You’ve sat through painful demos before. The ones that you wish were over shortly after they started. These demos are deal killers! Could it be that your team may be guilty of the same?
It’s not hard to fix, but first you need to know if it’s happening and then have a strategy to get things on course. Read on to diagnose if your sales effort has this deal-killing disease and how to fix it if you do.
THE 3 REASONS WHY YOUR DEMOS AREN’T WORKING:
1. You are talking too much about you and your product.
Does your team begin the first part of the demo meeting talking about what your company does, how many employees you have or who your customers are? If so, you’re losing your prospect before you get started. Your audience wants to get to THEIR points fast and they want to stay on those points until they are resolved. Every minute you spend talking about things that are not important to them, going too deep technically, or not going deep enough, you are losing your audience, eroding credibility, and putting your sales opportunities at risk. Remember, your prospects have already done research on you. So, when you talk about you, keep it short and wait until the end.
2. There is little interactions.
The best sales presentation you’ll ever give is the one the prospect never sees… because it feels like a conversation. In a demo, prospects should be doing the talking about 60% of the time. When it’s just you talking to them, they believe it is biased and self-serving, and it usually is. They can smell it a mile away! They should be telling you what their frustrations are with the current state and why it’s important to get it fixed. By having your prospect talk this out with you, you are allowing them to sell themselves.
3. You are showing them what they don’t want to see.
Often when I ask salespeople whose agenda is the most important in a demo (or any prospect meeting) they tell me it’s their agenda. WRONG! They believe their job is to show the prospect all the features of the product and why those features are so amazing… WRONG again! Everyone in the audience has priorities for the meeting, what they want to see, in what order they want to see it, and how much of each section they need to experience to feel comfortable about the solution. There may be great features in your solution that you think are incredible but are just not important to them right now. However, there are usually some key items that will make or break the deal. Know what they are, stay on point, let them talk it through with you and start knocking down more deals!