Any technology vendor wishing to sell services to brokers and insurers should take heed of Celent’s latest report, How to give a really bad demo, a tongue-in-cheek look at the 10 worst practices for demonstrating new technology to insurance companies and brokerages.
Donald Light authored the satirical piece for Celent, a global research and consulting firm for the financial services industry. Brokers reading the piece may find themselves reminded of a first-hand example of one or more of the following bad demo techniques listed in the Celent paper.
Here’s one satirical piece of advice to tech vendors that may particularly resonate with brokers and insurers listening to tech demos – if you get a hard question, don’t answer it.
Celent’s paper quips that no one has ever had only successful implementations or happy clients. And so tech vendors can expect to be asked about these unhappy situations at their demos.
“The worst practice is to avoid a straightforward response,” the paper says. Further, it jokingly states that vendors should not acknowledge the facts of the matter, describe what they did to improve the situation, or reveal lessons any lessons learned.
“You should think about providing a somewhat inaccurate description of what happened, because senior IT staff in the insurer you are talking to could not possibly talk to their counterparts in the insurer in question. And analysts only know whatever you tell them – once burned, ever eager to be burned again.”
Here are nine other key worst practices:
• Don’t try to understand the insurance company or the brokerage at which you are making the tech demonstration.
• Give the same demo you always give.
• Don’t waste time convincing the insurer or the broker that you are a good long-term partner
• Business value? Don’t even go there.
• Spend as much time as possible in a general business user environment. “It’s fine to spend 80% or 90% of your time showing screens to business users,” the paper says. “Be sure to log in as a super-user in order to make it as hard as possible for people viewing the demo to understand whatever role that is being demonstrated at a given time (Agent? Underwriter? Unit Manager? Business Analyst? Summer intern?)”
• Don’t demonstrate the current version
• Don’t give people a chance to understand new screens
• Don’t tune your demo for the insurer’s or brokerage’s presentation environment
• Don’t repeat questions or answers for anyone on a conference line.
