Insight: Demos are the Ultimate Adoption Tool

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast we’re talking to Principal Admin Evangelist LeeAnne Rimel to find out how you can build demos to help drive adoption at your organization.

More about this Insights session: Join us as we look at how demos can drive adoption with Admin Evangelists Rimel & Gillian Bruce….

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with LeeAnne Rimel and Gillian Bruce.

Why Demos Are the Best Way to Drive Adoption

LeeAnne is the demo master on the Admin Evangelist team— she builds an app for everything. Demos make things a lot more tangible for your team, and as LeeAnne says, “The big reason that I build demos is that it’s a great way for people to understand it.”

The reason to go with a demo over an informational email or even a webinar is that it’s tangible, and you’ll come across things you didn’t expect. “If we’re explaining something verbally or putting it on a slide, we’re picking and choosing what features and areas we’re highlighting, but we can’t always anticipate what our end users need to see,” LeeAnne says. There might be something that’s not crucial to our demo, but a user will see it and have a question. “It’s a great way to help your audience think bigger and think about how they can apply it to what they’re doing.”

Demo Advice From the Demo Master

Other members of the Admin Evangelist team will vouch for the fact that what makes LeeAnne an amazing demo builder is that she’s able to focus on the story. It’s not just about what the demo is, but what the context is and how the audience will see it. For LeeAnne, the key is to start with “thoughtful discovery.”

“There’s a formula for creating a demo: business needs + feature + how will this delivery impact,” LeeAnne says. As an example, she points out that if you’re buying a car and the salesperson doesn’t ask you anything about what you need, they’ll spend a bunch of time showing you features that you don’t care about. So, “thoughtful discovery” would be making sure you take the time to talk to your team: what are the tools they’re using today? What are the friction points they encounter?

Once you understand your team’s needs, you can show them the features that they care about and use a demo to illustrate how those features drive impact.  If you can build your demo around the pain points and how a feature can help, they’ll see for themselves how it will make their day easier, which makes adoption much more manageable.

Demos All the Way Down

LeeAnne is so good at building demos that she’s actually made demos about building demos. To get ready for one of these demos, she has to do the opposite of what she’d usually do for a good demo: make her desktop really messy and leave a bunch of tabs open.

If you have a screen or video recording tool like Camtasia, it’s a great idea to make a quick screencast so your team can come back to it later. That way, you cut down on the number of times you have to run the demo. Speaking of recordings, there’s a 30-minute webinar that goes through all of the steps LeeAnne does before she runs a demo, “a pre-flight checklist if you will.”

Links:

• Webinar: How to Rock a Salesforce Demo by LeeAnne Rimel
• 5 Tips to Rock Your Next Salesforce Demo by LeeAnne Rimel
• Public Speaking Skills module
• Innovation Solution module

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