26 RULES FOR HIGH-IMPACT Written by Bobby LancasterINTRODUCTION Why demo storytelling is important Live product demos are now the primary medium for communicating value transformation in sales, product management and product marketing. Sales Engineers, Product Managers and Product Marketers are constantly designing, building and presenting product demos to communicate value transformation. But the problem is that most people in these roles don't have much experience with storytelling, and end up delivering product demos that miss the mark. Learning how to tell a good demo story will make your demos more interesting and meaningful. Luckily there are rules and principles for effective storytelling. In the following pages, | outline 26 different rules that can help you deliver high-impact demo stories.RULE #1 Know your audience and what they value Values My goals for the year are to reduce costs, speed up time to ee Pert CEO Lam trying to decreas oa mee Service Manager Eee ee Service Agent The purpose of a demo is to "demonstrate" a meaningful transformation of values. If you don't know what your audience values, you simply won't be able to deliver a meaningful demo. To build a meaningful product demo, the first thing you need to do is speak with your customers and understand the values that drive their business. Different roles in an organization can have very different values. A customer service agent is focused on KPI perfomrance values like Mean-Time-To-Resolution (MTTR) and First Call Resolution. A customer service manager might value Agent Onboarding Time or SLA Adherance. A CEO might value Speed to Market or Revenue. Run discovery calls with the customer and ask them about the measurable values that drive their business. Map out the organization, the different roles, and the individual and team values that are driving their behavior. You should now have a “hierarchy of values" that describes the individual, team and company values of your customer. This "hierarchy of values" that you discover will be the foundation of your demo story.RULE #2 Discover pain points that matter Pain Points Values eer teu) CEO Service Manager é Service Agent Ceo) If you don't understand your audience's pain points, you won't know exactly what to show them in the demo. To demonstrate a transformation of value, you have to show the audience how they can overcome a pain point they currently have. If you've done a good job with discovery, you should have a deep understanding of the pain points that individuals and teams face across the company. Different roles will have very different pain points. For a Field Service Technician, they might have a pain point accessing Work Orders on the road. For a IT Manager, they might have a pain point training new software engineers. For a CFO, they might have a pain point with manually creating reports every week. Run discovery calls with your customer and ask them which of their workflows are most frustrating. Ask the customer to show you a demo of their current workflow so you can see and understand their pain points directly. Go onsite and shadow their teams to get a first-hand understanding of how they work and what they find frustrating. These pain points that you discover will be a foundational element of your demo story.RULE #3 Use stories to communicate value to a non-technical audience Most business audiences are not technical and they lack the technical knowledge to know how your product works under the hood. Stories are a highly effective way to communicate the value of a product to a non-technical audience. Stories communicate to an audience why a product works, and what the value of the product is, without delving into technical details. The best way to explain why a product works is to tell a story and demonstrate the value of the product through action. Almost every role outside of IT is non-technical, so stories are a critical tool for selling into these "line of business" departments. While you are in discovery, try and map out the technical expertise of the core buyers you are selling to. Ask them what level of technical depth they would like to delve into during the demo. Sometimes you'll be presenting to an entirely non-technical audience, and won't delve much into technical details. Sometimes you will have a mixed audience of technical and non-technical roles and have to strike a fine balance between storytelling and technical explanation. If you are delivering a demo to a mostly non- technical audience, lean into storytelling to communicate the value of the product.RULE #4 Be careful using too many stories with a technical audience If you are delivering a demo to a mostly technical audience, be careful using too much storytelling. While technical audiences love a good story like anyone else, they are mostly interested in how the product actually works under the hood. Technical audiences are typically less interested in the business value of the product; they are most interested in the technical value of the product architecture. Technical audiences want to know the nuts and bolts of the product, and they want to figure out the story for themselves. Most technical audiences in IT have seen thousands of product demos, they have been burnt by vendor products that didn't deliver, and they are skeptical of sales teams. If you lean too much into storytelling without delving into the technical architecture of the product, a technical audience will zone out and lose trust for you. You can of course still tell a story to a technical