Search results matching tags 'Professional Development', 'Opinion', and 'Speaking'

Demo Mastery for the Technology Evangelist

KKline — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 17:02:00 GMT

In the same way that the finest presentations involve much more than the simple relaying of information, the finest software demos are much more than just presenting features.

REMEMBER: The goal of a demo is to INSPIRE the audience to use the software/technology, not to teach them every nuance of software/technology.

I've spent the last 10 years learning how to give good presentations and to give good software demonstrations. Here are several tips to take your software demonstration from informative to masterful:

1. Know your audience

Whenever you start a demo, make sure you have a good idea what the audience is interested in. That way you can focus the attention of the audience upon things that actively engage their imagination. You really, really want the audience to be thinking about how they're going to use the software that you are presenting. If it if you're not presenting on something that they're interested in, they'll mentally disengage. In some cases you'll even see them open their laptops and start to answer emails. That's the last thing in the world that you want to happen.

In many cases, I'll begin a presentation by asking my audience to tell me more about themselves. I want to know how much of their time is spent as a developer, as a DBA, as a designer. If nothing else, I can change the sort of examples that I use to be tailored specifically to the audience that are presenting to.

Truly bad software demos have problems. The code doesn't work. The beta software crashes. The screen shows the dreaded blue screen. But that's one thing. What you really want to avoid, is the truly mediocre software demo. The quickest path to a mediocre software demo is to simply show every feature and explain each in as much detail as you can. It's like those games that sit in our closet that no one likes to play. Most all of these games are ones in which one person takes a turn while everyone else waits. No one has any fun except for the three or four minutes in which it relates directly to them.

2. Start, but only start, with an agenda

It's always a good idea to inform your attendees of what you would like to present. What you present the agenda it's a great idea to confirm that this agenda is what the audience is looking for. Before I learned to do this on a regular basis, I found that my presentation might contain two or three lengthy sections of my software demo which were completely uninteresting to the audience. The customer is really numbed by this waste of time. It's far better to tell the audience what you are going to tell them.

Here's my routine when I start a demo. Confirm that your agenda is of interest to them and recheck the time constraints of the meeting. Then, get to what they are interested in. This flexibility also provides you the opportunity to inject other software demonstrations that are much more pertinent to your audience. Audiences love a presenter who can think on their feet and are flexible to the interests of the audience.

3. Skip the lengthy intro

This is a aspect of demonstrations and presentations that I struggle with. I worried a lot that I hadn't demonstrated enough credibility with my audience. And so for many years of my technology evangelism role, I spent a lot of time telling the audience about myself and about the company. What I found over time though, is that audiences actually give you an initial dose of credibility. It's up to you to maintain and even enhance that credibility through a strong demo and a good presentation. Better to have a very short introduction and get straight to the meat of the presentation.

Call out - Mouse Cursor Movement: It's especially important to remember in online demos that there is usually a great deal of latency between what you do on your screen and what your audience sees on their screen. So it's important to remember to MOVE YOUR MOUSE SLOWLY AND THOUGHTFULLY! I've sat in online webcasts, and even in in-person events, where the mouse literally disappeared on one section of the screen and reappeared elsewhere because the presenter was moving their mouse cursor here, there, and everywhere. If you want the audience to see what you're doing with the mouse cursor, keep it slow.

4. Show what is pertinent

One of the most important things a software evangelist can do is to show the most important and pertinent take away of their software. Let's you are trying to teach an audience about the extreme ROI (return on investment) of a particular kind of business intelligence strategy, it's crucial that you figure out in advance what are the key takeaways that you would like your audience to remember. Typically in audience will only remember two or three very salient points about your demo. If the BI presentation spends the first 30 minutes showing how to build a report but never once mentions ROI, what do you think the audience will remember? Once you know what is pertinent to your audience and what you want the key takeaway to be, you should focus the rest of your energies on building an airtight demo that supports those takeaways.

You will see the inverse of this many times in a mediocre or poor demo. At the end of the demo the audience will feel like they have sat through product training, rather than a call to action that inspires them to use the product. I've sat through demos in which the presenter carefully walk through several different menus, tabs, and wizards. And after 30 minutes of that, I now knew HOW to use the software, but I still didn't know WHY I would use the software.

In the worst cases, showing everything that your software can do may leave the audience feeling that it is too complex, too detailed, or too overwhelming for them to use effectively. Remember that a software demo is not design to train the audience. A software demo is designed to inspire the audience to use your products.

5. Don't get sidelined

We usually get sidelined in our demos by two things: questions from the audience and "technical difficulties" a.k.a. bugs.

