5 Dos & Don’t Of Running a Great Product Demo

One of the most critical parts of any SaaS sales process is the Product Demo. You’ve gotten them to commit to a meeting, whether through an inbound funnel that eventually leads to this moment, or countless cold calls to schedule your one opportunity to impress them. So, how do you make sure you nail it?

Below are 5 things you absolutely must do to kill it, and 5 things to avoid like the plague.

Dos…

Prepare

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” One of the best Abraham Lincoln quotes serves as a reminder that the act of cutting down the tree is less important than preparation.

For each product demo, you should always set aside time to prepare. You’ll want to learn as much as you can about who you are speaking to, what their unique challenges are (whether through Buyer Personas, similar people you’ve spoken to, or by asking in advance), and what their goals are. Then learn about their company, what do they do and how can your product accelerate their company’s growth? Finally, make sure you have a demo account that is loaded up with the right information to give the most valuable walkthrough possible.

Always remember despite all the preparation you’ve done, you will need to be flexible. As the immortal Mike Tyson said “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” Instead of thinking of demos as a scripted event, think of your process as a playbook. You know what you’ll do when faced with certain challenges and improvise from there.

Upfront Contact/Agenda with a time check

Running through the structure of your presentation will clear up any confusion about how things are supposed to go. Giving them a clear idea of what is coming, how long it will take, and confirming that the plan allows the salesperson the first opportunity to get buy in. At Instant Demo, we like to use the TWIG method for starting each call.

T - Thank you for your time...

W - We are going to be doing this…

I - I am going to ask you questions…

G- Goals are the following...

In practice, it might look like the below.

T - Thank you for taking the time to speak with us…

W - We are going to spend the next 30 minutes walking through the platform to see if our product is a fit for your business.

I - I am going to start off by asking you a few questions, and then throughout the demo I will have other questions to make sure I fully understand your needs.

G- The goal of this meeting is to see if we are fit. If all goes well, the next steps would be to schedule a meeting with our Solutions team to set up a Pilot for you to try our software on your website. Does that work for you?

The final point there is important. Getting the upfront contract. Always make sure to detail what the next steps would be should everything go well right up top, and get them to agree then. This makes talking through Next Steps at the end of the call much easier, and gives you a safety net if you need to collapse the call for timing reasons.

Speaking of timing, we also recommend always doing a Time Check at the beginning of the call, asking if the time scheduled still works for them. The worst thing you can have happen is to be 20 minutes into a 60 minute demo only to find out they have a hard stop in 10 minutes.

Master Q&A

“A great demo is really a conversation with your product as the backdrop.”

Every single interaction you have with your prospect is an opportunity to learn more. Some companies prefer to have a full step in the sales process dedicated to just asking questions, i.e. the Discovery Call. However, most customers hate having 30-60 minutes dedicated just to qualifying themselves as a buyer and find the discovery call frustrating. Instead, we believe the best practice is to Always Be Discovering, and the best medium for discovery often is the product demo.

Discovery is essential to running a good product demo, and some upfront discovery will always be required. In fact, a SalesBenchmarkIndex survey found that reps that run a demo without discovery win 73% less. But how much discovery is too much? We believe the sweet spot is about 5 minutes at the top of your Demo call. Use that short window to nail down what is most important to the prospect, clarify their needs/goals, and then begin your demo. From there, you can use Q&A throughout the demo to learn more about the prospect and alter the presentation as is required by the new information you gather.

The other benefit to this is your product demo will no longer feel like a sales pitch or a lecture. It will feel like a consultation. Asking interesting questions about their business needs will set you up as an expert that they trust and want to work with. Also, you can use questions to lead the prospect to seeing value in your product. You don’t always have to tell them the benefit, instead, use questions to make them think about their current solution and how changing to yours would benefit them. The easiest way to do this is to always think “instead of telling them, could I ask them?” For example, instead of telling them “this feature will save you money” ask them “do you see any ways this feature could reduce your cost?”

Talk about Pricing & Next Steps

According to Gong, not talking about Next Steps on your first call will cause your Close Rates to go down by 71%. Additionally, talking about pricing on the first call leads to win rates increasing by 10%. Talking about next steps is what keeps your deal moving, keeps the prospect engaged, and aligns everyone to a mutually agreed upon plan of action. Without it, you just have two teams with no plan that both want something from each other, but no way to get it.

Not everyone knows how to buy software. Salespeople often assume that on the other end of the phone there is a group of organized, savvy business professionals, whose only job is to buy software just like yours. That is almost never the case. Remember, the people on the other end of the phone are human and often have a bunch of other things they do everyday at their “job” so you are just a blip of their radar sometimes. You need to change that, and teach your customers how to buy. That starts by clearly outlining the next steps, and getting buy-in from the team to ensure that you are all working towards the close.

When it comes to pricing, don’t hide. Being confident with your pricing is one of the easiest ways to establish value. Bringing it up early in the sales cycle has a number of benefits, but likely the biggest one is getting the wheels moving on approvals. If they don’t know what they should expect to spend on your product, how are they going to appropriately plan for a new expense? Think about it this way, if you have a big expense due in 3 months, you have time to plan for it. If the same expense comes out of nowhere, you may try to find a way around it, delay the expense, or ignore the problem instead of paying. Don’t put your buyers in the awkward position of having a last minute expense, instead, make them perceive your product as an investment they should prepare for now.

