Demo Storytelling

Create Your Story

• Spice Up Your Demo
  • The best presenters illustrate their thoughts using stories
  • Stories are memorable because they tap into emotions
  • Salesforce has found that demos are most effective when customers are the focus of the story
• Explore a New Life
  • Personas are roles that are used to tell “day in the life” stories
  • Personas are useful because they make demos relatable
• Win Over Your Audience
  • Four key elements to any story, and the questions to help identify them:
    • Hero - strong character with their own goals and motivations, helps audience connect what you show in your demo with real-world experience
      • Who is my customer?
      • Who is my customer’s customer?
    • Challenge - hurdle that makes it difficult for your heroes to succeed in their journeys
      • What obstacles are blocking my customer’s goals?
      • What challenges does this customer have with the company they’re working with?
    • Helper - someone or something that helps heroes conquer their challenges
      • How do your products/services help the hero overcome each challenge? How do they equip the hero?
    • Victory - wonderful place that makes your customer’s struggles and challenges worth it
      • What victory resonates with your audience?
      • Why is this victory significant to my customer?
      • What happens when my audience is victorious over their challenges? What can they do now that they couldn’t before?
• Make your Customer Shine
  • Every story needs a hero - a main character.
    • Products and services are not heroes or the sole focus of a good story
    • Instead position customers as the hero transforming their business
• Find your Customer’s Hurdle
  • Weave your audiences challenges into your story. What is relatable?
    • Poor-quality pipeline causing salespeople to miss their numbers?
    • Service agent receiving abnormally low customer satisfaction scores?
    • Lack of insight into customer behavior confounding a marketer?
• We are Better Together
  • Stories typically have hero-helper relationships
  • “Helper” should be your products or services
  • Biggest factor in customer’s building decisions is how products and features help them through their challenges - they are looking for a product that makes their problems disappear, and would like for you to deliver it
  • Customers care more about business outcomes than “features”
• Create a Lasting Victory
  • Two parts to a victory:
    • Finish Line: tangible outcomes - results, costs saved, time reduced
    • Lessons Learned: emotional changes in your customer
• Inspire Positive Change
  • Hero’s journey from start to end is called the “From-To shift” - it is the growth and change your hero experiences on their quest
    • It describes how emotionally relevant and meaningful your story is for your audience
  • In demos, its important to leave on the high note of transformation
    • This transformation inspires customers to give you a chance at solving their business challenges
      
      
• A benefit of telling a story during your demo is that stories create emotional connections and are memorable
• Benefit of using a persona is that it creates a relatable connection with your customer
• Salesforce is the Helper of your demo story
• An effective helper statement for a customer interested in delivering exception customer service is: This new service lets agents send messages to customers instantly, reducing case resolution time

Build Your Storyboard

• Storyboard Like a Pro
  • One way to ensure your demo goes off without a hitch is to create a storyboard
  • Storyboard - visual representation of your demo story. Goal is to transform you story idea into a screen-by-screen, click-by-click presentation
  • Even if you have a story, you should still create a storyboard, because they:
    • Identify holes in your narrative
    • Illustrate what is possible screen-by-screen
    • Shows other teams what needs to be built/how it should look like
    • Save time, because building a demo takes more time than storyboarding it
    • Tie your story back to your customer’s goals
• Step into Success
  • An important rule of thumb is that you should revise the story until it makes sense screen-by-screen. Toss out anything that doesn’t work in your storyboard.
  • Use the following four steps to create your storyboard
• Step 1: Whiteboard It
  • Whiteboard is a great place to begin framing your demo story because it’s editable - here you can align your hero, challenge, helper, and victory
  • Use four quadrants, and state goal at the top:

• Step 2: Map It
  • Introduce products and transitions

• Step 3: Slide your Story Into Google Slides
  • In Google Sheets mock something up like the following:

• But, present something more clean and finalized:

• Step 4: Build with Confidence
  • Consider the following questions about building out the rest of the demo:
    • What part of this demo will be hardest to build?
    • What will take the longest to create?
    • Do I need to request support from another team to build this demo?
      
      
• It is important to create a storyboard because storyboards are used to organize thoughts
• The first first step in outlining your storyboard is to draw your story on a whiteboard
• Use placeholders in your mockup Google Slides