minimum of mouse clicks. This corresponds to the Great Demo! “Do It” pathway.

Finally, for audiences who are really interested, you can dig deeper and explore the breadth and depth of the relevant capabilities, just like those who wish to read more of the article. In Great Demo! we call this “Peeling Back the Layers.”

Interestingly, also note that there are very few readers of the news who read everything on a news website (I can’t imagine if it is possible, in fact!). Similarly in demos, you are not obligated to present everything that your software can do, so please don’t.

And as news people say, “Don’t bury the lede!”

Combine the Menu Approach with Inverted Pyramid

Let’s say you have four prospect players in your demo meeting:

1. An executive
2. A middle manager
3. An individual contributor
4. A system administrator

How do you organize your demo for this disparate group of people? You combine the Menu Approach with Inverted Pyramid for each player: it’s actually four individual demos!

Work with the executive first: present a Menu for him or her. Let them choose the item of most interest and then present the Illustration. Is this enough or would they like to see more? Yes? One or two “Do It” clicks satisfies their interest and they are done.

Who’s next? The middle manager.

You follow the same process: Menu, Illustration, Do It, and then Peel Back the Layers in accord with their depth and level of interest.

Next up is the individual contributor. Rince and repeat: Menu, Illustration, Do It, and then Peel Back the Layers.

Who is last? The system administrator, and you follow the same process for them. Interestingly, what the admin wants to see is like someone who reads sections of the news that nobody else care about!

Can Inverted Pyramid be applied elsewhere in demos? But of course!

Answering Questions

“Can it export to ___?” asks the prospect.

“Absolutely! We support seven different types of export formats, including ___, ___, ___, ___, and especially ___, ___, and ___, which offer significant advantages in export fidelity as some of the colors aren’t rendered as accurately in the other formats, plus the translation of European number format to U.S. format is done really well, along with handling address and phone numbers from 71 countries…” responds the vendor, who is about to continue when the prospect says,

“Oh – so the answer was ‘yes.’”

In addition to organizing the content of your demo, one of the best uses of Inverted Pyramid is answering questions. You start with the highest-level answer and then test to see if your prospect is satisfied or wants more detail.

In the dialog above, the vendor should have started with “Yes” and then asked, “Is that sufficient or would you like more depth?”

Simple and very effective! (Is that enough or would you like to see more on the Elegant Art of Managing Questions and Time?)

Running Short on Time?

Earlier I noted that newspaper editors could trim articles to fit the available space by cutting stories from the bottom upwards. In doing so they knew they’d lose the least important information and that the balance of the article was unaffected.

We can apply the same principle in our demos!

Let’s say you expected an hour for your demo meeting, but you’ve only been given thirty minutes: what do you do? By applying Inverted Pyramid, you are able to communicate the most important capabilities and concepts to your prospect; you’ll leave many of the details and less important information out. That’s the demo equivalent of cutting upwards from the bottom of your story.

Have only twenty minutes? Same principle.

Only ten minutes? Invert that pyramid!

How about a one-minute interaction in an elevator? Inverted Pyramid is the answer!

Use the News

News organizations have evolved and production hardened the use of the Menu Approach and Inverted Pyramid in presenting information extremely effectively, mapped to each individual’s desire.

Why not apply the same ideas in your demos?

(And perhaps in other forms of communication, as well!)

Copyright © 2009-2026 The Second Derivative – All Rights Reserved.

To learn the methods introduced above, consider enrolling in a Great Demo! Doing Discovery or Demonstration Skills Workshop. For more demo and discovery tips, best practices, tools and techniques, explore our books, blog and articles on the Resources pages of our website at https://GreatDemo.com and join the Great Demo! & Doing Discovery LinkedIn Group to learn from others and share your experiences.

Here’s a simple method to assess yourself or your team, based on seven levels of increasing proficiency:

• Level 1: Uncovers statements of pain.
• Level 2: Uncovers pain and explores more deeply.
• Level 3: Uncovers pain, explores deeply, broadens the pain and investigates the impact.
• Level 4: Uncovers pain, explores and broadens, investigates impact and quantifies.
• Level 5: Uncovers pain, explores and broadens, investigates impact, quantifies and reengineers vision.
• Level 6: Applies these skills across the Technology Adoption Curve, “burn victims”, disruptive and new product categories, transactional sales cycles, and other scenarios.
• Level 7: Integrates and aligns the skills above into a cohesive discovery methodology.

Pre-Assess

Before reading on, take a moment and decide where you (or your team) stand on these Levels…

Now, let’s explore each briefly.

Level 1

When doing discovery, if you or your colleagues simply uncover “Pain” and go no further, then you and they are novices!

For example, your prospect offers, “Our current process is manual…” Many vendors leap to propose a solution at this point. Sadly, that’s what happens in far too many “discovery calls.”

Operating at Level 1 can barely be called “doing discovery”! It is clearly insufficient and results in losses to more competent vendors and No Decision outcomes.

Let’s go a bit deeper…

Level 2

Vendor reps with slightly better discovery skills ask follow-up questions to explore the prospect’s pain more deeply. For example:

The prospect says, “Our current process is manual…”

Vendor replies, “Sorry to hear this – why is this an issue?”

Prospect responds, “Well, it takes too long to get the reports we need and there are often errors in the reports…”

This represents a step up in skills attainment to Level 2. The pain is a bit deeper and broader, but we can go much further!

Level 3

Practitioners at Level 3 seek to understand more about the impact of the pain on the prospect’s immediate and extended organization. Let’s continue the conversation:

The prospect says, “Our current process is manual…”

Vendor replies, “Sorry to hear this – why is this an issue?”

Prospect responds, “Well, it takes too long to get the reports we need and there are often errors in the reports, because of the manual process…”

Vendor asks, “What’s in these reports and how are they used?”

Prospect answers, “Well, the reports give us visibility into where we have problems to address. When the reports are late – which is nearly always – the delay results in unhappy internal customers…”

This conversation continues, exploring the content of the reports, how they are consumed, the nature of the problems, how the user population is impacted, and how addressing the process impacts the prospect’s goals and objectives.

This discussion broadens and deepens the exploration of the pain and seeks to look beyond the workflow. Who else is impacted and in which departments? Is this a local pain or something that affects the organization more extensively?

Level 3 is all about understanding impact.

