By Murray Fife on
7/15/2009 8:40 AM
Yesterday I read a post by Eric Kimberling (@erickimberling) titled "In Search of Business Value & ROI: Achieving IT Benefits Realization" (http://tinyurl.com/mmx5k4) and to be honest, it made me a little sad.
The title of the post was a little misleading. I think it should have really been titled "A Beginners Guide to Cutting your Software Vendors Margins to the Bone, Bleeding them Dry, and Hanging Them Up on the Town Wall as an Example of What Will Happen to the Next Vendor that Dares Walk Into the Company" (sorry - my capitalization may be a little off).
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By Murray Fife on
7/2/2009 12:01 PM
 I just had some thoughts on ERP demonstrations and pilots - why they are so hard to do, and also a possible solution - Piloting in the Cloud, and becoming your very own Test Pilot.
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By Murray Fife on
6/27/2009 4:14 PM
 In my last post "Demo Scripts vs Storyboards" I talked about creating storyboards for demonstrations. After thinking about the format of the storyboards, I thought that a better way to plan out the scenes of the demonstration would be to put each of the storyboard elements on an index card
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By Murray Fife on
6/24/2009 9:53 AM
 I did a Webcast yesterday, and something that I always do before a presentation is outline what I am planning to show. This helps me keep on track and also is where I note down
- order of the topics
- features that I want to show
- data that I should use to best highlight features
- possible areas to avoid because I haven't set up data etc.
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By Murray Fife on
6/6/2009 9:13 AM
Let me let you in on a secret... If you put ten software demonstrators in the same room and ask them to show the same feature or method to perform a task, then chances are you will get ten different demonstrations. And this is with the same product. Most software is flexible enough to provide a number of different ways to achieve the same result.
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By Murray Fife on
6/4/2009 6:13 AM
This morning I was reading a blog from Dave Litzenberg titled "The Scripted Software Demonstration: Making an Enterprise Software Decision on More than Gut Feel" - http://tinyurl.com/qoegsx - and I had to make a couple of comments on scripts, and why they are not the greatest thing since sliced bread. Scripted demonstrations are great for creating structure - but it has a couple of downsides.
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By Murray Fife on
5/28/2009 5:03 PM
Or in other words, is a demonstration something that needs to be structured and follow specific rules or do you just need to be a natural performer and you will be able to get away with murder during the presentation?
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By Murray Fife on
12/8/2008 6:20 AM
I was in a demonstration last week, and it was a scripted demonstration. All of the people that were evaluating the software had a rating sheet, with all the features that we had to show, and all they needed to do was rank the feature on fit with a score from 0-10.
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By Murray Fife on
12/6/2008 6:19 AM
Something occurred to me this week while I was at a demonstration, and although it probably isn't a newsflash to anyone, I thought I would write a quick note about it.
Being first to present in a formal demo cycle is the worst place to be.
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By Murray Fife on
7/10/2008 6:18 AM
RFPs (Request for Proposals) and RFIs (Requests for Information) have been the bane of my existance ever since I started working in sales doing demonstrations. Before even being able to talk with the customer, or try to solve any problems, you first have to run the questionaire gauntlet and answer every question that the customer (or rather the highly paid consulting firm) is able to think of.
Many times, it doesn't seem like much care has been put into the RFP/RFI's in the first place, because they are copies of documents that you can find on the web, and as a result contain every question under the sun, many that I don't even think the customers know what they mean as well.
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