How to build a career moat with interactive demos

Anael (Host, Storylane CSM): Hello, everybody. Welcome to this webinar, the second episode of our Finer Demos Club series. Today we have Michael Burr from NICE with us, and he'll explain how he managed to build a career moat by mastering interactive demos. Before that, I'll introduce myself — I'm from Storylane, a customer success manager, helping our customers take their demos to the next level.

Alright, so I think now we're all ready for Michael. I'll let you introduce yourself, but I'm very excited — as a former presales and sales engineer myself. Michael, senior sales enablement manager at NICE, you're about to present three lessons you learned that helped you push your career to a much higher level. So without further ado, Michael, over to you.

Michael Burr (Senior Sales Enablement Manager, NICE): Sure, awesome. Well, I really appreciate it, and I hope this is helpful for everyone. If we have any technical difficulties, try to flag me down, and if there are questions we want to ask as we go along, feel free to do that. So as Anael said, I am Michael Burr. I work for NICE. Traditionally we're in the contact center space; that's really kind of morphed — we're into the customer experience space now, and so we touch on all points of where a customer starts an interaction in a customer service journey, in any kind of industry. It can be everything from health care to software sales. I work in software sales, but it could be something like travel — anything you can imagine. Anything where there's a customer service journey, we touch on it.

When I started working for NICE about four years ago, I started as a sales enablement engineer. So I came on to help actually sell the product, get on live demonstrations. I still do a lot of that in my work now, but it's expanded since then. I transitioned quickly from that role, about a year into working for NICE, into a marketing manager role. And then since then I've moved into this senior sales enablement role, where I still have to touch on marketing and help with that, but it's also about enabling our salespeople in the best fashion possible — whatever solutions we can come up with to make their lives easier as they go through the sales process, we want to help them do that.

So we're going to talk a little bit about that and show you how I built my career and where it came from. Working as a sales engineer when I started, I had a lot of exposure into where there were some gaps. One of them being: when we deliver full-service demonstrations — a customer comes to us, they're interested in our product — that takes a lot of effort. We have discovery sessions, we're pinpointing the demo right to that customer, and we're giving them that experience. And I realized through that process that we needed something, at least on our website, that was a little more interactive, more positive, more proactive — engaging customers right when they hit our website, to give them a taste of what our software was about. So I went out and did some searching and discovered that Storylane existed, and it really checked off all the boxes for what we needed. We didn't have any of these self-service interactive demos, but we had that need to tell compelling stories. Once I was able to transition into the marketing role, I started leading the charge, with a team of folks, on how we could adopt this software, Storylane, and start using it to build interactive demos.

This is the typical thing you're used to — what Storylane bills itself as is promoting interactive demonstrations for potential customers. But we're going to talk a little bit about how I've expanded that to have cross-departmental influence, and not just have it be this one-trick pony — and then how that's also helped me reinforce my career here, but also establish NICE as indispensable.

So I'm going to go through three lessons that cover all of that. The first thing, when you start building out demonstrations — and it's a suggestion I'd make to you, whether you're new to Storylane or you have expertise with it — is really try to break the system. What I mean is, don't give them a headache — I'm not asking you to give Storylane a headache — but really dive in and see what kinds of functions might be available in the tools that people aren't thinking about. Think outside the box, and use all of the tools however you can to build out your demonstrations appropriately. Listed here are some of the ones I've used. The first is the ability to do HTML capture or screenshot demos. With my work, we have a platform that has a lot of different functionalities — we've got 40-plus products on our platform; it's called CXone Mpower. Here's an example of something that might capture beautifully, totally fine, with HTML. But this is an example of a program we have called Performance Management, and this application has a lot of JavaScript in it, a lot of different libraries at play. These are all widgetized — I can drag these around and do different things with them. So if I try to capture that with HTML, it may not capture as fluidly as I'd like. So I go through experimentation when I'm starting a project — I've got to capture a new product and make sure which format is going to work best for me. And there are tricks to do a hybrid — you can inject screenshots into different places, different media forms — so I'd encourage you to experiment with that as well.

The search-and-replace function is key as well. Normally when I'm capturing my production demos, I have to go onto a live demo environment, and there are real people's names there, and I need to anonymize that content as quickly as possible. So I could search for "Michael Burr" using find-and-replace in the edit function, do a quick replace, and my name is taken out of everywhere — so I don't have to worry about anybody trying to look me up.