Where can we go from here? To uncover value!

Level 4

At Level 4, customer-facing vendor reps quantify the pain, using the prospect’s own numbers. For example:

Vendor says, “You noted that it takes too long to get these reports done – how long is it taking today?”

Prospect responds, “Oh, it takes about a week – 5 working days…”

Vendor asks, “How long would you like it to take – or need it to take – to feel you’ve really addressed this problem?”

Prospect answers, “Well, if we could get these done accurately in a half a day, that would be terrific…!”

Now we have a tangible Delta of value: The difference between the prospect’s current state and their desired future state of 4.5 days. Our vendor should further explore this by asking how often the reports are generated, how often errors occur (and what happens when they do) and how much time is consumed by the team creating these reports.

The answers to these questions might result in the following exchange:

Vendor summarizes, “So, if I understand correctly, generating these reports is currently consuming nearly 1.5 FTEs annually, and taking 4½ days longer than you want. In addition you said it is causing low internal NPS numbers for you and your team.”

Prospect responds, “That’s correct – and I hadn’t really internalized the full cost of this problem until now…!”

Level 4 skills are all about uncovering value.

Can we do better than this? Absolutely…!

Level 5

Practitioners at Level 5 reengineer the prospect’s vision of a solution.

Frequently, prospects are unaware of what is possible with your offerings. Their understanding is limited to the information that you have made publicly available, which is almost certainly a subset of what your product(s) can do!

Continuing the conversation from above, our vendor asks the prospect to describe or share an example of the report currently used. After viewing the report, the vendor realizes that it is lacking certain capabilities or possibilities, and explores these with the prospect:

Vendor notes, “It looks like you have a good basic view of the what’s working and what’s not in these reports, but they are static, if I understand correctly…  Would it be useful or interesting to be able to drill down to find the root causes, right from the report?”

Prospect responds, “Wow, yes that would be terrific – that would save a lot of time…!”  [How much time savings might also be explored here…]

Our vendor has now proposed an improved version of the report and the prospect has agreed this would be better. This is one example of Vision Reengineering: Going beyond your prospect’s initial vision of a solution.

The ability to execute this kind of Vision Reengineering is a Level 5 skill.

Level 5 – With a Differentiating Twist

Vision Reengineering is also an opportunity to outflank competition.

In our example conversation, our vendor realizes that they have a relevant capability that is not matched by the competition and introduces it using a Biased Question:

Vendor notes, “Many of our other customers, in similar situations to what you’ve described so far, found it very useful to have these reports sent automatically to the consumers via an email link – but only when there was a problem to be addressed. Our customers report that they didn’t waste time accessing reports where there were no issues – in some cases, they reported saving several hours every week. Is this a capability you’d also like to have?”

Prospect answers, “Wow – yes, that would be really helpful for us as well…!”

Vendor offers, “Great – let’s plan to include it in the demo…”

Here, our vendor rep has introduced the alert-based capability – a key differentiator – and turned it into a Specific Capability that the prospect wants and expects in their solution.

Folks operating at Level 5 not only reengineer vision but also outflank their competition.

Brief Digression

We’ve outlined a representative subset of discovery skills to enable an easy assessment of discovery skill levels. There are many other skills not addressed in this simple ranking system, including managing timing and flow, probing methods, workflow analysis, going beyond the workflow, starting discovery, individuals vs. groups, “Why” questions, culture and uniqueness, and more.

The take-away is simple: There’s much more to be learned than what is represented in the 5 skills levels defined so far! Which takes us to…

Level 6

The skills and levels outlined above are terrific for “standard” prospects, but sadly there is no such thing as a “standard” prospect! While many prospects fit within a reasonable range of situations and experiences, there are numerous types that extend well beyond the norm.

These include “burn victims”, prospects on different portions of the Technology Adoption Curve, prospects for disruptive and new product categories, repeat vs first-time buyers, working with the C-Suite, transactional sales cycles, and other scenarios.

Burn victims offer a good example to explore…

Burn Victims – Fear and Loathing of Risk Unrewarded

“Have you tried to fix this before?” Answers to this question can yield interesting and sometimes surprising information.

Customers who tried to address problems previously and failed are known as “burn victims” and they tend to be very careful about subsequent solution proposals!

A “Yes” response requires careful follow-up questions. “What happened?” is a good starting point. You want to understand what actions were taken, what tools were purchased, what was implemented, when this all took place, and what were the outcomes for the individual, as well as the organization and others who were impacted.

There is great risk in change, often accompanied by fear and loathing. And for good reason!

Have you ever seen an implementation effort fail? Have you ever met a customer who was unable to gain the desired value from an offering? Have you ever encountered someone who had to roll back to a previous solution?

In discovery conversations, you need to determine if your prospect was a burn victim and then explore exactly what happened. Only by hearing and understanding your prospect’s sad story can you convince them that the same thing won’t happen with you as the vendor!

Level 6 Revisited

Another example is inherent in the range of personalities associated with different positions on the Technology Adoption Curve. Innovators tend to require very little discovery: They often synthesize use cases on their own! Early Adopters are similar, but typically want a reasonable level of discovery to confirm their own opinions.

Early Majority prospects differ, sometimes greatly, from Late Majority players in the level of proof required and the amount of corresponding discovery they need. Whereas Early Majority individuals may be satisfied with a Technical Proof Demo, as you move to the right on the curve they’ll start to require POCs.

Late Majority players are much more likely to pursue an RFP process (and even further to the right expect an RFI followed by an RFP and a high probability that the entire effort will end in a “No Decision” outcome!).

Laggards may never make a change and no amount of discovery will satisfy!

For another Level 6 example, consider transactional sales processes, where opportunity size is small and interactions with prospects are brief. These scenarios require yet another version of discovery (and demo) skills.

Level 6 practitioners are adept at both the questioning/probing methods and application of these skills to the special circumstances of the “non-standard” population.

What’s next?

Level 7

The skills discussed so far are just that – a set of individual skills – which leads to, “when and how should these various skills be applied?”

Should a discovery conversation begin with an exploration of “pain” or address prospect pain and solution vision later on? Are there best practices for timing and flow? How do you change topics; when do you employ Expansion Questions to dig deeper; what are good quid pro quo to offer along the way; how do you know you’ve covered enough?

