Keep Demos On Target
If you nail a demo, you can light up a prospect's imagination with countless ideas of what might be possible. However, it’s waaaaay too easy for a poorly executed (or poorly timed) demo to shut down a prospect’s interest and instead “inspire” an early end to your meeting and to your opportunity for a sale.
In my experience, there are three must-have elements in a good demo:
Make it Engaging - Whether on a stage, in a conference room, or on a screen, the presenter should adhere to the basics of good public speaking, keep a good flow, and bring the audience along with them from start to finish.
Nail the Execution - Practice, practice, practice. Limit live content to speaking only wherever possible. No Typing. No page loads. No progress bars.
Keep it Relevant - Your demo should be 100% relevant to the prospect conversation at that moment in time. Incorporate your customer’s use cases, data, demo scenarios, logos, and anything else you can acquire from them into the demo. Bloat your demos at your own risk*.
When I arrived at CloudFactory, the standard practice for demos was to delay the demo until the prospect’s use case had been validated, the use case had been reviewed, samples of client assets (e.g., data for annotation or documents for processing) had been provided by the prospect, and the team had specified and tested the desired tooling for the use case. Then, and only then, would the team conduct a demo. However, I made an assessment that this approach was not appropriate in most cases.
After watching countless hours of recorded Zoom calls and talking with members of the team, I made the following assessments:
Early presentations were lacking in depth and detail. Discovery calls covered high-level subjects (company mission, operating structure, history, etc.) but lacked the kind of detail that could give a prospect confidence in our ability to do the work.
Prospects were frustrated. Whenever prospects asked questions attempting to satisfy their desire for expertise, the teams would give them the “stiff arm” treatment, resisting specifics until they were ready to demo.
Dragging out Presales: Collecting the data and use case details needed to conduct the desired demo added precious time and confusion to the presales process. In many cases, the prospects’ frustration would cause them to disengage quietly or simply sign with the competition. Those who endured the presales journey long enough to see a demo were often delighted with the results. But they had to “earn” their delight by enduring our lengthy presales process.
To address the pain detailed in my assessment while keeping sales efficiency in mind, I devised a new demo process that reconsidered the structure and timing of prospect demos. We created three different demo scenarios, each crafted appropriately for the stage of the opportunity.
Demo 1: Discovery Demo
Objective: Demonstrate our expertise for the use case in question. I.e., “We’ve done this before.”
Parameters: A brief, pre-recorded walkthrough(5 minutes or less) of a similar use case using open-source data.
Desired outcome: Address early client questions, win their confidence, and ensure they stick around long enough for us to conduct a full demo later.
Demo 2: Pre-Proposal Demo (Optional)
Objective: For complex use cases, walk through the intended solution with the client.
Parameters: Ask clarifying questions and validate assumptions before pursuing the analysis necessary to prepare a proposal.
Desired outcome: Improve confidence and technical buy-in before committing to a proposal.
Demo 3: Proposal Demo
Objective: A full demo to complement the written proposal.
Parameters: The demo should include client assets, specified tooling and end-to-end solutions architecture.
Desired Outcome: Win the business.
*Note there is an opportunity to consider here for senior sellers who consider themselves ambassadors of possibility. You might elect to tantalize your prospect with a taste of something they had not yet considered. But this is a master move, not to be taken lightly. Pursue this path only if you have the highest confidence that your prospect will find it relevant, valuable, and exciting. Otherwise, stick to the 100% relevance approach.