I use what's called hidden guides. This was something I stumbled upon when I was exploring building out demos for live presentations that I didn't want people necessarily knowing were in the Storylane platform. For example, I built out this product demo for a product we have called Orchestrator. If I go into demo mode like this and go full screen, I actually have it progress in such a way that there are invisible tooltips. So instead of having the tooltips highlight, I essentially have a map that I follow, and I teach people how to use that map and the talk track associated with it. They know where to click, and then they can go through the demo accordingly. If you didn't know, you wouldn't know it was being run on Storylane — it looks like a very real application. This can be helpful for things like porting over Figma files, when you need it to be a really realistic reference representation of what software might be. It can also help you get away from having to deal with internet bandwidth — maybe the internet crashes while you're out doing a demo somewhere and you need it to run live, and you can't rely on your software to work through that. So just some things to think about. It comes down to experimenting with your education — thinking outside the box.

To expand on this thinking and where it came from for me: I read a book back in 2010 by an author named Seth Godin, called Linchpin. This has been a defining moment in my career as I've built things up. I lean into a lot of the teaching from that book. It's about how you become irreplaceable, how you become an indispensable part of your workforce. And that goes back to the main topic here, which is building that career moat. I want to make NICE look like it's irreplaceable and indispensable. The only way for me to do that is to look at my career and not just follow the rudimentary path laid out for me — "I do X, Y, Z every day, that's my standard practice" — but think outside that box to come up with new and broader solutions. That lends itself to the whole innovation landscape when you're working at a tech-centric company. So it all works together: I get to build a moat around me and make myself indispensable, but at the same time NICE becomes a product that's indispensable for others by virtue of what I'm able to show with what we've done.

Alright, going along with that, one of the really simple things I use — and everybody can and should do this — is the organizational features built into Storylane by default. I use folders where possible, and naming conventions that make sense to me. But I'm not the only person using this — there are people on my team, and I've got a lot of floating demos out here, so the folders are important. But I take it a step further. Most of the time, the demos I embed aren't going to be sent out to whomever, wherever — that title piece isn't going to show up, because they're embedded in subfolders or websites. For example, if I go to our interactive product tours and launch one — let's pick a good one, Performance Management — you'll see it's built into an embed. If I begin this, I'm not going to see the title name of that tour at all; it's totally within this embedded format. So that dawned on me: I can use naming conventions within the file types themselves. Every time I type "product tour," it's going to pull up only the specific demonstrations relevant to that, and it makes it easy — I don't even have to worry about the folder structure. A simple, quick tip, but it works surprisingly well.

The next example I want to show you is one that's relatively recent. We found that instead of just using the demos for presentations or interactive click-throughs that people could access, I started thinking, well, how can we use this internally in other ways? We started to use it in our learning management system. Traditionally with learning management — I'll show you what it looks like — somebody would create SCORM files, and they're injected into our system. We call it Dojo; it's hosted on Cornerstone. People would go and access that. But if one person created a training module this way in 2021, and somebody created another one in 2023, and they're combining these curriculums together, everything looks disjointed. You have to reach out to the LMS team anytime you want to update it, coordinate with different teams — product and design — to make them look as cohesive as possible, navigate through the approvals process, and it becomes a really tedious process. Well, wouldn't it be nice if we could just use Storylane so it's a one-stop shop? If a change needs to be made, somebody reaches out to the appropriate person — in this case, it's me — I can make those changes, and then they're done. We don't have to go through an upload process, we don't have to worry about the formatting, because everything follows the traditional theming and format we set across the Storylane platform.

So I'll show you an example. Here is what some of those learning modules looked like before, and this is out of the same curriculum. You may not notice the differences, but me, working for NICE, I absolutely do. One, the logos are outdated, and this is part of an existing curriculum we're correcting currently. If I want to update, I've got to update both of these modules, reach out to multiple people, talk about the different incongruencies. One has a chapter structure built out, which is nice, but one of the scenes isn't even named properly. And one's really old-school — it's just all one singular flow. Wouldn't it, again, be nice if instead of that, we have a system like this, where it's a nice, clean, cohesive look? You arrive there, you scroll down, the presentation tells you how the demo is going to work that you're about to review, and then you scroll down and you've got Storylane nested there ready to go. They can begin the training inside the LMS — it doesn't require me to do anything else.