And how do you, as an organization, ensure that the output of your discovery conversations is consistent within your team? How do you avoid CRM “Discovery” notes from untrained reps that consist of, “It’s a huge opportunity”?

The answer is that discovery must be perceived as an integrated, cohesive methodology – where the individual skills are applied in a structured, repeatable process.

An Analogy – Let’s Build a House!

Contemplate a range of construction skills: The ability to hammer nails, drill holes, saw wood, pour cement, connect wiring, plumb sinks and drains, install drywall, paint, etc. Each of these skills takes time to learn and master.

Building a complete house requires these skills and coordinated timing and flow.

In order to know what to build, an architect generates plans and a full set may include separate pages for the foundation, framing, plumbing plan, electrical and lighting, heating and cooling, roof and exterior, interior finish, cabinetry and fittings, and more.

The contractor takes the plans and coordinates the timing and flow of each step: That’s the methodology of construction! You can’t install light fixtures and electric wiring until the framing is in place, but you also need to do the electrical before internal drywall and finish.

And imagine the disaster if a concrete foundation is poured and then the contractor realizes that plumbing and electrical conduits should have been installed first…!

Methodology is what coordinates the individual skills with the correct timing and flow.

Back to Level 7 – Discovery as a Methodology

Our construction contractor works from a set of architect plans to know what needs to be built. Over a period of years, they have acquired the knowledge to lay out the timing, assemble the appropriate skilled workers as needed and direct them. (And there are numerous books that lay out the process – a quick search on Amazon shows dozens.)

Similarly, seasoned sales and presales practitioners with many years of experience may have synthesized their own, personal discovery methodologies, but each will have strengths, weaknesses, gaps and additions based on their personal experiences. What is needed is an organizational discovery methodology: that’s Level 7!

At the simplest, this means that vendor teams need discovery outlines or templates predefined with recommended flow and timing. A completed discovery document for a prospect is the output of the process and such completed discovery documents should look similar from sales rep to rep, presales practitioner to practitioner, and customer success manager to manager.

A successful discovery methodology works comfortably for both prospect and vendor. At the end of the conversation(s), the prospect feels fully “heard” and the vendor feels fully enabled to propose a precise solution.

An assessment for Level 7 includes two “figures of merit”:

1. Your organization executes skills at Level 5 at minimum (and at Level 6 for the typical range of prospects you encounter).
2. 2. You have consistent capture and documentation of the discovery information defined as the complete set necessary to propose precise solutions, and to implement and enable your customers to achieve the agreed-upon value.

(Hint: If your customer success team is confused or unclear about your new customers’ goals, use cases, and success criteria, based on your internal documentation, you definitely aren’t at Level 7!)

Seven Skills Levels for Doing Discovery

Recapping:

• Level 1: Uncovers statements of pain.
• Level 2: Uncovers pain and explores more deeply.
• Level 3: Uncovers pain, explores deeply, broadens the pain, and investigates the impact.
• Level 4: Uncovers pain, explores and broadens, investigates impact, and quantifies.
• Level 5: Uncovers pain, explores and broadens, investigates impact, quantifies, and reengineers vision.
• Level 6: Applies these skills across the Technology Adoption Curve, including burn victims, disruptive and new product categories, transactional sales cycles, and other scenarios.
• Level 7: Integrates and aligns the skills above into a cohesive discovery methodology.

These seven levels represent a simple method of assessing the state of your discovery skills.

Reassess

Now, that you’ve consumed these definitions and examples, reassess where you (or your team) are. How does your new assessment compare with what you thought at the beginning of this article? Most people, when they are honest with themselves, are operating at Level 2 or 3!

And in the spirit of “Never Stop Learning,” where can you (or your team) improve?

(Contact us if you’d like to explore implementing Doing Discovery skills and methodology at your organization…!)

Copyright © The Second Derivative – All Rights Reserved.

To learn the methods introduced above, consider enrolling in a Great Demo! Doing Discovery or Great Demo Workshop. For more demo and discovery tips, best practices, tools and techniques, explore our books, blog and articles on the Resources pages of our website at https://GreatDemo.com and join the Great Demo! & Doing Discovery LinkedIn Group to learn from others and share your experiences.

What’s in this article for you?

Understanding Critical Business Issues (CBIs) can make the difference between successfully closing business vs wasting your time with No Decision outcomes. Helping your prospects recognize their own CBIs can accelerate their buying processes and bolster their business cases.

If you are unfamiliar with Critical Business Issues or you’d like a refresh, you may want to start with the “What” portion of this article, followed by the “Why” section which explains their importance and the impact of failing to capture them.

If you are an existing Great Demo! or Doing Discovery practitioner, or if you are already familiar with CBIs but sometimes struggle to identify or collect them, I invite you to jump to the “How” segment.

Finally, if you find it hard to differentiate between CBIs and Problems/Reasons, you are invited to review the “What” section as well!

WHAT

What Is a Critical Business Issue?

Let’s start with a question: Are you on track to achieve your objectives this year?

Prospects may articulate their challenges at two distinct levels:

1. The Critical Business Issue(s) – these are the outcomes of the lower-level challenges.
2. The prospect’s Problems or Reasons that cause the higher-level outcomes.

The wise vendor will want to understand both of these and be able to differentiate between the two.

A Critical Business Issue (CBI) is best defined as an individual’s objective that is at risk. Typically, these align to one’s quarterly, annual, or project-based objectives.

Consider: How are you measured? How will you know, at the end of the year, that you have been a success? In most organizations, you’ll meet with your manager and discuss whether you achieved, exceeded, or failed to meet your objectives for the previous time period. Hopefully, you are also tracking your progress along the way, as well!

• If you are on track to achieve your objectives, or you have no need or desire to change your trajectory, then you don’t have a Critical Business Issue.How do you know if you are on track? You examine the measurement(s) you use to determine achievement. If these metrics or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are “looking good” then you don’t have a CBI.
• On the other hand, if you are concerned that you might miss an objective or, worse, you know you won’t achieve an objective, then you do have a Critical Business Issue.How do you know if you are not on track? If the metrics or KPIs show that you are at risk of missing an objective, then you do have a CBI.

Summarizing, it is these checkpoints when you assess your personal status and progress towards your objectives that yield two possible outcomes:

1. Things are looking good and it is likely that you’ll achieve your objectives. No CBI.
2. Things are not looking good and your ability to achieve your objectives is at risk! You have a CBI.

