The art of the demo — what to show, what to cut

The Curse of Show-Everything

New SEs face the temptation to show "everything the product can do" in a demo. This consistently produces worse results than focused demos. The reasons: customers retain 2-3 things from any demo regardless of how many you show — showing 15 dilutes signal across noise; rapid feature pacing prevents the customer from absorbing depth and asking the questions that build conviction; competing vendors' demos that show fewer things deeper are remembered as "more substantial"; and the implicit message of show-everything is "I do not know what you care about, so I will spray you with options." A…