audience, but make sure it's a good one.RULE #5 Storyboard your demo in detail before you start building anything One of the biggest mistakes people make with product demos today is rushing to build the demo before understanding the story. If you jump into building your demo without a deep understanding of the audience's values and pain points, you won't know exactly what to focus on. You won't know what to build until you understand the story. The best way to rapidly understand the story is to use a visual storyboard to map out the components and flow of the demo. | personally use Miro to storyboard all of my demos, and use it to map out all of my discovery notes, values, pain points, user personas and the customer's system architecture. The faster you can visually map out the elements of your story, the faster you will be able to figure out the demo flow and the overarching story. Storyboarding a demo is also a great way of collaborating internally with other stakeholders involved in the demo. Once you have a cohesive storyboard that you have validated with the customer, only then should you start building out the demo itself. If you deeply understand the story, you'll know exactly what to build, you will have much more focus, and you will build the demo faster. If you are building out a demo and are a bit lost and not sure what to focus on, go back to the storyboard and refine it before building anything else.RULE #6 Co-create and validate the demo storyboard with your customer as a > q BS) You can't create a meaningful story in isolation. The best way to craft a high-impact story is to co-create the demo story with your customer. Marketing teams create isolated and abstract "narratives" that are a distillation of many customer stories, but in sales we have to work 1:1 with a customer to co-create a story. Remember that your audience wants your demo to go well, so they have a vested interest in making sure you understand the story in detail and can deliver a meaningful demo. Your customers knows more about their business than you, so the fastest way to lock-in on the story is to spend a lot of time in discovery. The purpose of discovery in a sales cycle is to reveal the underlying story of a customer. The best way to co-create the demo storyboard with your customer is to use a collaborative digital whiteboard application like Miro. Once you have completed discovery and drafted up a storyboard for the demo, share the storyboard with your customer and setup a call to go through it in detail. Do multiple reviews and revisions to the storyboard with your customer until the story "clicks" and you have a very clear understanding of demo personas, pain points, values and systems architecture. You should spend more time co-creating the demo storyboard with the customer than building the demo.RULE #7 Use demo personas to tella dramatic story Customer Service Agent Claims Manager nN 8 so ®& Software Engineer Service Manager CEO Product demos today are increasingly using more "demo personas" to show the product from multiple user perspectives. Structuring your demo story around demo personas is a highly effective way to demonstrate interpersonal value by showing how the users interact with each other. Ten years ago, most cloud application demos only showed 1 or 2 demo personas. But today a complex enterprise deal may require demos that span 20 or 30 user personas. Solution Consultants, Product Marketers and Product Managers struggle to design and build complex persona-centric demos because they don't have much education about storytelling. Understanding the structure and rules of stories will help you scalably create complex persona-centric demos, even if you have to show a lot of user personas. Persona-driven demos are naturally dramatic because they show users interacting with each other to achieve a transformation of value. As you go through discovery, you will identify many user personas at your customer that are involved in the use-case that you are targeting. Build a map of all of the user personas involved in the workflows you have discovered. This list of "user personas" is the cast of characters for your demo story.RULE #8 Use the minimum number of demo personas necessary to tell the story vy & Customer Service Agent eS oy Service Manager The more demo personas you include in your demo, the harder it will be for the audience to keep up with the story. Think of a movie that has a huge ensemble cast, and it's difficult to keep track of every character and understand how the story fits together as a whole. To make sure your demo is memorable, use the minimum demo personas necessary to tell the story. Often you will find that some of the user personas don't "fit" into the story ina meaningful way, and they feel like ancillary characters. Other times you will find that there's a lot of cross-over in actions between demo personas, which can make the demo lose momentum and get repetitive. Try and cut any demo personas that aren't absolutely relevant to tell the story, and combine demo personas when there is a lot of cross-over in their actions and values.RULE #9 Identify the hero of the story and give them clear intentions and obstacles hetero ® © Customer Service Agent Service Manager ceo obstacles atéations Hetero Srelesiiea ‘eens Pain Points) (values) < Inerease First C: lution Se Service Agent Every story needs a hero, otherwise the audience won't know what action to focus on. Showing a clear hero of the story makes the audience focus their attention on the actions