It is this second situation that presents you with a Critical Business Issue: The risk of failing to meet your quarterly, annual, or project-based objectives. Your prospects operate the same way and are much more likely to act when they are at risk of failing to meet an objective, particularly a key objective.

Example Scenarios

Let’s explore some simple example situations that your prospects may encounter:

• If your prospect is in sales, it is very likely that they have a quarterly and/or annual revenue quota that they need to meet. If they are currently under quota and it looks like they may not achieve the necessary numbers, they are at risk. They have a Critical Business Issue.

  CBI: “At risk of not achieving quota.”

• If they are in operations, their objectives are typically to produce the required output, in the required timeframe, and within budget. Missing any one (or more) of these three measures puts this person at risk of missing their objectives.

  For example, they could produce the required output, but if there is a need for substantial rework, then they would be at risk of missing the required timeframe for delivery and running over budget as well. Any of these results in a Critical Business Issue.

  CBI: “At risk of not producing the required output on time, within budget, and on spec.”

• If they are in IT, they are likely measured by certain Service Level Agreement (SLA) metrics. These could include parameters such as availability, performance, or time-to-resolution.

  If their SLAs are not being met or are at risk, then they have a Critical Business Issue.

  CBI: “At risk of not achieving agreed SLAs.”

• Project completion is another area that can yield CBIs. If your prospect is in charge of a project and that project is currently looking good for completion on time, on spec, and within budget, then they will likely meet their objective.

  However, if any one or more of these three parameters is not met, then they have a Critical Business Issue. Note that they could deliver on time and within specification, but still not meet their objective if the project runs over budget.

  CBI: “At risk of not completing the project on time, on spec, and within budget.”

CBIs are personal, based on an individual’s specific objectives and the risk of not achieving them. CBIs are simple, but precise – just as an individual’s objectives are precisely defined (or should be!). CBIs are typically time-bound and, most importantly, they have specific measurements to differentiate between success and failure.

Note that several individuals may share a common objective. This occurs in some presales organizations, for example, where a presales team shares a revenue quota objective. Each individual team member is still subject to the success or failure measurement, in spite of the objective being shared.

CBIs are not squishy or ill-defined. “Do a good job” or “contribute to the effort” are not well-written objectives. How can one tell if a person has met the “measurement” of a “doing a good job”? Could “contribute” simply mean “show up?” You may occasionally encounter prospects who lack specific well-drafted objectives. These people are rather unlikely to have Critical Business Issues and, correspondingly, are unlikely to seek solutions.

Changing gears slightly, you’ll notice that we haven’t discussed the cause – the Problems or Reasons – that puts each of the above four example prospects at risk. That’s the next level down.

Problems/Reasons – “Pain” vs CBIs

Most prospects when they express pain do so as a description of one or more problems. Let’s use an enterprise software salesperson as an example.

You ask, “So what seems to be the trouble?” The response might be, “Well, I don’t have enough good leads…”

They are expressing “pain.” “Pain,” however, is poorly defined. It could be a CBI, or a problem or reason that is causing the CBI. “Pain,” therefore, needs to be qualified.

Is it a CBI? Yes, if it maps directly to an objective that is at risk. No, if it is an underlying problem or reason that impacts the ability of the prospect to achieve their objectives.

In the example above, Great Demo! practitioners will recognize (I hope!) that this prospect has articulated a Problem/Reason and not a CBI. Your job is to (gently, but firmly) help the prospect associate this Problem/Reason with a CBI.

A simple example would be to ask, “What is the impact that insufficient leads is having on your objectives?”

The salesperson answers, “Well, without good leads I don’t have enough opportunities to pursue…” This response is getting closer, but it is not quite there!

Why? Because “insufficient opportunities” is not how the rep is measured. Quota is the metric, so you need to dig deeper (or push higher).

Accordingly, you ask, “Tell me, how are you measured? How will you know that you have been a success at the end of the year?”

The salesperson replies, “Oh! If I make my quota – if I achieve my quarterly and annual numbers…!” Now you’ve uncovered a CBI!

Your next step is to associate the Problems/Reasons with the CBI:

You explore, “So If I understand correctly, the lack of good leads is impacting your ability to make your numbers…”

The salesperson concurs, saying, “Exactly…!”

Congratulations – you just uncovered the information you need for the first three items on a Great Demo! Situation Slide, and you have clearly differentiated the CBI from the underlying Problems/Reasons:

Job Title and Industry:Enterprise Software Salesperson

Critical Business Issue:At risk of not achieving quota

Problems/Reasons:Insufficient number of good leads

“But” you may be thinking, “Why isn’t simply uncovering ‘pain’ sufficient for a sales process?” The answer is that “pain” alone is often an inadequate driving force.

WHY

Enduring Pain vs Seeking Solutions

People will live with the pain they know forever, unless it is associated with a Critical Business Issue!

I love to tell the following story to illustrate this idea. The setting is a Great Demo! or Doing Discovery Workshop, and I’m working to communicate the difference – and importance – of CBIs vs Problems/Reasons:

I ask the participants, “Does anyone here have a car that has been making a noise or a sound for a period of time?”

Invariably, someone responds, “Yes, my car has been making a weird noise for a while…”

“What kind of sound is it?” I inquire.

“Kind of a screeching noise coming from the left front wheel when I make turns” the participant replies. Other people in the room nod their heads – they have had similar issues.

I ask, “Does the noise bother you?”

“Yes, it did for a while, but I’ve learned to get used to it…” is the response.

I probe, “How long has this been taking place?”

“Oh, I’d guess about nine months…” responds the participant.

Nine months! This is a terrific example of a Problem/Reason – a “pain” that this person has been living with for nine months. It is not a Critical Business Issue because it hasn’t impacted their ability to achieve their objectives (Well, not yet!)

I explore, “What would cause you to get this repaired?”

The participant replies, “Oh, I don’t know, I guess if I couldn’t drive the car anymore…”

I say, “Perfect example! Imagine you are on your way to the airport to fly to the biggest demo of your career. It is stormy, with heavy wind and rain. You are halfway to the airport when suddenly your left front wheel starts to fall off the car! You immediately pull off the highway, but now you are at risk of missing your flight.”

