Richard Smith的动态

True in most cases and the only time it would be false is when you are lucky! From my experience the only way to communicate your value is to show how your solution directly solves a real problem/need of the customer. By doing discovery you can understand the implications of a problem/need if it is not solved as well as what value the customer sees in solving it. If the customer doesn't see significant implications and/or significant value they won't make a change. The status quo will remain.

True. Effective discovery is important. I think in order to carry out a compelling demo, you really first need to understand your customer’s challenges and needs, in order to align the demo to deliver the best value for them. If not, you could focus on the wrong parts, waste time and bore your prospect. To be compelling, you need to be engaging, and to do that, you really need to understand what’s important to your customer.

True. Actually, without proper research, your sales demo will not address the specific interests of your prospect. Instead, you will waist more time presenting features or information that will literally annoy the client and drastically reduce your conversion rate at all levels. By experience, I've used a basic CRM platform for a B2B start-up and devices to cut the sales rep out of the process and found an app that was able to automate the sales demo. The prospect would select directly from the website homepage a time and date available for a demo, generating automatically a GoToMeeting invite and a short survey on which features of the product he/she wish to review. This has reduced the length of our demos by 30% while increasing our conversion rates in opportunities and decision time frame. Therefore, without the basic discovery prior to the demo, delivering a compelling demo is unlikely to succeed.

I would say false for the simple reason that at times, an effective discovery can validate that a generic high level overview of the most significant parts of the tool is indeed best. However, this the exception to the rule and I always urge my customers to agree to a technical discovery call whenever possible.

If you do know your product and know your audience any presentation or demo should go well. Being prepared helps, but it doesn’t preclude creativity and inspiration at the last moment!

Discovery beforehand is incredibly valuable & necessary because you need to prepare use-cases for them and examples of other companies that use your product for the same reason. You cannot think of this on the spot. Effective discovery not only shows you care by catering towards their unique interest, but also speeds up the sales cycle to close the deal. We do this a lot where I work and prepare a list of companies similar to them using us, and then prepare an ROI case base on the numbers they give us during discovery. Makes a HUGE difference

Depends

It depends on what you deem as ‘discovery’. I have had sales presentations where the sales person failed to even research my company. And there we sat both not knowing where it was going - it was a short meeting.

My response to a prospect wanting a demo right off the bat is, "Would you ask your cardiologist or attorney to advise you without knowing what's required to achieve the results you want? That kind of behavior would warrant them losing their license, and rightly so.