of that character the most. If you don't clearly introduce a hero to your story, the audience will get distracted, and you won't communicate the value of your product effectively. The core energy of a story exists in the tension between a character's intentions and obstacles; what they want and how hard it is to get it. In order for the audience to stay interested in the hero, you have to articulate clear intentions and obstacles for the hero. The hero must have a clear goal that they are going after in every scene, and clear obstacles that they face blocking them from their intention. If your hero doesn't have clear intentions or doesn't run into any serious obstacles, the character simply won't be interesting, and the audience will tune out. There's nothing at stake unless the hero is aiming at something big and running into difficult obstacles along the way. During your discovery, you should have identified a set of clear values and pain points for your audience. The intention of the hero should directly align with the discovered values, and the obstacles they face should directly align with the discovered pain points. Once you have identified a hero for your story with clear intentions and obstacles, you are ready to start building scenes.RULE #10 Start each scene with a clear user intention statement Intention Intention Statement (Value) If you don't start every demo scene with a clear user intention, the audience won't know how to orient to the story, because they don't know what the character is aiming at. You should start each demo scene by explaining what the user is trying to do before clicking on anything. A big problem | see with demo storytelling today is that the presenter doesn't explain the intention/goal/desire/want of the user before acting in the demo. If the audience doesn't know what the demo persona is aiming at, they won't know if/when the persona got it or not. Setting the user intention at the start of the scene provides a frame for the audience to see what values the user is aiming at. Everything you show in the scene should be aligned with this user intention, otherwise the audience won't know why you're showing what you're showing. If an action isn't aligned with the user intention, it's not part of the plot, so cut it.RULE #11 Confront the hero with increasingly difficult obstacles to overcome Increasing Obstacles © a — a — | Service Agent Intention (Value) If you want your audience to stay engaged with your demo, the story has to have momentum. The obstacles that the characters face should gradually increase all the way to the end of the demo. If you don't setup an increasingly difficult set of obstacles to overcome, the story will lose momentum, and the audience will get bored. The actions that the hero takes to reach their intentions and overcome their obstacles are what reveals their character. Audiences want to see a character revealed by taking bold actions in the face of obstacles to reach their intentions. Once you go through discovery, you should have a prioritized list/hierarchy of the values that you believe your product can transform for the customer. Some of the values will be more important than others. You should also have a prioritized list/hierarchy of obstacles (pain points) that you believe your product will impact. Organize your demo scenes around these values and obstacles, and organize your scenes from the smallest values/obstacles to the biggest values/obstacles. If you can't prioritize lists of the values and obstacles of your customer, you need to do more discovery. You may get the temptation to show the biggest value and obstacle in the first scene, worried that the audience won't pay attention until the end of the demo. This approach is great for getting the audiences attention, but if the rest of your demo is focused on smaller values and obstacles, the audience will lose interest. Think of the movie Die Hard, with the hero John McClane facing increasingly difficult obstacles to stay alive. The rising action of the story keeps the momentum of the story going.RULE #12 Create time-bound obstacles to build suspense Time-bound Intention Hero obstacle (Value) eres cay eis Service Agent Just as every story needs a hero, every story also needs a villain, and the villain in enterprise product demos is Time. Businesses are always on the clock, and constantly trying to operate faster and more efficiently to stay competitive. The best way to setup the villain of Time in your story is to setup time-bound obstacles for your hero to overcome. Simply by placing a time limit for overcoming an obstacle, this builds suspense for the audience. Now the hero has a clear intention, an obstacle in the way, and a limited amount of time to overcome the obstacle. Suspense is a critical tool for keeping the audience's attention, particularly for important value messages in your demo. Don't make the whole story suspenseful, just key scenes where the value of time is at play. If you are trying to demonstrate how a process can be done "faster", creating a time-bound obstacle is the best way to prove this through action.RULE #13 End each scene by articulating a measurable transformation of values Beene ity If you want a scene of your story to come together as a whole, the scene must end with a clear demonstration of the transformation of a measurable value. If you don't clearly articulate what value changed because of the actions in the scene, the audience won't understand the "point" of the scene. One of the biggest mistakes | see