I ask, “Now, would you get it fixed or find an alternative mechanism to get to the airport?”

“Absolutely!” is the response.

I continue, “So, now it has become critical?”

“Yes… Ah Ha…! Now I see the difference between a pain or Problem/Reason and a CBI…!

(How is your car doing, by the way?)

Think about your own business life: How many things frustrate you, or that you complain about, but you never act? These things just seem to linger and are never addressed. These are perfect examples of “pains” or Problems/Reasons. We don’t like the situation, but we often live with them … forever!

They bother us but we don’t address them. They aren’t important enough to address. Why are they not important? Because they don’t impede our ability to achieve our objectives (or they don’t impact our ability to achieve our objectives enough, compared with other problems). Problems/Reasons that don’t impact our ability to achieve an objective are just “pains” that we live with.

Now ask yourself, what does impact your ability to achieve your objectives? It is those particular Problems/Reasons that are putting your specific objective(s) at risk. The objective that is at risk is the CBI, and the underlying “pains” are the Problems/Reasons.

The essence of the importance of a Critical Business Issue is that it does represent someone’s inability to achieve their objectives. Failure to achieve objectives can result in innumerable negative outcomes, ranging from personal consequences such as reduced compensation, loss of a promotion opportunity, or movement out of a position of authority. Failure to achieve objectives for senior members of a company can have organizational negative impact as well, such as layoffs, inability to pursue acquisitions or mergers, or falling stock price.

Finally, for presales and salespeople pursuing individual sales opportunities, the lack of a CBI has another likely result: A No Decision outcome. This is where your prospect chooses to remain as they are and does not move forward with a solution. This happens because their “pains” are at the Problem/Reason level and are unattached to a CBI. Those “pains” will continue to be Problems/Reasons … forever!

So, “pain” alone is insufficient. It must be attached to a CBI for a sales opportunity to move forward productively.

HOW

Earlier you saw an example of moving someone from the Problems/Reasons level to uncovering the associated CBI in the case of the salesperson with insufficient leads resulting in their risk of missing quota. Let’s explore other methods of uncovering CBIs.

Using “Why?” Questions to Uncover CBIs

“Why?” questions are particularly useful when you need to surface your prospect’s CBI. Let’s say that you’ve invested considerable time discussing their Problems/Reasons, Specific Capabilities, and other discovery parameters, but your prospect has yet to articulate a CBI. “Why?” can be an elegant method to shift the conversation up a level. Here’s an example:

You say, “We’ve been discussing your situation for a while and I’m beginning to feel like I understand it reasonably well, but tell me, why did you reach out to me in the first place? Are there specific goals or objectives that you need to achieve, or that are at risk?”

Your prospect responds, “Oh! Yes, I was assigned this project, and I’m concerned that I won’t complete it on time…”

You follow-up with, “Thanks – I understand. And when do you need to have it done?”

“By December 1 this year. It needs to be complete and tested for a kick-off at the beginning of the year,” replies your prospect.

“And when do you currently expect completion, if you don’t make any changes to your current trajectory?” you ask.

“Likely it won’t be done until the following April…”

Congratulations! You just uncovered both a CBI and a Critical Date, plus a key Delta (a measurement of value)! The prospect’s CBI is to complete the project by December 1; the Delta is the four-month difference between completion in April (and missing an important objective) vs finishing on time by December 1 (and achieving their objective).

That only took one use of “why?” to accomplish. In other cases, you may need to ask “why?” multiple times to unwrap the layers hiding your prospect’s CBI.

For example, your salesperson prospect says, “I don’t have enough good leads…”

You pursue this, asking, “Help me understand, why is that a problem?”

“Well,” responds your prospect, “without enough leads I typically don’t have enough opportunities to fill my pipeline…”

“I see,” you reply, “and what does that cause? Why do you need to fill your pipeline?”

Your prospect clarifies, “I need a good number of leads to work with because only a few will become real opportunities.”

“OK,” you note, “But why is that important?”

“Well,” your prospect explains, “I’m not going to make my numbers if I don’t have enough good opportunities…!”

(Ding ding ding ding ding…!) “OK,” you say, “Now I understand. Your real issue is your risk of not making your numbers this quarter. Is that correct?”

“Absolutely!” exclaims your prospect. “This quarter is already at risk, and my full year quota is looking ‘iffy’ as well!”

Note that you can harvest three sets of discovery information from this conversation:

1. Critical Business Issue: At risk of missing quarterly and annual quotas.
2. Problems/Reasons:               Insufficient leads and not enough good opportunities.
3. Critical Date(s): End of this quarter and end of their fiscal year.

This conversation took three “why?” questions to reach a CBI. That’s not unusual for staff-level prospects. Does that change when interacting with managers?

The Higher You Go…

The higher your prospect’s job title, the more likely they will directly articulate a CBI. C-Suite members and other executives tend to operate at the CBI level. “Achieve X in revenues.” “Manage costs below Y.” “Launch the new product by Z.”

For example, a head of sales knows they need to achieve the required revenue numbers to enable the business to succeed. A head of operations similarly knows they need to deliver the required goods or complete the necessary projects on time, on spec, and within budget. CEOs and heads of business units are typically measured by profit or growth metrics, which combine the objectives of the head of sales and head of operations.

C-Suite and similar executives often communicate their objectives (and hence their organizations’ overall objectives) in quarterly meetings or statements. They want to make it absolutely clear what needs to be accomplished and how their organization will be measured.

The higher the job title, the more likely they will communicate directly in CBIs. The lower the job title the more you should expect to hear Problems/Reasons.

The Chain of Pain

There is often a direct linear relationship between managers and their teams in terms of their CBIs. Very simply, a manager’s Problems/Reasons may be their staff members’ CBIs. You can read more about this idea in the Great Demo! Third Edition book. You can learn (much!) more about doing discovery in the book (cleverly titled), Doing Discovery.

“How Are You Measured?”

Another very good way to uncover a CBI is to ask, “Tell me, how are you measured – how will you know at the end of the year that you have been a success?” There is a very strong tendency for people to recall their objectives when you ask this question!

A True Story

One day, a head of sales called me, out of the blue, and opened the conversation with, “Our demos suck…!” This was one of the most fascinating openings I had ever heard coming from a prospect. We moved into a very productive discovery conversation that ran for about an hour.

