Seminar 'Presenting and Selling (Scientific) Software'

Type:

Seminar (2 SWS)

Ects:

possibly 2 or 3 (bioinformaticians so far cannot get "soft skills" counted)

Lecturer

Andrea Schafferhans

Rotation:

Tuesday 10:30-12:00 - 23.11. Introduction; 11. 1. Background; 25.1. Discussion; 15.2. Presentation training block (dates to be discussed)

Place:

01.09.034

Language:

English

Organisational

Please write a mail to Andrea Schafferhans if you plan to participate in the course, so we can fix the dates for the course.

Since one of the participants will not be in Germany before Jan/2011, the main part of the course should take place in 2011.

I suggest to have a short introductory meeting in november, a lecture/seminar with some background info beginning of January, maybe one discussion session end of January and the final training in a block in February. The above dates are suggestions.

 

Content

This seminar will give the participants the opportunity to train their presentation skills, focussing especially on skills needed to sell software. They will learn how to

  • identify key features of a product as well as important differences to competitors
  • analyze typical application scenarios and "pains" of their customers
  • create short but compelling presentations.

There will be an introduction explaining the sales process for complex/scientific software, the information customers need, things to remember when preparing a software demo and the key points of compelling software demonstrations.

The participants will prepare sales material for a software package of their choice. Ideal would be software they have contributed to, themselves. The material will include:

  • a presentation and demo consisting of three parts:
    • Prequel: briefly explain what software you will present, what your intended audience would be and what is special about your software
    • Intro: Address your customers (actors: other participants) and explain what you will show them
    • actual Demo: demonstrate the capability of your software in a live demo 
  • some written documentation (1-2 pages), where you can choose
    • either a meta-document where you explain your software, audience, critical business issues, choice of demo scenario and "illustration"  
    • or to produce some marketing material like a 1 or 2 page fact-sheet with figures which essentially show your demo on paper

The material will be presented and discussed in a block seminar at the end of the semester.