How can you communicate the value of your product to unfamiliar customers?

Before talking to a customer who may be unfamiliar with your product, gather a hypothesis on how they may be solving the problem your product solves today. Triangulate common challenges you've heard in the industry and with similar customers and at the minimum, show up with a perspective on how your solution can impact their business. Before jumping into anything about your product on the call, ask them to share how they're solving XYZ problem today and what their idea of improving that looks like. This will be a good starting point for deepening discovery, understanding pains, and collaborating with the prospective client on if you are a good fit for each other.

Understand both your product and how your potential customer will use it. You must know these things before you ever go to see a customer. You need to be able to understand what they are doing and how they will use your product if you are to identify an opportunity to sell to them. You do not need to know everything about what your customer is doing but you do need to know enough to have a good idea that they will need to use your product.

Put yourselves in the shoes of the person (ICP) you are trying to sell to. Identify key pain points within their day to day and think about the pain you would be solving for them and how. Based on the analysis, craft a series of questions that could uncover & lead to your prospect feeling the pain point. If you discover during the course of the conversation that the pain you are trying to solve for doesn't exist, the next step is to uncover WHY.

If you can still ask "so what" about a statement that you have made about your product, then you have not explained the benefit sufficiently. Keep explaining until you cannot ask this any more. You cannot expect your customer to work out for themselves what the value is, you need to explain it. If you leave it up to them, then they are likely to say no as they do not understand well enough.

Food for thought: When there are 100 SaaS vendors available to solve every problem, can features really propel you to have a chance at winning the deal? Feature selling is a plague from when there were 2-3 vendors per industry and it worked. The evolution of that model is value selling & building relationships. Focus on making the prospect understand the problem you are solving for, how does your software do it better in simple words which do not involve tech terms or marketing lingos. Paint the picture to focus on improvements within hard outcomes/metrics when your software is implemented. Be a consultant in the process not an audio feature book.

A demo is like a katana sword, it always needs to cut through precise and fast but it also needs to be sharpened from time to time. Always spend time polishing your demo, learn from reactions, demos up-segment, demos from a colleague or your own past demos. The more you evolve your demo, the more your sales process becomes effortless.

Too many technical sales start with a product demo. This may be a reasonable approach but ensure that when you finish, you have time to ask how the customer might use the product. Do not just demo and leave. Better still, have an initial conversation with the customer to understand which specific parts of the product are most useful to them and then demo those. If you start with a general demo, then you may not show the relevant parts to the customer. a demo is either a conversation starter to understand needs or a proof that you can do as you claim. both are important but come at the start and towards the end of the sales process.