We had largely completed our conversation, and we were in the wrap-up phase. However, while I had terrific insights into his team’s demos, related factors, his organization’s culture, products, sales process steps and more, I hadn’t actually heard him articulate a Critical Business Issue.

Even though I was confident I already knew his CBI, I wanted to hear it from his lips.

I asked, “So, tell me, what caused you to pick up your phone and call me today?”

He answered, “Well, I’ve been given a sales quota for next year that is 20% higher than this year’s – and I know we won’t make those numbers with our current demos…!”

Fabulous! In that one sentence he communicated both his CBI and a Delta – what a delight…!

Enablement

It is extremely helpful to have an idea of likely CBIs for each prospect’s Job Title prior to a discovery conversation. This enables you to tell whether the responses you hear are reasonable, or if your prospect is simply articulating Problems/Reasons-level issues. For example, we know ahead of time that anyone in sales will likely have “revenue quota” or “making the numbers” as a CBI.

Many organizations that have implemented and adopted the Doing Discovery and Great Demo! methodology have generated enablement assets to support their practices. One terrific asset is a listing of high-probability prospect Job Titles with corresponding CBIs.

This enables sales, presales, marketing, and customer success staff to very quickly gain an understanding of their prospects’ and customers’ likely CBIs. As new prospect Job Titles appear and CBIs are collected for these, they are added to the enablement library.

What should you do when you encounter an unfamiliar Job Title and have little or no insight into their likely objectives or CBIs? Do some research ahead of your meeting. Go online and search for job descriptions or job openings for that specific Job Title. You’ll likely find wonderful examples detailing that Job Title’s expected objectives or measurements of success. ChatGPT (and similar AI engines) can be an excellent source for this information.

Summary

Prospects tend to articulate their challenges at two distinct levels:

1. The higher level: The Critical Business Issue(s) – these are the outcomes of the lower-level challenges.
2. The lower level: The prospect’s Problems or Reasons that cause the higher-level outcomes.

Now you should be able to uncover both levels and differentiate between the two. Doing so will improve your sales stage conversion metrics, reduce No Decision outcomes, and encrispen your sales process and your buyers’ processes, as well!

Copyright © 2023 -2026 The Second Derivative – All Rights Reserved

To learn the methods introduced above, consider enrolling in a Great Demo! Doing Discovery or Demonstration Skills Workshop. For more demo and discovery tips, best practices, tools and techniques, explore our blog and articles on the Resources pages of our website at https://GreatDemo.com and join the Great Demo! & Doing Discovery LinkedIn Group to share your experiences and learn from others.

“I believe that there is always something new to learn, in fact, that is one of the three reasons that I chose to become a chef, that my education is never over.”
– Anne Burrell
With respect to doing discovery and delivering demos, are you a cook or a chef?

What’s the difference? Cooks follow recipes, chefs create recipes! Cooks specialize in one or a few functions; chefs manage the entire menu and kitchen operation.

In doing discovery and delivering demos, most customer-facing team members are like cooks: They execute the prescribed skills and follow the established processes over and over, seeking to achieve consistent, high performance. Their objective is to minimize mistakes and follow best practices.

A few folks, on the other hand, are like chefs seeking to improve processes and pursue new methods. They generate and test new ideas, exploring new dimensions and going beyond existing boundaries. They welcome making mistakes and the information and experiences that those experiments yield.

We need both types; in fact, we need many more cooks than chefs!

Cooks and Execution

“A recipe has no soul. You, as the cook, must bring soul to the recipe.”
– Thomas Keller

Cooks practice following recipes until they are consistent and predictable (and hopefully tasty!). It takes time and repetition to execute even simple recipes to acceptable standards. The same is true, or perhaps harder, for delivering demos and doing discovery!

It often takes six months or longer before a customer-facing team member is considered “ready” to present a demo to a prospect or customer. And that demo will likely follow the established recipe rigorously!

Like the simple process of frying an egg, there are numerous nuances that impact execution, including customer preferences, ingredients, and the kitchen itself. Regarding customer preferences, some people desire their eggs “over easy” with yolks that barely touched the pan while others would gag when seeing these on their plate! That later group wants eggs that could bounce after cooking, which the first group would claim are “ruined.”

Ingredients are another dimension to consider. Fresh eggs vs been-around-for-a-while? Fertile or not? Jumbo, extra-large, large, medium, small, or peewee? Butter, bacon fat, other oil, or none? Garnish or plain? And how many eggs does the client want?

These choices map to the many options for demos. For example, executives prefer crisp demos with a focus on outcomes; middle managers want to see capabilities that map to their interests; and end-users yet another set. Each has their needs and preferences. Oh, and system admins probably want their eggs uncracked and uncooked, sitting on the shelf in the fridge, ready to be “configured!”

The nature of the kitchen, or kitchens, yields yet another set of learning challenges that find equivalents in demos and discovery. Gas stove, electric, wood, or other source of heat? Non-stick or cast-iron pan? How much heat and for what duration? Spatula, another tool, or none? Is it your kitchen or someone else’s? And what plate will you use to serve?

These parameters have their equivalents in demos and discovery. Your computer or someone else’s? Over the web or face-to-face? Your facility, your prospect’s, or a third party? Well-established and characterized demo environment or new and untested? (Untested? Oh-oh: Not advised…!)

And consider the complexity of the dish. How many ingredients? How many steps? What preparation and execution are required for each step?

Like learning to cook, that six-month investment in onboarding and training your new team member is just the start of their journey to demo and discovery proficiency. For demos, for example, once they have absorbed the standard demo script, they begin to ascend through the ten levels of increasing skills and knowledge:

• Level 1 : Follows the standard demo script
• Level 2 : Customizes based on the prospect’s market/industry
• Level 3 : Customizes based on the discovery information uncovered
• Level 4 : Communicates tangible business value
• Level 5 : Applies both Vision Generation and Technical Proof demos
• Level 6 : Manages and explores prospect questions
• Level 7 : Uses Biased Questions to outflank competition and reengineer vision
• Level 8 : Applies storytelling techniques to reinforce key ideas
• Level 9 : Applies these skills to the broad range of demo scenarios required, including demos for prospects occupying different portions of the Technology Adoption Curve, transactional sales cycles, expansion opportunities, Executive Briefing Centers, presenting new products, lunch and learn sessions, tradeshows, demos for analysts and third parties, channel partners, internal demos, and other scenarios
• Level 10 : Captures and reuses demo success scenarios, and integrates, aligns, and leverages the skills above into a cohesive demonstration methodology.

