We’ve all been there. Each of us has attended a virtual event where our intention was to be present and pay attention, but found ourselves beginning to multitask after the first few minutes. Perhaps the speaker or the topic just wasn’t engaging enough, or you were distracted by the nagging feeling that you should respond quickly to that one urgent email. Then, twenty minutes later, you realized you should probably get back to being present and paying attention.
My colleagues and I just finished delivering our Sizzling Demo Workshop for Microsoft Dynamics 365 in a three-city roadshow. We had a lot of requests from attendees to also cover delivering a sizzling demo remotely. As companies expand into new geographies, and as they increase their use of technologies that let more of their employees work from home and other locations, meetings where all attendees are in the same room are becoming more and more rare.
In the next Dynamics 365 Partner call on May 16, we’ll share tips and tricks to help you deliver sizzling demos remotely.
Sign up for the Dynamics 365 Partner call on May 16
Considerations for delivering remote demos
There are some considerations for delivering a remote demo that are different from an in-person demo. Your preparation will largely revolve around mapping out your interactions with the audience. We recommend having five or six interactions with the audience during a one-hour remote presentation. The average attention span will drop, as you are competing with more distractions, such as email and social media. Annotating directly on your PowerPoint is a useful way to keep audience attention – our eyes are drawn to the screen when we see movement. And, with smaller audiences, you can invite them to participate, inking their own annotations on your slides (this functionality is available in Skype for Business when the individuals are in presenter status).
If you have a larger group of people and want to gather information or input from the audience, you can start a whiteboard session, and keep everyone in attendee status. Polls are another tool you can use throughout a presentation that helps keep people actively listening and participating. If you use these tools, be sure to spend time at the beginning showing them how to use these tools when the time comes, and set the expectation that your demo is interactive.
Partner call about delivering remote demos on Tuesday, May 16
We’ll share more tips and tricks for delivering sizzling remote demos for Microsoft Dynamics 365 on the partner call on Tuesday, May 16.
Sign up for the May 16 Dynamics 365 Partner call
Dynamics 365 Partner Community
