Rant: Our webinar demo crashed mid-presentation and lost us 3 leads

Last Tuesday we were doing a live demo of our threat detection tool for a group of 40 people from a insurance company in Phoenix. About 15 minutes in the whole thing froze and I had to restart my laptop while the host tried to make small talk. Turns out our marketing team's demo environment wasn't set up with enough server capacity for that many viewers. Has anyone else had a demo go sideways because the tech team didn't prep the environment right?

3 comments

3 Comments

miles_garcia26d ago

Honestly I'm kind of surprised nobody's brought up the possibility that the demo crashing might have actually helped you. Like sure you lost those 3 leads in the moment but think about it - if the product can't handle 40 viewers watching a demo without choking, what happens when 40 real users are actually feeding it data and running queries and doing whatever else. Those insurance guys probably would have found out the hard way during a trial period and then you'd be dealing with bad reviews and word of mouth instead of just an awkward zoom call. Sometimes a crash like that filters out the wrong fit customers before they get deep enough to really trash you online.

taylor.sean27d ago

my marketing team's demo environment wasn't set up with enough server capacity" - yeah maybe you should've checked that before pitching to 40 people. That's on you guys for not testing under load. A freeze is a bad look but it's better than shipping a buggy product that actually fails in production. Sometimes these screwups save you from a way worse problem later.

anthony12927d agoMost Upvoted

A freeze is embarrassing but catching it now beats a full crash for customers.