Questions from the Audience

It's usually a good sign if your demo is provoking questions from the audience. However, you don't want to demo to turn into free consultation to solve one person's problem. Nor do you want to turn into fact-finding for one very narrow set of interests or to become the arbiter of some sort of political dispute between factions in the audience.

When taking questions, remember to repeat the question to the audience. This ensures that you fully understood the question, that the questioner asked for what they meant, and that if there is any recording going on the question will be picked up by the recording system.

But my typical rule of thumb is to only spend a couple minutes on a single question and questioner. Once a single questioner goes beyond a couple minutes, you can usually tell if you're heading for the sidelines. It's at that point that I asked the questioner if we can take the question off-line and come back to it afterwards so that everyone else can benefit from the time that we have set aside right now.

Technical Difficulties

Another form of sidelining are bugs in the software and outright crashes of your demo environment. Many times this simply can't be avoided. This is especially true if you are demoing a beta version of the software. But there are couple important things to remember if you are sidelined by a bug or crash.

First, mention if you're using a beta and that it might not be fully stable. Also, be sure to mention that the software WAS stable when you prepared the demo. Second, test your demo after conducting a full reboot of your demo environment. I've seen many demos crash because the presenter made other changes in the environment but only tested for the software demonstration itself. Third, Don't draw attention to bugs that you encounter during the demo, especially if they're just cosmetic. It's important not to do things like slap your four head and exclaim "what the hell is that?" If it's a bigger bug that hampers or interferes with functionality, you might state that it's normal functionality is… XYZ. Finally, if you experience a major bug or crash, immediately disconnect the projector or the desktop sharing application. There's nothing worse than seeing a presenter struggle with the bug in front of the entire audience.

6. Hit the jackpot

All good jokes have a punchline. All good action movies have a climax. All good newspaper stories have a headline. Your demo needs to have a jackpot, where the audience can clearly and immediately see how your software pays off.

Let's say you're doing a demo of the new columnstore features in SQL Server 2012. You could spend a lot of time showing the conceptual underpinnings of a columnstore index. You could show the state was to create columnstore indexes, to modify them, to drop them. You could admonish the audience and ways to build read-write systems so that they can easily get data into and out of columnstore indexes.

But what's the real payoff of a columnstore index? It is incredible fast for a particular kind of scenario on SQL Server. So in this example, your jackpot is to show how difficult that scenario is under normal circumstances and then immediately show how easy and fast it is with the columnstore index. Bingo! Your audience is hooked. They immediately see why they want this. There inspired to start using it. Now, they want to figure out how to use it and want to know when and under what conditions they should use.

Are you an SC, technology evangelist, or technology presenter? What are your tips for a better demo?

-Kevin

-Follow me on Twitter

Collaboration Nation Call to Action! Calling All SQL Server Bloggers and Twitterers

KKline — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 01:15:00 GMT

The Suggestion

The Modern Language Association hasn't made up all the new rules yet to govern how one blogger should reverence, er, reference another in their blog posts. But they should! Let's get that ball rolling for them.

I'm not exactly sure who started this format, but it's my favorite. When writing a blog post in which you mention another person's blog, let's do it like this:

"blogger name (blog_hyperlink | twitter_hyperlink)"

So, we might read a blog post by my friend Kimberly Tripp (blog | twitter) that might look something like this:

"...the Scottish Terrier was so well known in early American society that as recently as the 1910's, Manhattanite nannies instructed their young charges to be good else the "Scottish Terrier" would eat them, after a lengthy session of slobbery nuzzling and years of canine devotion. It is for this very reason that I've given my Scots/English husband, Paul Randal (blog |twitter), several variations of the nickname "Scottish terrier", "scotty", "snotty", and "scotsnots" until such a time as needed for me to roll up the newspaper, give him a good spanking, and stick his nose in ..."

Well, you get the point. And didja notice that I worked in not just one, but TWO entire examples of the blog-reference syntax?!? I can hardly believe my own craftiness. I went to university for four years to learn that y'know - and to learn how to funnel beer - but I digress.

The Call To Action

One thing I love about the SQL Server community is our very community-ness. (I also like the fact that you'll let me invent stupid words on the fly without too much criticism.) So, let's make the glob, {ah! damned dyslexia!} , blog reference business even easier by having you (yes, YOU) post your own blog & twitter links as a comment here.

I repeat - post a comment here containing your name, blog (with embedded hyperlink to your blog), and twitter (with embedded hyperlink to my twitter, er, YOUR twitter account).

I'll then repost a brand new shiny article with a full compendium to everyone's blog & twitter hyperlinks (except Brent Ozar's (blog | twitter) ) which you can save to some obscure cranny of Outlook or WordPerfect to call up at a moments notice when the urge to both blog and reference other bloggers strikes you.