So we've got this demo here right now, and I can show you how easy it is to make a change. If I go into Storylane and say, you know what, I no longer want this to say "begin training," I want it to say "let's go" — just a simple change. Once I make that change, I can publish it. Now that's published and good to go. If I refresh this — look at that, immediately the change is made. So I didn't have to reach out to anybody else, and I love that. There is no approval process — I obviously have to check with leadership that this is what they want done, but other than that, I'm not working through multiple people, ping-ponging emails back and forth. To have that really fast turnaround is pivotal when it comes to tech, especially being an innovation leader and being able to make those changes on the fly. Just think about that, and expand it: what could you do within your own organizations to enact change like that? That's where that different thinking comes into play.

Anael: Excellent. Michael, this actually answered some of the questions we had in chat about making changes to the product and how easy it is to propagate them. And Jeremy also just asked a few minutes ago: can you talk about how you collaborate with your web team? Are you using the demo hub for all of this, or do you need to ask your web team to embed tours on specific pages?

Michael: Yeah, that's a great question. We did not opt yet for the demo hub. So I actually coordinate directly with my web team, and I've come up with streamlined processes for that. I worked in continuous improvement prior to coming over to NICE, so process improvement is the name of the game for me. I've come up with systems to contact those teams in the most appropriate fashion and get turnarounds done quickly. We're going to talk a little bit about that team interconnectivity and how it works in another slide coming up, but the fundamental process is just knowing who you need to reach out to — those right people — and what you need to give them in terms of deliverable. And they need to know what to give you in terms of collateral to build those deliverables. If you can build that out in a system that everybody knows and agrees to, then you're pretty good to go. I hope that helps answer it.

Awesome, I'm going to keep moving along because we've got more to talk about. So, again, these are the kinds of questions I ask generally in my own mind. We gave the example of LMS and what I can do in CRMs, but really these are the core questions: What are the dependencies I can eliminate? Going back to continuous-improvement thinking, anytime multiple people have to be involved in a system, it's going to get bogged down. What are those bottlenecks? Are there things we're seeing as troublesome? The LMS — all of these outdated modules combined together in the same curriculum makes for a disjointed experience if you're trying to learn. I just got through one training, I know what to expect, and then I move on to something completely different — that's not a good user experience. And then, how can we update demos without coordination, or organize work in such a way that others have no doubt that I'm able to deliver what I need to?

Once you've owned that and correctly expanded — and this goes to Jeremy's question as well, and I see somebody asked about localization, I'm glad you asked because I'll bring up another interesting way I use the software that I don't think everybody does — you're going to have teams start to reach out to you. Because you're reviewing those help docs every day, because you're looking up unique ways to use the software as opposed to just the standard fare, you're going to be that expert. When they come to you, you're going to have the answers and the dependability. They know you can get done what you need to, because you're working in it every day — and I do work in it every day. So, again, it started with marketing demos like anybody else. Product was releasing products, but they've only got the designs in UX and Figma — how can we turn that into a live demo? It's not real yet, we're still constructing it. We can use the Figma plugin to extract that really quickly, and then I can start building out flows with those invisible click-throughs I described earlier to make the product seem all the more real. Sales needed live presentations, similar to what I showed with those invisible click paths, but also for keynotes — if you're giving a large presentation in a big forum, being able to do that in an impressive way. Because if you're jumping back and forth between slide decks, it can be more complicated when you're also trying to show live software. So being able to run those things in the same browser window is helpful. And then we discovered the LMS potential.

When you think about that more for your organization, it looks like this: start with your one demo use case, become the go-to expert with that traditional way of using it, let other teams come to you because they know it's available. And — I should be clear here — it's not just about letting them come to you, it's letting them know. They may not know what they don't know is capable. So if you can experiment in off time, coming up with interesting ways, thinking outside the box, and then show those as presentations, that will capture attention. And from there you expand strategically.

