The twelve-minute demo
Twelve minutes, six beats, no slides. Built out of what you have already read, and rehearsed until the third beat works on somebody else's laptop.
Everything in this course exists for the next twelve minutes. Not a deck — the org, open, on a screen, with a person watching. The whole point of learning a finished business rather than building one is that you can show it working before you have sold anything.
The rule that makes it good: never show a screen without saying what it costs them today. A board is a board. “These 96 enquiries are what your team currently keeps in their heads and a spreadsheet” is a demo.
The six beats
| Min | Beat | The line underneath it |
|---|---|---|
1 | The board | This is the business, in one screen |
2 | One enquiry | This is what it already knows without anybody typing |
3 | A lead arrives, live | Watch three things happen in eighteen seconds |
2 | The assistant answers | From your documents, and it refuses what it should |
2 | Two written messages | Not a mail-merge — read them |
2 | The ad-spend gap | This is the part that pays for it |
1
- Beat
- The board
- The line underneath it
- This is the business, in one screen
2
- Beat
- One enquiry
- The line underneath it
- This is what it already knows without anybody typing
3
- Beat
- A lead arrives, live
- The line underneath it
- Watch three things happen in eighteen seconds
2
- Beat
- The assistant answers
- The line underneath it
- From your documents, and it refuses what it should
2
- Beat
- Two written messages
- The line underneath it
- Not a mail-merge — read them
2
- Beat
- The ad-spend gap
- The line underneath it
- This is the part that pays for it
Beat 1 — the board (1 min)
Open the deals board and say what the stages are, in their words, from The deals board and the seven stages. Do not explain the software. Point at one column and say what has to be true for an enquiry to be in it.
Land: “Every business has this. Most keep it in three places that disagree.”
Beat 2 — one enquiry (2 min)
Open a single enquiry, the way Inside one enquiry: value, stage, source, next step did. Value, stage, source, who it is. Then show the empty next step and say what that means.
Do not promise a rich history here. In a fresh org 45 of 96 enquiries carry a single note and nothing carries more, so a client who leans in and asks to see the whole trail will find two lines. Say instead: “nobody has written the next step here, and that is the normal state of every CRM I have ever opened” — then let beat three create the history in front of them.
Beat 3 — a lead arrives, live (3 min)
This is the beat people remember, and the only one that can go wrong. Post a lead to the intake URL from Capturing a lead from any other system — from your phone, from a browser tab, from anything. Then say nothing for fifteen seconds and let them watch.
- A contact and an enquiry appear that did not exist.
- A call-back task lands on it, with the urgency chosen from the amount.
- It is routed to a named person, and the record says why.
Then open the run and show them the log, from The execution log: run one, then read it. Not to prove it worked — to prove it is readable. “When this goes wrong in your business, this is the screen we look at together.”
Rehearse this one until it is boring. Have the payload ready to paste, know which three workflows fire, and have the run open in a second tab in case the network is slow. If it fails in front of a client, narrate it — you have The execution log: run one, then read it and it will show you exactly where it stopped. A partner who debugs calmly in front of a prospect sells more than one whose demo went perfectly.
Beat 4 — the assistant answers (2 min)
Ask it something a customer would ask. Then ask it something it should refuse — a rate, an approval, their own case. Show the refusal and then open the prompt and show them the line that caused it, from Giving an agent a knowledge base.
Land: “Your compliance team can read that sentence and change it. It is not a model setting.”
Beat 5 — two written messages (2 min)
Show the two follow-up messages from Two kinds of follow-up: the cadence and the written-for-one message side by side — one offering to walk through an offer, one offering to collect a specific missing document — and say what each was written from. The last note on that person's file, which their team already writes.
Land: “This is what the notes your team already keeps are worth, if anything ever reads them.”
Beat 6 — the ad-spend gap (2 min)
Finish on money. Show what Telling Meta which leads were worth it does: the platform optimises for leads because leads are all anybody ever sends back to it. Their best campaign might produce the most enquiries and the least money, and nobody would know.
Land: “Everything before this makes you faster. This makes your spend smarter, and it is the one that pays for the rest.”
What to have open before they arrive
- The board, one enquiry, and the intake URL with a payload ready to paste.
- The chat agent, in a tab, already loaded.
- The two generated messages, in case beat five's live run is slow.
- Nothing else. A tab you did not plan to open is a question you did not plan to answer.
Know which of the 19 workflows are actually running before you start. There are 7 today, and 7 more waiting on a credential. If somebody asks to see WhatsApp, the true answer — “it is built, it needs your number” — is a strong answer. Guessing is not.
Do it
This lesson is assessed by doing it, not by a quiz. Run the twelve minutes, out loud, to a colleague or a camera. Then run it again.
- First run: get through all six beats without stopping, whatever goes wrong.
- Second run: cut thirty seconds. There is always thirty seconds of explaining the software rather than the business.
- Third run: have somebody interrupt you at beat three with “what if it gets it wrong?” and answer without leaving the screen.
- You are ready when beat three no longer makes you nervous.
Next: What to promise, and what not to — the last lesson, and the one that keeps the twelve minutes honest.
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