How to change your demos based upon personas

Business Users vs Managers vs C-Level

How do you present your product differently?

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In addition to presenting information to a prospect's pains, use-case, and industry, you should also be conscious of what persona(s) you'll be doing a demo for. This can be quite challenging when you're presenting to a room full of different professionals but discuss some strategies you can take to present your product in a way which will resonate with the needs and wants of that person.

In essence, I think each persona requires a blend of two different points of focus: Feature/function vs Business Outcomes

I'll segment this based upon three different personas: Business Users, Managers and C-Level.

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Business Users: 80:20

• This is likely the format which is most familiar and most common for the majority of product demos. This is the person(s) who will actually be in the platform day-to-day so they'll care the most about how the ins and outs of the platform and how it can save them time.
• You are best suited focusing on features and micro outcomes this user will experience (80:20). Anything that can make them better and more efficient at their current daily tasks is best to focus on. I think you can focus on what else the user can do with more time in their day and a better outcome.
• This demo will likely be the most feature/function focused because prospects typically need to be certain the solution can solve all of their needs. Depending upon your prospects knowledge of your space, I'd still focus on presenting your best features first to quickly grab attention and isolate your solution as an attractive offer.

Managers: 50:50

• Managers and Directors are obviously a median between the business users and Executives. They generally* have a good pulse on both the day to day operations of a business user and the initiatives that are top of mind for an executive. Thus, I think it's more important to focus more on business and user outcomes. 50:50
• With these types of personas, it's important to tell a really compelling and complete story. This could be the upside-down approach, where you articulate the overarching business outcomes they'll get from utilizing your product and then diving into the specifics of how. OR, you could flip it and start with the day to day operations and feature which help with that.
• Regardless of what order you present it in, you must be careful not to default to the standard "feature-function" demo like you'd do with a business user. These professionals have a wide range of pains so you must be conscious of addressing both sides of their business mind: Business outcome and end-user outcomes.

C-Level: 20:80

• The notorious C-Level demo. One in which you'll encounter some of the strongest and demanding personas. These are the professionals who will disrupt your planned demo and demand that you tell them why they should buy or what is the best thing here or even I already saw this, whats different. They care about business outcomes at a large scale, not specifically the features which make it possible (20:80).
• To combat this, I recommend focusing heavy on the business outcomes their organization will receive.

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