Showing-and-telling… a marketing artform

Creating Passionate Users, fast becoming one of my favorite blogs, shares some practical thoughts in this article about demonstrating new products or technology. “Don’t Make the Demo Look Done” applies directly to software, but the ideas are applicable to selling hardware, just as much.

For semiconductor companies, the concept of example designs, or functional mock-ups, goes a long way to help selling a silicon solution. Of course, fitting the prototypes’ forms and functions to suit the state of the products’ development is a bit of an art… and not all the competitors completely understand this… or so say customers who get a real kick out of seeing something more than powerpoint vapor-ware, or gnarly-looking circuit boards… (depending on the audience of course — the geeks love the circuits!)

In selling processes and business development discussions, one of the most effective ways to communicate a solution’s values are demos that are simple to understand, clear to grasp value, and non-distracting from the key message. The closer you approach a familiar end-product-esque form factor, the better, but not critical the earlier you are in development. The closer one gets into production-readiness, demo platforms evolve in sophistication as well. They look far more “ready.” Maybe this is pretty intuitive, but it’s suprising how easy it is to mess up, or more innocently, overlook.

Hopefully, I’ll get to put up some shots demo products soon…

Stay tuned…