in product demos today is that the presenter doesn't clearly articulate a change in values (increase in X, decrease in Y) at the end of a scene. After you go through discovery, you should have a prioritized list of the main values you are focusing the story on. Try and spread these values across different scenes, with each scene focused on demonstrating a single value. You should order the values in scenes based on how important that value is in your solution, starting with the smallest values and ending with the biggest values. Just as the obstacles should constantly increase throughout the story, the changed values should also increase, with the biggest obstacle/value in the final scene. Sometimes you will demonstrate multiple values in a single scene, but if you try and cram too many values in, the audience won't be able to keep up. Create as many scenes as you need to spread out the values you are demonstrating.RULE #14 Limit each scene to 10 minutes or less t=@ca es +=@= oam@oo coro => — => a It's very difficult to keep an audiences attention during a demo. If your demo scenes drag on too long, it will be hard for the audience to pay attention and know what's going on. Keep your demo scenes to under 10 minutes; 5 minutes if you can. It might seem difficult to show a complex feature or flow in 5 minutes, but if you have a solid understanding of the story, 5 minutes is plenty. If your scenes go over 10 minutes, the audience will tune out and won't understand what value you are demonstrating through the scene. Think of most films; scenes typically last 2-5 minutes, and rarely do you see a 15 or 20 minute scene (except Tarantino, but he's a master storyteller, so he can get away with it). Remember, in business, the villain is Time, so make sure you share as much information in the time allotted with your audience through tightly timed scenes.RULE #15 Give the story aclear beginning, middle and end ck Retin Three-Act Structure ‘Act One Ac Two. ‘Act Three ce) (Confrontation) (Gesolon) If you want your story to be memorable, it needs a clear beginning, middle and end; just like a good joke. Our minds seem to process stories through a 3-act structure, and this 3-act structure is used throughout literature, theater and film. Act Lis is the Setup (or the Thesis) of the story, setting up the main characters, the story world, and the intentions and obstacles of the characters, Act 2 is the Confrontation (Antithesis) and amps up the action, confronting the hero with a series of difficutt obstacles to overcome. Act 3 is the Resolution (or the Synthesis) that shows the hero transformed through their adventure, and brings the story together as a whole. The 3-act structure is highly useful for thinking about the structure of your story, and it will make your stories more memorable. You may have heard of the "Hero's Journey”. Mythologist Joseph Campbell coined the term in his book "The Hero of a Thousand Faces". Campbell theorized that all deep stories have an archetypal structure, what he termed the "Monomyth", He deeply studied mythology and articulated a series of "stages" that the hero goes through in a transformative adventure. George Lucas used Campbell's Hero's Journey stages as the foundation for the plot of Star Wars, demonstrating that using an archetypal story structure can have a big psychological effect on the audience. Campbell's work and the Hero's Journey stages are deeply useful, but it's steeped in complex mythology and very difficult to translate into a demo. Whatever story structure you use, from the 3-act structure to the Hero's Journey or other frameworks, your story should have a clear beginning, middle and end. The hero should have changed/transformed from the start to the end, demonstrating a transformation of values.RULE #16 Structure your story around Chaos and Order ‘The era has transformed (chaos into Order and achieves a new value 1-Start your story ina place of relative Order 2+An anomaly is detected that breaks the Order, and things descend nto chaos '5-Thehero ascends out of Chaos into a renewed state of Order where the ‘anomaly has been integrated 4+ The hero maps/integrates the ‘anomaly 3 The hero descends into ‘chaos to confront the ‘anomaly I think that Canadian psychologist Dr Jordan B Peterson has articulated the highest- fidelity model of the structure of stories in his magnum opus "Maps of Meaning". Peterson theorizes that the core archetypal structures of stories are Chaos, Order and the Hero/Villain who mediate between Chaos and Order. Archetypal stories start in a place of relative Order, where everything is going as. planned. Then an Anomaly occurs that disrupts this state of Order, and things descend into Chaos. The hero then voluntarily confronts the Chaos, integrates the Anomaly, and then ascends into a state of Renewed Order. The hero transforms himself and transforms culture through this process, transforming Chaos into Order. Peterson's theory of stories being made out of Chaos and Order is a much deeper and easier theory to understand than Campbell's Hero's Journey. Build your demo stories around the structure of Chaos and Order. This structure maps nicely to the 3-act structure, with Act 1 (Order), Act 2 (Chaos) and Act 3 (Renewed Order). Using this structure will make your demos more interesting and memorable. Source: "Maps of Meaning", Jordan Peterson (1999)RULE #17 Demo on the border between Chaos and Order Left Hemisphere | Right Hemisphere Operation in Operation in Explored Tertory Unexpored Temitony Positive Affect