Possibly the most frustrating of our three Alphas, this is a person who is going to spend the entire hour saying nothing. The entire time. Zippo. Here’s what you do...

Alpha Nothing is going to force you to carry the entire hour, which means, yeah, this is a lot like a presentation. You need to prepare to fill the entire hour with your tap dancing, but the good news is that this work is reusable for all of the different Alpha personality types.

The core of your demo is your Reveal, and as an engineer, you’re really going to be excited about getting to the Reveal. You know it’s the shit, and your thought is that the sooner you get there, the more jumping up and down everyone is going to do. The problem with your enthusiasm is that it assumes and has forgotten all of the endless boring work it took to find your epiphany.

The Setup and the Story leading into your demo need to document key points of your journey to the Reveal. It’s not the entire journey, it’s a brief summary, but it allows your audience to see and critique how you discovered the Reveal. Let’s talk briefly about each:

Back to the problem at hand. Alpha Nothing is saying nothing, so you can go long on both Setup and Story. Perhaps too much of either is just the thing to break the icy stare of Alpha Nothing. Maybe not. Let’s try something else.

I build each of the three parts of the demo around knowable, containable chunks of information. From a high level, there are three major chunks to start with—the Setup, Story, and Reveal—but there might be smaller chunks that you want to shape into digestible complete thoughts. The chunks serve two purposes: first, to allow you to structure your demo, but also to give you a place to pause during your demo and ask a simple question:

“Does what I just told you make sense?”

This check-in might seem pointless with Alpha Nothing in the room, who is just sitting there and nodding each time you ask, but this chunk-by-chunk check-in not only sets a comfortable information pace for your demo, it also sets the stage for you to get the information you came for in the first place.

You’re thinking your Reveal is the point, it’s your killer feature, and you might be right. But it’s the entire story that needs constructive feedback, because the Setup, Story, and Reveal are intimately tied together. You just don’t know when stopping to ask for feedback might allow your audience to make a simple comment that has immediate and lasting impact on your Reveal.

Given all the work you put into the demo for Alpha Nothing, you’re going to feel a sense of sad emptiness when you finish and it’s more of the same uninformative nothing. Still, there is some reason you’ve decided to pitch this unreadable schmo. Let’s assume your instincts are good and this silent powerbroker is going to do something. In my experience, you’re going to hear the feedback, but it’s going to come via a backchannel. It’s either an email from a random person in the meeting or a request for another demo where you’re going to get the real feedback.

I always assume that a demo is going to be given more than once. Since I never know how many times I’m going to demo, or which Alphas I’m going to demo to, I always build my demo for Alpha Nothing because it gives me the most demo flexibility. This will make more sense as we explore the other two Alphas.

After the frustrating silence of Alpha Nothing, Alpha Game is a delight. He actually wants to engage in a conversation, whether it’s the Setup, Story, or the Reveal. Alpha Game is also going to stay on script. He’s going to let you drive the demo and will respect the structure of the meeting, and when you get to the end of a knowable chunk, he’ll constructively chime in.

Even with a collaborative nature of Alpha Game, you still want to structure this meeting around knowable chunks. Your goal with any demo is information acquisition and, as we learned with Alpha Nothing, information often likes to hide. Your demo isn’t just the script; it’s the tone and tempo of the meeting. At the end of the first knowable chunk, you stop and you ask, “Any questions? Thoughts?” Perhaps there’s no feedback at the first pause, but after you’ve done it three times, everyone in the room knows that there will be ample opportunity to weigh in. However, getting them to talk is only solving half the problem.

“I don’t get it.”

What?

You’re only halfway through your Story and a previously friendly Alpha Game says again, “I don’t get it.” It’s the nightmare scenario. It’s what you’ve been worrying about since this meeting was scheduled: “Am I full of shit?”

A deep breath.

Remember the rule: all ideas get better with eyeballs. The perspective you need to have isn’t whether the feedback is right or wrong, it’s what’s the intent? What is he trying to say? What doesn’t he get? Ask him. If you still don’t understand his point, you keep asking questions. You need to ignore the fact that you’re pissed that he’s unintentionally invalidating your entire pitch. The question is, how is he doing it? “I don’t get it” isn’t a point, it’s an opener. It’s an attention grabber, which leads to a larger and hopefully strategic discussion.

The hope with Alpha Game is that he has a point—that you’re dealing with a rational, informed, articulate person. Just as your Setup, Story, and Reveal are built around knowable chunks, so is your conversation with Alpha Game. Each observation and question is a chance for you to see your demo from a different perspective, and that’s how you figure out whether you’re close to a Holy Shit.

Remember, you not only have the entire picture in your head, you also have all of the experience that led to the construction of that picture. The confusion in the room about your demo often isn’t a dismissal of your entire idea; it’s where you mentally zigged when they expected you to zag, which is precisely the kind of information you’re here to find out.

Managing the conversation, regardless of which Alpha, is an art, and you get better at it with practice. And you’re going to need all the practice you can get to deal with the last Alpha.

You arrive 10 minutes early and go through the unavoidable 2.7 minutes of dongle projector confusion. You check your slides. You check your demo. Both are solid. You have two whole minutes to nervously chat with the team before the storm hits.

Alpha Drive.

You don’t even get to start before she says, “Skip the slides. Show me the demo.”

Wait, what?

Alpha Drive has an ego or Alpha Drive is in a hurry. I don’t know what her deal is, but she’s going to drive the whole damned thing and you’re just going to go with the flow. Don’t believe me? Think you’re dealing with Alpha Game? OK, go ahead and try to convince her about the point of a well-structured presentation and how you’re....

“That’s not how I work. Show me the demo.”

Told you.

You’ve prepared for this. You’ve built your presentation around this inevitable chaos. When she asks for the demo, you jump to the demo. When she gets confused because she skipped a key knowable chunk in your Story, you detect this, call an audible, and jump to that one slide: “Did you mean this?” When the hour is over, you will have likely done your entire demo...completely out of order.

Alpha Drive is an intense reminder that everyone processes in their own order and at their own pace. Just because your Setup and Story naturally lead to your Reveal in your head doesn’t mean that this is how others are going to get there. Yes, Alpha Drive may eventually get to the Reveal and might say Holy Shit, but the journey will be entirely hers unless you take action.

Both of my favorite ways to reign in Alpha Drive involve time, and both techniques can be used effectively for any Alpha:

The one guarantee with the demo to Alpha Drive is that it will not go how you expect. You can pull every move out of your meeting management bag of tricks, but Alpha Drive will take you off-script and in an unusual direction.

The advice remains to remember your goal—information acquisition. Alpha Drive’s annoying habit of taking you elsewhere is yet another opportunity to see your idea from a different perspective, and that’s another way to learn about what you’ve built.