Help first, tour later

A prospect watching your demo is asking one thing before anything else: will this help me? How easy your product looks counts as well, though less, and mostly at the start.

What the research found

Since the late 1980s, researchers have put the same two questions to employees and consumers. Do you expect this tool to help you? Do you expect it to be easy? Then they compare the answers with whether people mean to use the tool. The largest review pooled studies of about 410,000 people, and expecting help went with a stronger intention to use a tool than expecting ease did. Employees and consumers looked the same.

Ease also fades. Researchers followed employees in four firms for five months after a new system arrived: usefulness mattered the whole time, while ease mattered right after training and had dropped away by the third month. One thing that went with a tool feeling useful was plain enough: people could see its results, and explain them to someone else.

What it means for you

Say you show a clinic your booking tool and spend twenty minutes on menus and settings. They nod, and never reply. Nothing in those twenty minutes answered the question they came with, so they were left to work out alone whether the tool would help them.

Ease still counts, and a demo is a first contact, which is when it counts most. You don't need to hide how the product works. Put a useful result first, and let the ease show in how few steps it took to get there. None of the studies tested demos, so treat this as our reading of what they found.

Before your next demo

• Ask beforehand what they would most like to see solved. Their answer tells you which result to show.
• Start the demo with that result, on their own case rather than a made-up example, and point out how few steps it took.
• Keep the full feature tour for later, when they ask for it or in a follow-up.

How Bamya CRM helps

Bamya CRM is a free AI-assisted CRM. It can remind you to ask a prospect what they need, before every demo.

Research: Blut, Chong, Tsiga & Venkatesh (2022), Journal of the Association for Information Systems; Venkatesh & Bala (2008), Decision Sciences; Davis (1989), MIS Quarterly. Most of these studies are surveys of what users say they intend to do, not of buying decisions, and the links with measured use were weaker.