Negative Affect ‘Actvation of Behavior Inhibition of Behavior Word Processing Image Processing near Thinking Holistic Thinking etal Recognition Pettem Recognition Detail Generation Patiem Generation Fine Motor Action Gross Motor Acton Dr. Peterson mapped his theory of stories to the brain using neuropsychological research, and found that the left hemisphere of the brain is optimized for Order, and the right-hemisphere of the brain is optimized for Chaos. Our deepest neural structures are optimized for stories about Chaos and Order. Order Chaos The Known, | Be The Unknown Explored Territory \Unexplored Territory Culture Nature a Tao ("The Way") A symbolic representation of this idea from the East is the Yin-Yang symbol. The black paisley represents Chaos, and the white paisley represents Order. The smaller circles represent alittle Order in the Chaos, and a little Chaos in the Order. The twisting line down the middle of the Yin-Yang is the "Tao", the "Way". The instinct of meaning is activated when you are on the border between Chaos and Order, so if you want to deliver a meaningful demo, you should try to always be on this border. You know when you are on this border when you are ina state of "flow", when you lose your sense of time, and are deeply interested in what you are doing. Source: "Maps of Meaning", Jordan Peterson (1999)RULE #18 Find visual metaphors in your product to show the story Demos are primarily a visual medium, like a film, so try to find visual metaphors in your product that can pictorially show your story. A picture speaks a thousand words, and often a simple visual within your product can convey value without any words, or at least with fewer. Many products have amazing visualizations that can effectively demonstrate value pictorially; dashboards, data visualizations, low-code workflow designers, state diagrams, schema diagrams and stage chevrons. Try and ground the screens in your demo to these pictorial representations of product value, and spend most of your time on these screens. After the demo, you can send the customer a few select screenshots of these visuals, and it will help them remember the value associated with the visuals.RULE #19 Personalize your demo data to your customer's unique language Add real account names to customer list Rename “Customers” to "Patients" > Change dashboard titl to "Advisor Services’ Change branding to match customer brand Every company has different brand, lingo, acronyms, department names, role titles, and names for their data and processes. One of the best ways to get an audience interested in and focused on your demo is by personalizing the demo data to their unique language. There's a lot you can personalize in a demo: branding, color schemes, user roles, report titles, dashboard labels, data tables, knowledge articles and KPI metrics. This can take some time, but it can substantially improve the quality of your demo, and make a much bigger impact on your audience.RULE #20 Remove any screens and data that are irrelevant to the story Most product demos show too many screens, and show data that is completely irrelevant to the story. You want your audience to be focused on your story, so go through your demo and cut out everything that doesn't align with the value you are demonstrating in the scene. Each scene of your demo should only show a handful of screens. You want to minimize the number of actions (eg clicks) you are making in the demo, otherwise the audience will get distracted. Audiences in a demo often interrupt a demo and ask "What's that?" pointing to something on the screen that has nothing to do with the story you are telling. Removing these irrelevant screens and data points from your demo makes it easier for the audience to understand the demo, and decreases the change of your story getting derailed.RULE #21 Ground your demo in the reality of what the product can do today Often we get the temptation to show “art of the possible demos" or "roadmap" features that aren't mature or easy to implement. These demos are great at the right time with the right audience, but you run the risk of losing trust with the customer if you go too far. As much as possible, try to ground your demos in the reality of what your product can do today, without embellishing it. Most enterprise buyers have seen thousands of fake demos, and been burned by vendors pitching future features and use-cases that never delivered. Your customers will trust you more if you ground your demos in features that are currently available and have been proven out by other customers.RULE #22 Allow the audience to physically interact with your demo a 9° a x Most demos today are delivered one-way from a presenter to an audience, with little or no physical interaction from the customer. One of the most effective ways of getting your audience engaged and immersed in your demo story is to have them physically take action in the demo. If you are doing a demo over Zoom, give your audience access to your screen and have them click through the demo themselves. If you are doing a demo in person at an office, setup multiple laptops and tablets and phones with the demo, and have different audience members act out different demo personas. If you are hosting a sales or marketing event, setup large physical interactive demos so the audience can get hands-on and immersed in the experience.RULE #23 Don't tell the audience something they already know Your audience knows more about their business and industry than you do, so don't bore them with