I did want to touch on the language translation, or localization. Here's how I'm currently approaching it: I use the chapters feature. The reason — and this is only with some demos, like LMS, for example — rather than creating multiple different LMS modules for Spanish, Portuguese, whatever the language is, I can come in here, use the chapters feature, build out the different chapters split up by language, and then use the menu tool down here to let people pick those. So when we preview this, they get instructions — on this main instructions page they can click through in English, but this one is in Portuguese currently, because it's a language I know. I can instruct them to come down here, click on this, and change their language. So, again, a not-necessarily-out-of-the-box way you'd think about using the chapter feature that's built in, but it works for us — especially with LMS modules, because I don't want to go update multiple LMS modules, I just want to update the one. So hopefully that helps with the localization question.

Alright, kind of summarizing here — from nice-to-have to critical infrastructure, you want to be that first person they go to. The way our business works now, the pages on our website that I showed you don't go live without an interactive product tour. If we're releasing a new product, you better believe they come to me and say, "Hey, we've got to get the product tour ready." And I have a system: they collect a series of screenshots, I know where to go into the application to capture appropriately, and then they work through and massage out the tooltip language so it's exactly how they want it. That's an ebb and flow we follow. And then we come up with these great stories to tell. And, again, just being open to what people may come to you with, and continually experimenting. I hope that helps. That left us about five minutes to touch on any direct questions we may not have covered. But hopefully that gives you a good vision of how we work here.

Anael: Amazing. Thanks, Michael. I have to say, I knew what you were talking about, but I learned again today. So thanks for those three lessons. So, guys: become indispensable, own your tool mastery, then the infrastructure, be there for questions, and then expansion and teamwork — collaborate. So let's see the questions we haven't managed to answer yet. Somebody mentioned they have the same question as Nikki. Oh, here we go — I know we're supposed to keep them short. That's a good question. You guys want to take that? I have my own thoughts on it. It's sort of a Storylane question, but if you have your thoughts, go for it, Michael.

Michael: So, increased engagement — yeah, it comes down to the duration, but also just captivity. I think about how I can keep them inside the demo. What's going to create engagement is interest. When you watch a movie trailer, the reason it's interesting is because it's dynamic — they're jumping around, doing different things. So what can I do to keep them guessing, so to speak? And then always have a call to action, of course, but I think that falls a little bit outside of your question. Go ahead, Anael.

Anael: Yeah, that's keeping it entertaining. Not only entertaining, but keeping not just the attention but the action going. So to keep them short, you have to stick to the most important part — that's up to you, building your script. And then for engagement, we have some tricks in the tool — you showed some of them — zooming, highlighting some areas, some media modals you can add here and there with GIFs and videos. But of course, on a 12-step demo, you're limited on that too. I believe in the click-through being the main point, with short text and voiceover.

Michael: Yeah. I saw a question from Mark Percy — hopefully he's still on — I can answer it. He asked, can you do invisible click areas without the HTML plan? Yeah, actually you can. In my experience, I use it in screenshots more often — typically it's a screenshot demo where I'm using the invisible click paths. You turn down the opacity, that's all it is. You go into the settings of the tooltip, and there's a way to turn the opacity down to zero. I zero it out, and that's how I make the invisible click paths.

Anael: Exactly. Make the hotspot transparent, the beacon. Yep.

Michael: And yeah, you know the trick. It's true, John — you're not wrong. Some of the tips I experiment with do indeed come from using PowerPoint for years.

Anael: And no text on the guide — there will be no guide showing up if you use the hotspot one. Yep. Alright, we have one more minute, so that means maybe one last question. Yes — that question from Jake Murphy about gating any demos at the beginning or middle.

Michael: We can gate, but I have not used that in my experience yet, because the type of demos I'm making are either direct access by people putting on presentations, or live demos for customers, or because we're trying to present to the open public. But I believe you can gate them in different ways.

Anael: Yep. We have a whole blog article about this on our website. The gating conversation — there are different opinions, I see. So, yeah, we are at time. There have been a lot of questions, and thanks, Michael, for your input on some of the ones I mentioned were more Storylane questions. As a champion and super user, it's even better to hear the answers from you.

Michael: Right.

Anael: Alright, well, thank you, everyone. As Renee wrote in the chat, we'll follow up on the questions we haven't answered. This was recorded, but we will not share the entirety of the recording — this was an exclusive event. So thank you all for joining and for your attention. Thanks again, Michael, so much, for showing us what you've done.

Michael: It's a pleasure.

Anael: And see you all next time on our third event from the Finer Demos Club. Have a great day.

Michael: Thank you. Bye.

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