- A Real-life Story of Transformation
- Who Is an Executive?
- Demos for Executives
- Two More Tips
You’ve completed discovery with your prospect’s executive and team, and now it’s time for the demo. What do they want to see?
A Real-life Story
“Walk a mile in your prospects’ shoes…!”
Earlier in my career when I was growing a sizeable business, we needed to implement a CRM system, and vendors were invited to present their offerings. Of the five vendors solicited, only two held any discovery conversations, and all five requested two-hour slots for demos with my evaluation team of eight people. Our experience was not a positive one, but it was transformational!
Imagine going to a restaurant and:
- The waiter presents a fifteen-minute PowerPoint presentation on their founding, history, revenues, team, kitchen equipment, inventory, along with a list of their favorite customers.
- The waiter takes you on a tour of their kitchen, showing you the various food prep stations while emphasizing their approach to portion control and plate layout.
- You return to your table, but the waiter never offers you a menu! Instead, they bring out dish after dish, asking each time, “What do you think of this?” or “Can you see yourself eating these?” and “How do you cook this currently?”
- After enduring this for two hours, you never get to eat what you’d really wanted, despite being presented with dozens of unwanted dishes. Finally, you leave the restaurant, angry and still hungry!
That’s not a particularly pleasant dining experience. Well, each vendor followed that same approach in their demo meetings with us:
- They inflicted lengthy corporate overview presentations upon us.
- Their demos were long, step-by-step, linear explorations of their offerings, with many side excursions into details that we neither cared about nor remembered!
- And none of them showed the key deliverables that we needed and that I as the executive required from their offerings!
After suffering through these five demos (that’s ten hours overall), I gathered the team together and asked them what they thought about the experience:
“Awful!”
“Boring!”
“Terrible!”
“They never showed us what we need!”
“Everything looked complicated and confusing!”
“These systems have way more than we need!”
“Mind-numbing!”
I said, “Folks, I have bad news: We’ve been doing the same thing to our prospects!” I continued, “We need to make two major changes to our processes:
- First, we need to approach discovery from the perspective of what our prospect needs us to know before we propose any ‘solutions’, and
- We need to turn our demos upside down and get to the point: We need to ‘Do the Last Thing First.’”
Over the next few years, we applied these ideas in day-to-day use. Dozens of discovery conversations and demos went into testing, correcting, improving, and hardening these new methodologies.
What was the result? Transformation to a dramatically improved level of practice!
We began to see prospects who made purchasing decisions during discovery, and demo practices that reduced the length and number of demos yet resulted in more closed business. More recently, the Great Demo! methodology was validated in studies of tens of thousands of demos.
It was a remarkable journey, kicked off by a sales executive who found himself in the role of a prospect!