Demo Failure Response
Situation
A live demo breaks, an environment is unavailable, data is wrong, or the feature does not behave as expected in front of the customer.
What the customer may say
"Is this what production will be like?"
What you should say
"Good catch. This demo environment issue is not the experience we want you evaluating. I'll call out what failed, switch to the backup path, and follow up with the root cause and corrected validation."
What not to say
"That's weird; it worked earlier."
Follow-up question
"Would you rather continue with the backup walkthrough now, or reschedule a clean live run with the right stakeholders?"