Somebody asked me recently about the most outrageous software demonstration I had ever participated in. I have two…couldn’t choose between them.

The first…was my first. Way back in 1990. This particular software company came to my employer’s office with two sales professionals. One was the local sales rep – the other guy was brand new to the software company. So new, that this was his first day on the job…a bit of a gunslinger was he.

These two guys were so out of sync with each other….the low-point came when they actually wrestled the keyboard from each other trying to make a point. Very funny. Needless to say we killed them…The demonstration was so bad that it worked to their favor. I contacted the president of the software company and explained what happened. He came out and did the demo with another sales professional…and they eventually won the sale.

Interestingly in retrospect…this whole little drama was the first step in me forming Lupine Partners. More on this another time.

Lesson: If you are going to be bad…be REAL bad.

Second really bad software demonstration: As more and more technology has become Internet based, it is not unusual for software vendor salespersons to request Internet connections to be made available during the demonstrations. This particular vendor made a big deal about having the connection; processing over the Internet was a large consideration for this particular client.

The demonstration started, and very quickly we began to go through the scripts. The software vendor salesperson was talking about the speed of the processing. I looked up at the screen and noticed that the whole demonstration was running on c:\localhost, which for the technically challenged means that the entire demonstration was running locally on the vendor’s laptop. In other words, the entire Internet connection “hook-in” was a sham. I held my tongue to see if the representative would correct his misdirection. He didn’t. He proceeded through the whole day talking about the speed of the vendor’s internet product. When I held the debriefing that night, I asked the team about the Internet speed. They were very impressed. I then asked how many of them knew that the entire demonstration was local, processed on the software vendor salesperson’s laptop. The IT director raised his hand. The other people in the room were shocked—and then they were angry. We had a long discussion about product and company—good product, bad company.

The really interesting turn on this story was that three weeks later I was going through demonstrations with another client with this same vendor. The same thing happened again. It was an entirely different sales team; in fact, these were senior sales people. I held my tongue and then did the same thing at night: revealed what had been done to the project team. Same result, same anger.

All of this was avoidable. All the sales representative had to do was disclose upfront that he was going to do the bulk of the demonstration locally in the interest of speed and timing. That’s what everybody else does. But they were insecure about the functionality of their Internet offering that they misled.

The really interesting point is that the software company in all 3 examples…from 1990 to 2004…is the same company.