information they already know. Your audience is probably busy with meetings, they see lots of vendor demos, and they hate nothing more than a boring demo showing them something they already know. It's a waste of their time. Spend time understanding what your audience already knows, about specific workflows, use-cases, competitors, systems, Understand what they consider to be "known". Then spend time expanding your demo story into the "unknown", introducing ideas that are new to the audience. Introducing ideas that are "unknown" to the audience will grab their attention and make them interested in the outcome of the story. If the story stays in the realm of what is "known", the audience will tune out, as there is nothing interesting for them to learn. But you can't make your whole demo story about the "unknown", otherwise it won't be relatable. The best path is to strike a balance between the "Known" and the "Unknown", just like you demo on the border between Chaos and Order. Chaos is the Unknown. Order is the Known. Our brains are optimized to process information on the border between the Unknown and the Known. So when you are crafting your demo story, don't just tell the audience something they already know; lean into the unknown.RULE #24 Don't present the demo; perform the demo A demo is not a presentation; a demo is a performance. In a presentation you are just talking, maybe showing some slides. But in a demo you are taking action ina product, often from many demo personas, so a demo is much more a performance than a presentation. Persona-centric demos are naturally theatrical and dramatic, so lean into this when you perform a demo. Try and "get into character" when you are presenting froma particular user persona. Try to be entertaining as well as informative.RULE #25 Write a talk track but then throw it away and improvise Write a talk track Improvise The fastest way to lose an audience's attention is to read from a script. As soon as. the audience notices you are reading from a script, they will tune out. It's still very useful to write a script though. Writing a talk track for your demo forces you to narrate and think through the story in detail. Writing the talk track will help you identify flaws in the story, will help you shorten scene length, and will help you internalize the story. But after you've written your talk track, throw it out and improvise. No-one wants to hear you read from a script, so the only way to perform a demo well is to improvise your talk track. The best way to keep the audience on the edge of their seat is for you to be on the edge of yours. If you spend enough time in discovery and storyboarding, you'll have enough knowledge to improvise your talk track on the fly. If you are struggling to improvise your talk track for a demo, it's a sign that you haven't done enough discovery and storyboarding.RULE #26 Show, don't tell x Don't Tell One of the most quoted principles of film storytelling is "Show, don't tell”. Film, like ademo, is primarily a visual medium of communication, so visually showing a concept is much more important than saying what's happening. You have to show the audience how the characters act in the product to demonstrate value; you cant just talk about value. If you find yourself talking a lot during demos without actioning much in the product, it's a sign you are breaking the "Show, don't tell" rule. You should always ask yourself whether there is a way to show a concept in the product rather than verbally explaining it. Most product demos today are delivered verbally, without a whole lot of action happening on the screen. This is boring for an audience, and they will tune out. In demos as in business, the villain is Time. If your intention is to create a meaningful demo, giving yourself an obstacle of 10 minutes per scene will help you practice the "Show, don't tell" rule. As you boil down your demo scenes to under 10 minutes, you will be forced to Show instead of Tell.26 RULES FOR HIGH-IMPACT DEMO STORYTELLING #1- Know your audience and what they value #2 - Discover user pain points that matter #3 - Use stories to communicate value to a non-technical audience #4 - Be careful using too many stories with a technical audience #5 - Storyboard your demo in detail before you start building anything #6 - Co-create and validate the demo storyboard with your customer #7 - Use demo personas to tell a dramatic story #8 - Use the minimum number of personas necessary to tell the story 9 - Identify the hero of your story and give them clear intentions and obstacles #10 - Start each scene with a clear user intention statement #11 - Confront the hero with increasingly difficult obstacles to overcome #12 - Create time-bound obstacles to build suspense #13 - End each scene by articulating a measurable transformation of values #14 - Limit each scene to less than 10 minutes #15 - Give your story a clear beginning, middle and end #16 - Structure your story around Chaos and Order #17 - Demo on the border between Chaos and Order #18 - Find visual metaphors in your product to show the story #19 - Personalize the demo data to your customer's unique language #20 - Remove any screens and data that are irrelevant to the story #21- Ground your demo in the reality of what the product can do today #22 - Allow the audience to physically interact with the demo #23 - Don't tell the audience something they already know #24 - Don't present the demo; perform the demo #25 - Write a talk track but then throw it away and improvise #26 - Show, don't tell