I met with a business owner this week, who had developed world class data mining & reporting software for large enterprises seeking to benchmark themselves against their competitors on a global basis.   When I asked about the software, he got out his laptop and started demonstrating how the software worked.

I admit about five minutes into the demonstration, I “checked out” on everything he was saying.

Whilst I “checked out” on the demonstration, I was extremely impressed by the passion and enthusiasm he had for the software. I totally bought into his belief this software will transform the way businesses extract, analyze, and report on data.

At the end of the demonstration, I reached over, shut the laptop and said:

             “Now sell me your software without demonstrating how it works”

 He went silent and clearly was struggling with knowing how to respond. In fact, the first response was:

                “No-one has ever asked me to do that before”

 From that stumbling response, we went into a wide-ranging conversation about the software, covering issues such as:

• The positioning of the software
• The ideal clients who would get maximum value from the software
• The problems the software will be solving for such clients
• Why the software is better than its competitors
• Pricing of the software
• Talking to prospects about the software

At the end of the conversation, the business owner summarized the key takeaways from our conversation as:

1.    Demonstrate how the software works once he determines a person is interested in the software; and
2.    He was walking away with two sentences that positioned what the software did without ever opening a laptop.