Basic tips on successful product demonstrations

That everyone consistently overlooks. A series based on my experience in SaaS presales engineering.

Here's tip number 1: Do NOT run the oversized unified slide deck on the same computer the #presalesengineer will use to demo.

It sounds basic, but if I had a nickel for every occasion when I spoke out against this practice and the rest of the team listened, well, then I would have a nickel.

I my 8 (eight) years working in SaaS I have seen the consistent tendency of sales, business development, and yes, even presales, to put together an extra large slide deck (think at least 50MB due to number of slides and visuals) including all the different presentations (commercial, company history, product, customer needs, project timelines & implementation, charts & graphs etc.) and run them from the same computer to be used for the demo. The size of the deck and running the visuals will use a lot of resources and significantly decrease response time (creating a dreaded lag during the live demo or any sort of click-through for that matter).

Since the presales engineer will be stuck being a live cursor ("next slide, please"), they cannot use this time to refresh the app or update their notes and talk track with whatever comments / questions the customer is asking during this part of the workshop. It effectively prevents them from being relevant.

By the time we have reached the demo stage (usually towards the end for some reason, but we will discuss this in a different article), the PC is slowing down, the app is asleep, the browser is lagging and the presales is well, tired.

What to do it instead: The presentation should be ran by either the person in the call who has the least to say (so acting as the admin) or by the sales person who leads the call and who can thus manage the agenda and keep the time (as they should).

The presales engineer has technical skills, but it does not mean they have to be in charge of hardware debugging as well.