Thanks and looking forward to seeing your blog reference soon!

-Kev

-Twitter @kekline

Sequels for SQL: Dec 17, 2009

KKline — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:46:00 GMT

In the Sequels for SQL series, I point you to sites where you can go beyond the nose-to-the-grindstone resources that we see every day as SQL Server professionals. (My favorite resource for pan-SQL Server pointers is Steve Jone's Database Weekly email newsletter.) These are the story that comes after and outside (the sequels) of our daily working lives (the other SQL). Let's broaden our horizons together. If you hit on an interesting but overlooked topic, I'd like to hear from you.

SQL Server: We live it. We love it.

When Jimmy May talks, I listen. Not just because he's a personal friend, but also because he knows what's what, if you'll pardon the expression. So when Jimmy says "I believe xPerf will fundamentally change the way I do my job", then I want to know what the heck this free xPerf management tool is and how I can best leverage it. Check out Jimmy's blog entry on xPerf here.

Devices & Gadgets: Usually making our lives better, sometimes not so much.

Ever wonder what's inside one of those tiny USB hard drives? No? Not even a little bit?!? When I started in IT, hard drives where as big as washing machines and cost $60,000 running at speeds in the 100's of RPMs. My how times have changed. Here's a fun hack of a USB hard drive - http://www.dansworkshop.com/electricity-and-electronics/usb-hard-drive-hack.htm.

Futurewatch: Important issues just over the horizon.

There are a lot of standard elements of society being rebranded as the "2.0" version of itself. The 2.0 moniker was first put forward by visionary Tim O'Reilly (blog | twitter), of the eponymous media company. Whenever you see the 2.0 moniker added to the end of something, most famously Web 2.0, then you know that it will include the characteristics of collaboration, interoperability, and user-centered designs. So, whereas the first go at the web in the mid- to late-1990's was about enabling information retrieval such as transforming printed catalogs into on-line catalogs, Web 2.0 enables all of its participants to comment on, review, rate, and otherwise participating with each other in the use of such a catalog. In the last FutureWatch blurb, I pointed out work on Grid 2.0, centered on efforts to update the USA's electricity grid. I'm going to do a much more detailed post in the near future about emerging 2.0 efforts, but one to point out now is Gov 2.0. Under this broad set of initiatives, governments from the lowest to highest levels of responsibility are opening up their public databases for consumption by the public. An example of Gov 2.0 in action comes with the President's SAVE Award, in which the public is invited to vote on their pick for the best money saving tip put forward by federal government workers. Read all about this year's SAVE Award here.

Humor: I haz da funny.

Weird products in Japan have their own name - chindogu. Most of these are crackpot inventions that everyone knows will never see the light of day, such as these these featured here. However, some of these products DO get marketed and, more amazingly, purchased. Check out the product reviews of this totally bizarro chindogu here at Overstock.com.

Professional Development: Because there are two words in "database professional".

There are mountains of great websites with tips on how to be a better speaker. Some day, I'll write a long blog post about my favorite sites for learning how to improve your oration. But if you're in a hurry, and who isn't these days, then this blog post at TechRepublic succinctly sums up the advice you'll find from many other web sites, articles, and blogs.

Society: Important issues to discuss with your friends and family.

One of the most remarkable things about the USA, as a rather biased citizen, is our ability to suck up our pride, admit a mistake, and try to prevent it from happening again. One way that the USA tries to prevent future occurrences is to convene a commission of some kind. I found this analysis by David Leinweber, a Haas Fellow in Finance and Founding Director of the Center for Innovative Financial Technology at UC Berkeley, of the commission studying banking market reform in the USA to be quite intriguing and, frankly, upsetting.

WorldView: If James Bond knows that the world is not enough, then so should I.

I'm always on the lookout for issues related to safe and clean water. If you think people can be grumpy when oil is in short supply, imagine what it's like when there's not enough drinking water for everyone. See how India is dealing with enormous water issues in this revealing article from the Economist. And I'd be interested to hear what our Indian blogger friends thoughts are on this topic, folks like Rushabh Mehta, Jacob Sebastian, and Pinal Dave. (Water issues have remained one of my passions ever since my years working for NASA developing the water recycling systems for the International Space Station, in which we made water of the H20 that passes through the human body re-drinkable. And it tastes good. Incidentally, all of the technology we developed for this project, as with all non-classified government projects, became public domain. ECLSS technology is now used in hundreds of commercial products ranging from household detergents to commercial solvents to filtration systems.)

Thanks!

-Kevin

Twitter @KEKline