How to Give a Really Bad Demo: Ten Worst Practices from Actual Experience

Giving a bad demo is obviously against vendors’ best interests—and also serves the interest of prospective buyers poorly—that this report has abandoned the usual “10 Best Practices for Giving a Great Demo” approach.

In the report How to Give a Really Bad Demo: Ten Worst Practices from Actual Experience, Celent uses humor, satire, and a tongue-in-cheek perspective to help vendors and those who want to buy solutions from vendors to have better and more effective demo experiences.

“There is no particular reason a vendor would want to give a bad demo to a prospective buyer of its software, and yet, vendor selection teams and analysts sit through a lot of really bad demos--and to be fair, bad stretches in some pretty good demos,” says Donald Light, Research Director with Celent’s Insurance Group and author of the report. “Why this is both puzzling and troubling.”

This 17-page report presents ten “worst practices” based on actual experience—ranging from “Don’t try to understand the insurance company” to “Business value: Don't even go there.” The goal of the report is to make vendors and insurers break a smile and think about how to make demos work for them.