And that’s all just to become an accomplished cook with respect to demos! Achieving this can take years and for many people it is a lifetime journey.

We need proficient cooks; we need many of them in our customer-facing roles!

Chefs and Creation

“Cooks seek to avoid mistakes; chefs embrace them.”
– Me

When I try a new recipe, I endeavor to follow it as written. I may play a bit with choosing a plate or bowl for presentation and I’ll likely add some kind of garnish. But my first attempt at a new recipe follows the script, just as a newly certified vendor rep follows their demo script.

Regarding food, I’m a cook.

There are a number of dishes that I’ve made many, many times and I do continuously work to improve the outcomes. I’d like to get my biscuits just a bit crispier and more flakey. I want to get that fresh tuna fillet seared evenly all over, with that gorgeous gradient of the cooked edges changing to sushi-raw inside just right!

On the other hand, I don’t think my wife has ever followed a recipe verbatim. For her a recipe is just a starting point, just a suggestion.

Somehow, she visualizes (or more accurately, the taste equivalent of visualize!) how different ingredients impact a dish. Intriguingly, she also has a mental image of what is available to her in our kitchen. It’s like she has an active database that she works with in her head. She’ll pull ingredients from cabinets I didn’t even know we had! And she intuitively understands what works well with other components.

This goes far beyond a few grinds of pepper or grated nutmeg. Za’atar, yuzu, Manuka honey, and Tahitian vanilla are staples for her! (Try these; they’re really terrific!)

And it is not just ingredients that form the basis for chef’s experiments. New cooking methods have been introduced and refined over the past decade, including sous vide and air frying, which have since become commonplace; but also less-known methods like ultrasonic-assisted, infra-red, and ohmic heating techniques.

It takes a chef to depart from the norm.

Does everything she make turn out wonderfully? Mostly, but there are occasional mistakes, some of which she can correct, but all of which she learns from!

Cooks seek to avoid mistakes; chefs embrace them.

You: Cook or Chef?

“Be yourself; everyone else is taken.”
– Oscar Wilde

I’m not suggesting that everyone should endeavor to become a chef with respect to demos and discovery. Quite the contrary! We need skilled practitioners to execute well-proven methods and processes consistently and with high fidelity.

In fact, we need many more cooks than chefs in our customer-facing teams. Great restaurants may have several or many cooks, but typically only one real chef (restaurant job titles can be deceiving).

But back to the question: Are you a demo and discovery cook or chef?

This likely depends on two sets of factors:

1. Your personality.
2. Your experiences.

Your personality often determines what gives you the most pleasure and sense of accomplishment. Many of us focus on constant improvement of our practices, seeking to make our demos just a bit better, and our discovery conversations just a bit more mutually informative. Generally, we are working towards best practices.

In the ten levels of demo skills above, most customer-facing team members are delighted as they progress to higher levels of execution. They get great satisfaction from learning and then mastering new skills and scenarios.

Most people struggle the first few times that they present in Executive Briefing Centers; they’ve never dealt with an audience that consists solely of executives! And vendor personnel who have been demoing for prospect Innovators and Early Adopters are initially surprised at the much more skeptical responses they get from Late Majority prospects. But they then do work to improve and tailor their demos for those specific audiences.

It’s like the breakfast restaurant cook who has been promoted to work the lunch menu: The recipes are different, but well-documented. The kitchen is the same, but the customers have significant differences. The cook embraces the challenge, and a few weeks of concentration and repetition yields consistent positive outcomes.

Your experiences, like the change from breakfast to lunch, can impact your pathway as well. In one case, you might find you enjoy the challenges of changing from breakfast to lunch recipes. In another, you might find you’ve been pushed into a whole new dimension!

Imagine you’ve been a skilled breakfast cook for a while when suddenly your restaurant has to close its doors! You scramble (no egg pun intended) and find a new position at a Thai cuisine restaurant. Now, you have an entirely new kitchen, new cooking methods and equipment, new ingredients, and new customers. You’ve got a lot to learn, but over time you gain competence and, finally, are getting smiles from the owner as you dish up tasty Pad Thai, Tom Yum Goong, and Som Tum.

People with a “cook” personality take great pleasure in achieving and ultimately mastering their new skills. And so do chefs, but chefs start asking questions and experimenting: “Wow, I wonder about using lemongrass in breakfast offerings, such as sausage? (Yes!) Could tamarind be added to orange juice and champagne to make an intriguing mimosa? (Oh yes!)

What are the key attributes of your personality? Are you focused on pursuing best practices or establishing new ones?

What about your experiences? Has your trajectory pointed you towards being an excellent cook or launched you into the role of a chef?

In my case, I was a demo and discovery cook (a good one, thank you very much!) for over fifteen years before an event took place that forced me to revisit my practices. I had been the “go to” person, in many cases, for demos for the products that I represented. I was skilled and comfortable with the results and output of my discovery conversations. I felt I was at the top of my game…

Until I became the customer!

It was when I was leading a business unit and needed to purchase a CRM system that I woke up and smelled the coffee: instead of being the cook, I was now the patron. The vendors we engaged were largely awful with respect to doing discovery and their demos were appalling Harbor Tours!

But what I also realized was that we, as a vendor, were applying the same poor practices in our sales efforts! We were just as bad. It was like realizing that our fried eggs were greasy and served cold (yuck!). Our “best practices” clearly weren’t “best,” they were simply our current practices.

This experience triggered a reexamination of our discovery calls and demos, yielding the Great Demo! methodology and, a bit later, the Doing Discovery methodology. (See “The Great Demo! Origins Story” in Suspending Disbelief for the full, enlightening story!)

Become an Excellent Cook First…

“They say that nobody is perfect. Then they tell you practice makes perfect. I wish they’d make up their minds.”
– Winston Churchill

In the kitchen, you need to be a consistently successful cook before you can become a chef. The same is true for doing discovery and delivering demos. You need to execute your current best practices consistently and successfully before you contemplate making substantial changes.

