Rob Mathewson Rob Mathewson

Keep Demos On Target

It’s waaaaay too easy for a poorly executed demo to shut down a prospect’s interest

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:

  1. 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. 

  2. Nail the Execution - Practice, practice, practice. Limit live content to speaking only wherever possible. No Typing. No page loads. No progress bars.

  3. 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.

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Rob Mathewson Rob Mathewson

From Home Brewer to Craft Brewery

I wanted to examine the existing process and make the adaptations necessary to progress the Pre-Sales journey from an uneven series of hits and misses toward a continuously improving process with repeatable success.

Scaling a company’s solutions strategy requires a hard look at the Pre-Sales journey. Taking my inspiration from The Lean Startup, I wanted to examine the existing process and make the adaptations necessary to progress the Pre-Sales journey from an uneven series of hits and misses toward a continuously improving process with repeatable success. As anyone who has choked on a glass of skunky home brew knows, your experience at the local microbrewery is much more likely to deliver a pleasurable pour, visit after visit. 

During my first 90 days at CloudFactory, I conducted a listening tour around the company to orient myself as the leader of the new Solutions team.  When talking with leaders from Go-to-Market and Delivery, I identified three areas in the Pre-Sales journey with drastic inconsistencies that created complexity and raised churn risk. 

These three areas offered a fantastic opportunity to improve the Pre-Sales experience for our clients and a smoother operational flow for our teams in Pre-Sales, Post-Sales, and Delivery:

  1. Demos - Existing sales practices discouraged any demos until the AE had validated the opportunity. Further, sales would only offer a demo once we had received a sample of client data and our team had analyzed the data. 

    Impact: Clients experienced a weeks-long validation process without being afforded an opportunity to learn about our methodologies or experience our expertise. 

  2. Discovery - There was no step in Pre-Sales where our inconsistent utilization of Solutions Consultants was more consequential than in Client Discovery. Incomplete exploration of client opportunities left our team struggling to catch up with the necessary for defining the use case, business case, and conditions of client satisfaction.  Such details were gathered much later in Pre-Sales, if at all.

    Impact: Insufficient client discovery reduced our close rate. For deals we were fortunate enough to close, the missing details led to extended onboarding, poor Delivery performance, and palpable client frustration.

  3. Tooling Assignments - The company had embraced its “Tooling Agnostic” approach quite literally. In practice, every Opportunity started from Square One. Any tooling option was on the table. We conducted a Tooling Discovery for each and every Opportunity that involved additional meetings and detailed Q&A in search of “The Perfect Tool.”

    Impact: Unlike our competitors, we subjected prospective clients to an exhaustive search process. The added discovery steps slowed down our deal velocity and reflected poorly on our sales teams, as clients interpreted our tooling exploration as an indication of our inexperience.


In my next three posts, I will detail my approach to overhauling our approach to Demos, Discovery, and Tooling Assignments.

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