Use Weekend Language

When your friend asks you what you sell, what do you say? I am guessing you don’t spend 30 minutes going deep into specific product features. You probably just give it to them in a nutshell “Oh, I do XYZ.” What if they ask a follow up question? Time to breakout the Powerpoint? No, probably just a simple answer that helps clearly illustrate the problem you solve. Why on earth do we not sell our product this way to our customers?

We are all great at communicating with our friends and family because our default is storytelling. Andy Craig, the author of Weekend Language, puts it best...

When we go to a party on Saturday night, we don't talk about how we optimized our calendar last Wednesday to monetize our mission-critical, best-of-breed, seamless-solution-provider business. (If you do, that's probably why you haven't been invited back to many parties). No, on the weekends our speech is conversational, simple, clear, and interesting. We speak in examples, anecdotes, and analogies. But then Monday morning hits. We step into the office and suddenly we're full of feature lists and ten-point plans, "high level" terms and nonsense. As if that wasn't bad enough, we beat the snot out of our audiences with 118-slide PowerPoint presentations chock-full of text. Audience members typically don't remember anything from those types of presentations. But they do remember stories.

How should this translate to your demo? Tell more stories, use analogies, and most importantly, use LESS powerpoint. When running through your product, instead of saying “this feature does X,” say “here is a story about how another client uses this product.” People love stories, so stop running demos like you are a User Manual, run them like you are an expert storyteller.

Don’ts…

Focus On the Product

The demo is not about your product. Knowing everything about your product and being a true product expert does not make the demo valuable, or even interesting. As Robert Falcone reminds us in his brilliant article Your Product Demo Sucks Because It's Focused on Your Product, just being able to explain the product and show off how it works doesn’t mean you are doing a good job selling it. He recommends an approach where you spend 5 minutes of discovery up top, and then say “here's what you told me your goal is, here's the challenge you told me is in the way, here's what it will look like when our product takes down that challenge.” Once the prospect agrees, the conversation quickly changes from “what can your product do” to “okay, prove to me your product can do that and we are in.”

Doing that is dramatically different from the way most people demo a software product, because instead of focusing on what they are showing, they are focusing on the outcome that happens when they use the product and getting buy-in on the desired results. Once the outcome is known, the product demo simply is just proving you can do what you promised.

To further your success on these demos, go a step further than Falcone suggests, and once you understand where they want to go, spend extra time breaking down the negatives of where they currently stand. Selling them on benefits will only be as valuable as their eagerness to change what they are currently doing, so spending equivalent time discussing the pain of inaction is critical.

Lecture / Talk the entire time. A demo is a conversation.

Customers don’t take meetings for their entertainment value, they take them because they are hoping to get value. When a prospect gives you 30-60 minutes of their time, don’t show up and throw up. Use the time to be a consultant, learn about their business, and add value.

As a general rule, you want them to walk away from the meeting saying to themselves “I would have paid just for the phone call” because of how much value you give them. Now ask yourself, how can you provide that much value without deeply understanding the customer? You can’t. So running even the most brilliant 60 minute lecture about your service will fall on deaf ears if the customers can’t put themselves in the shoes of your ideal prospect.

Be a consultant, don’t be a lecturer.

Run Over Time

One way to shoot yourself in the foot quickly is to run over the time given, which often means that you didn’t get to one of the most important parts of the call Discussing Pricing. Or worse, you haven’t confirmed next steps or scheduled a follow-up meeting.

The other downside to running over time, is it makes you look unprofessional, unprepared, and potentially will give the impression that the process of working with you will be a bigger hassle than they thought. Beyond that, if the customer has any burning questions or objections, you won’t have time to find out what they are, or dive into any they already brought up.

Our general rule of thumb is to always plan on ending your call with at least 10-15 full minutes for questions. Better to end early than late, always. And on that note, make sure you don’t show up late to your calls either. You already have a time constraint, don’t make it harder for yourself.

Only do Discovery

They asked you for a demo of your product, so you damn well better show them your product! The worst way to start off a potential relationship with a client is to pull a Bait & Switch by running a full Discovery session instead of a product demo. Remember, you can use the demo as a medium for running effective discovery. This is all even more true when your website CTA is “Request Demo” or some variant of that.

However, some solutions are more complex than others. A slim 5% of all products may require deep technical discovery that simply cannot be done on the first call. If you fall into that category, just make sure to align expectations with the client before the call or right at the top of the meeting. This ties back to setting a clear agenda, which then gives the customer a clear path forward and makes it easy for you to lead them to the sale.

Do a PowerPoint Presentation

To be clear, we aren’t saying NOT to use Slides. Slides often can have a positive impact when pairing them with the right discovery questions. Using Slides to prompt conversation, the same way we recommend doing it during the demo, can be a powerful tool to get further understanding of your customer’s needs and to educate them about how your product can get them from A to B. But only doing a powerpoint presentation, is a big no-no.

Powerpoints can help you demonstrate the value prop, but the product itself is what they are going to be using everyday. Tell stories within the product, show how other customers use it, and use analogies to explain how things work in the software. Showing them the value in the platform will also open up conversations about their existing workflow, questions about how your tool works day to day, and other relevant stuff they will massively value but cannot see in a powerpoint.

Conclusion

Running a product demo is a high stakes moment in every sales process, but the things that allow you to be successful are really just “going back to the basics.” Set clear expectations, be a human on the phone, show them value, have a good conversation, and always be prepared.