The prerequisite before exploring new ideas is to establish a clear baseline, enabling you to determine how your investigations compare. Before you add tamarind to your sausage, you must have a repeatable sausage recipe that delivers consistent results with your customers. Otherwise, how can you tell if adding tamarind is an improvement or not?

This doesn’t preclude you from ideating new methods or processes, of course. It simply says that you, or someone, needs to be able to determine if a change is better, worse, or the same as the status quo.

Incremental or Step-Change?

“Necessity is the mother of invention.”
– Plato

In the kitchen, change can be driven by the absence of an ingredient, tool, or other entity. We ran out of brown sugar for a recipe and substituted smoked brown sugar, instead. The result was perceptibly improved taste and scent. Not a big change, but the result was a noticeably better, so we amended the recipe accordingly.

Was this a big change? No, it was an incremental improvement, and it represents one small step in the transition from a cook to a chef. Note that the high-performing cook would have headed to the store to buy more regular brown sugar; smoked brown sugar is not the standard recipe!

The same principle applies to demos and discovery. An example incremental improvement in discovery is learning to explore “pain” more deeply than the simple acknowledgement of pain by the prospect. “How long has this been going on?” “Is the team frustrated?” “Tell me more about what is going on…” These small additions elevate vendors from Level 1 to Level 2.

A step change represents a more radical departure from the norm. I was getting ready to roast a rack of lamb (special occasion!) and had planned to use my typical set of herbs and spices, which had served me well over the years. (I’m a cook, here, obviously!)

My wife suggested I prepare a glaze based on harissa, which I had never heard of before. “What’s harissa?” I asked. “It’s a hot, spicy paste made from peppers…” she explained. “It’s in the fridge. Here, I’ll show you…”

She guided me to the proper location in the fridge where a jar resided, purchased previously by my better half unbeknownst to me. “Try it!”

I did.

And now I have a new standard recipe for rack of lamb! She’s the chef; I’m the cook.

In the world of demos, traditional practice was to “save the best for last” and show the prospect how your system worked. During my experiences buying the CRM system I realized that prospects want to see deliverables before learning how the vendor’s system works. And in many cases, particularly with high-ranking prospect players, they aren’t interested in how the system works at all; they are concerned about the solutions, outcomes, and deliverables the tool provides or enables.

However, making the change from “save the best for last” to “Do the Last Thing First!” required reconstructing demos. It’s a step change that offered major improvements.

We invested several years testing, tuning, and validating the new practices in hundreds of demos across a broad range of parameters until the new methodology was “production hardened.” The results showed consistent substantial improvements in demo performance (based on our own experiences and, later, as reported by Great Demo! Workshop customers):

– Gains of 10% or more in improved close rates overall
– Demo win rate increases of 25-75%
– Reduced “No Decisions” by half
– Reduced sales cycle length by 50%
– Reduced of cost-of-sales by 25%
– Reduced “wasted demos” by 50%
– Eliminated or reduced the need for POCs and evaluations
– Free POCs and evaluations transformed into paid events
– Increased deal size and breadth by 2x – both licenses and services

Chefs, whether in the kitchen or doing demos and discovery, often look for step change opportunities!

Accepting vs Solving

“Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
– James Baldwin

Great chefs go far beyond simple exploration like trying a radical new ingredient: They solve problems.

The sous vide cooking method originally arose to make food preparation safer, by enabling pasteurization and sterilization of quantities of food for large commercial operations. Separately, a French chef (not the French Chef!) wanted way to prepare foie gras while retaining as much fat as possible; sous vide was the solution. (I’m personally not a fan of foie gras…!)

Restaurant chefs wanted a way to speed meat preparation. They found it through precooking and holding various meats using sous vide, then finishing as needed on the grill, sauté pan, etc. Doing so saved a great deal of time and expense, while yielding a superior product, in many cases.

Cooks generally simply accept the status quo: “We’ve always had this problem…” Chefs see problems as challenges to be overcome.

In the world of demos, one of the biggest complaints as a presenter is being asked to deliver an “overview” demo with little or no discovery information. Most people just complain, shake their heads, and then present their “standard overview demo” (aka Harbor Tour).

I looked at the problem as solvable and invented the Vision Generation demo, successfully designed to satisfy the prospect’s (or sales rep’s!) desire to “see what’s possible,” but doing so crisply while leveraging existing customer success stories. Vision Generation demos result in a rapid connection between vendor and prospect and segue smoothly into a productive discovery conversation. (See Chapter 11 “Vision Generation Demos” in Great Demo!)

Problem addressed. Here’s another example…

Vendors with many product offerings traditionally present long, painful product overview presentations and/or even more painful end-to-end demos. (“How long do you need for your demo?” asked the prospect. “How much time have you got…?” replied the vendor!)

I borrowed a simple, but very effective tool from the world of restaurants to solve this problem: the menu!

When you sit down in a restaurant, the waiter hands you a menu (or you use a QR code to read on your phone). In moments, you can see what’s possible from the list and make your choices. Very simple, very logical.

You can apply the same method for demos and discovery: Present a menu of the solutions you offer. Your prospect chooses what is most interesting or important to them, giving you guidance about what to pursue.

The Menu Approach (as it is known) enabled a step-change in engaging prospects, saving incredible amounts of time and enabling a crisp focus on prospects’ specific interests. (See “Origins of The Menu Approach: A Demo Survival Success Story” in Suspending Disbelief for the engaging tale!) Applying the Menu Approach at tradeshow booths and stands was a high-productivity refinement of the method.

In the kitchen, I am most definitely a cook. With discovery and demos today, I would claim the chef title!

Dessert

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.“
– T. S. Eliot

Individuals: Are you a cook or a chef? If you are a cook, keep pursuing those best practices, expand your skills, and acquire knowledge. And be very proud to be a cook!

Leaders: Who are your cooks and who are your chefs? Develop the former; nurture the later. Engage their unique strengths and talents. Doing discovery and delivering demos requires truly great cooks to follow best practices and truly great chefs to define new ones!

Copyright © 2025 The Second Derivative – All Rights Reserved.

To learn the methods introduced above, consider enrolling in a Great Demo! Doing Discovery or Demonstration Skills Workshop. For more demo and discovery tips, best practices, tools and techniques, explore our blog and articles on the Resources pages of our website at https://GreatDemo.com and join the Great Demo! & Doing Discovery LinkedIn Group to learn from others and share your experiences.