Business forecasting is all about detail. It has to take into account every aspect of the enterprise and return a coherent picture. But board directors aren't usually detail people. They work in overviews.
Our suggestion to Reflex was to show how their product takes away the detail and gives them control in its place.
| Format: | Hard disk, memory stick or CD-ROM |
| Primary Use: | Business to business presentation |
| Secondary Uses: |
Customer leave-behind |
| Client-editable: | Client can personalise the demo data to suit the customer Data hierarchies can be altered during presentation to respond to audience feedback |
| Remote update: | No |
| Internet communication: | No |
| What we did |
Design |
Reflex Action is an exceptionally powerful forecasting software package that puts business managers fully in control of where the organisation is going. Reflex needed to be able to make highly relevant demonstrations that show exactly what there system can do. To do that they needed to show how it works with the sort of data their customer might really expect to see.
That wasn't an easy task. Setting up dummy data for each presentation would take many hours, even before configuring the system to use it.
We developed a working model of Reflex Action that usesits own small, quickly editable database. The customer sees a believable picture of his or her own business, and the leave-behind version even allows them to experiment later.
Graphing is an important element of the forecasts. Previous attempts to output these graphs or embed them in PowerPoint presentations had proved complex and unreliable, so an alternative was needed. We used Configurative's live graphing capabilities to present interactive data in bar charts, line graphs and animated 3D pie charts.
The demonstration sits behind a concise, clearly-argued presentation that focuses on what the customer gets from the system, not on Reflex's self-evident expertise in developing it. We structured the presentation around the view that a director wants to take of his or her business. Using the analogy of how you drive your car, this is easily understood. You drive with your main attention on the road ahead, glancing at the key instruments that tell you, in general terms, what's going on in the engine room. If a warning light comes on, you tell the garage that something needs fixing.
You do it this way because, if you take your eyes off the road for any length of time, you'll crash.
So the top and bottom message of the whole pitch is absolutely clear: Welcome to the Driving Seat.
It's worth mentioning an unusual approach we've used here. The data structure used in forecasting is built according to a carefully developed hierarchy. This gives rise to a number of sub-hierarchies that respond to the needs of individual users: the sales view, financial view or logistics view for example. Before a presentation Reflex makes a best guess at these hierarchies.
If they're right, the customer is bowled over. But get one thing out of place and it becomes a distraction. The hierarchies in our presentation allow the presenter to drag and drop items in and out of hierarchies or re-order them right in the middle of the presentation. This has the audience beginning to spec out their system even before they've made the decision to buy.
As a result, they see a presentation that's self-evidently tailored to their exact situation. And when they receive their copy on memory stick, it reflects all the changes they've made.
User-configurable presentations are fairly rare. We suspect that audience-configurable presentations may be unique.