Programmed to Forget

How this impacts our demos

by Peter Cohan, Second Derivative

Programmed to Forget

Imagine you are driving home from work or on an errand … What do you remember about the cars and signs you see, the road-side debris, people, buildings and the roads you pass? How much of that information do you retain? 

Most of us remember very little as we move through our day. Our brains are continuously evaluating what we see and hear — and continuously discarding anything not considered important, threatening or particularly interesting. 

What do we remember? Remarkable events, problems, danger and close calls, humor (things that made us laugh), anger (things that made us mad) and other emotional experiences (things that caused a strong emotional reaction).

What don’t we remember? Everything typical, expected or normal. Indeed, we are programmed to forget … .

The forgotten

How does this impact our traditional software demos and what audiences remember? In an hour-long traditional demo, we shouldn’t expect our audiences to remember very much:

• They won’t remember long sequences of features, functions and options.
• They won’t remember complex workflows, loops and multiple “if” cases.
• They won’t remember the confusing interdependencies of configuration choices, multiple roles and intertwined pathways.

The remembered

What will audiences recall from traditional demos? The beginning, the end and the ugly:

• They will remember the first and last few things you show.
• They will remember the bugs, crashes, ignored or poorly handled questions, the amusing distractions from other audience members and particularly stunning fumbling for features.
• And they will remember an overall impression of the demo — as being boring, confusing and complicated.

They may also remember the absence of capabilities they want — in many cases, even if you did, in fact, present these capabilities! 

What can we do to improve our success rates? 

Memory management 

Here are three simple — yet very effective — tactics to help your customers retain the key ideas you want them to remember:

1. Do the last thing first! When presented with a long list of ideas, people remember the first few items very well and the last few items moderately well — and the material in between generally gets lost. This is the “Attention-Retention” Principle (also known as the Serial Positioning Effect).

Take advantage of this and start your demos with the most compelling, most interesting deliverables for each audience. If the audience remembers nothing else, they will remember the most important part of your demo — the payoff, the visual evidence of the solution to their problem. 

1. Present discrete “chunks.” Along similar lines, people absorb and retain information best when presented in discrete chunks, as opposed to a long linear flow. Organize and present your demos accordingly — in consumable components — and use a roadmap to help manage the delivery of your component chunks.
2. Summarize! Adults learn by repetition — so when you complete a demo segment, summarize. Repeat, verbally, what you just showed them. If you are face-to-face, you should see your audience nodding their heads. This means they have heard you, they understand, and they have a higher likelihood of remembering.

How can you tell if your audience will remember the key points? You’ll see them making notes. Most of us combat our “programming-to-forget” by making notes of the major ideas, issues and questions we want to remember. For software demos, if you are doing well, you’ll see your audience making notes about key capabilities and writing comments about what they find particularly interesting. 

I really remember … 

What else can we do to help audiences remember our demos? Anything they perceive as remarkable is memorable — for example: 

• Use a unique technique to present a solution to a problem: “Wow! They showed us the key reports that we need to produce right up front, at the beginning of their demo. And they showed generating those reports in three mouse clicks, as opposed to what takes us a week to do today!”
• Engage the audience: “That was so cool — they had John drive a portion of their demo, and John still types in all caps!”
• Develop concepts or materials ad hoc: “It was great when they built a new form for us, first on a whiteboard and then right in their software.”
• Make it a two-way conversation: “We were really engaged — asking questions and even coming up with new ideas for our process.”
• Finish the demo early: “Wow — they finished early, and I had time to get some real work done!”
• Be humorous, but effective: “It was funny when the sales guy said, ‘The bad news is I have a 60-slide corporate overview presentation to show — the good news is that I’m not going to inflict it on you!’”
• Use props: “Do you remember when their technical guy came into the room with this huge stack of documents and folders spilling all over the place? Looked like our day-to-day lives, to me.”
• Run their examples: “That was really nice — we rarely take something of value away from a demo.”

Humans are, by nature, programmed to forget. Causatively forgetting the unimportant, the uninteresting and the unremarkable is how our brains handle the enormous volume of information we encounter every day. 

Make your demos memorable by “doing the last thing first,” organizing your delivery in consumable components and by summarizing — as basics. Make your demos truly unforgettable by doing the unexpected, the noteworthy and the remarkable.