5 Common Mistakes When Delivering a Sales Demo

A sales demo is one of the key instruments for the salesperson to confirm that the solutions the product offers meet the customer’s requirements and would lead to successful business outcomes. Delivering an effective demo requires a lot of practice - from mastering the product knowledge to effectively driving the conversation and focusing on the right things. As a part of the process of improving the demo skills of my team members, I watched a very large number of call recordings and attended the actual meetings. Throughout this exercise, it became apparent to me that junior reps tend to make similar mistakes that significantly decrease the probability of a demo resonating with the customer and, as a result - the probability of closing the deal. Let’s review these mistakes, the risks they create, and how to address them.

Not confirming the agenda

Confirming the agenda is a critical step in an effective demo. When a rep doesn’t understand what the customer is (or at least - might be) interested in, it usually leads to trying to show everything at once. Such demos feel chaotic and overwhelming, and since there are a lot of solutions to be shown the rep would likely be rushing things up. Ideally, the agenda for the demo should be confirmed during the discovery meeting. It saves time for both parties and enables the sales rep to better prepare for the demo since she’s aware of the customers’ use cases and challenges. But there are situations when it is not possible. For example, after being acquired by a parent organization, the customer has an urgent need for enhanced security features due to the global requirements of the acquiring company. So when the demo is organized spontaneously, it’s imperative that the rep starts it by asking what are the key areas the customer would be interested in seeing. The answer would form the scope of the demo and any remaining time could be utilized by the rep to showcase additional solutions that she believes would be relevant to the customers’ needs. Including the question about the client’s challenges in the beginning is not time-consuming but could dramatically increase the relevance of the demo.?

Not presenting through the use case

The purpose of a demo is to showcase how customer’s challenges can be addressed with solutions available in the product and how, as a result, the business processes can be improved. The last thing that you want your demo to be is a collection of random feature overviews. Keep in mind that the decision of whether to purchase/upgrade or not on the perceived value of the product - not how great the features look. That said, it is considered a good practice to present a demo through a story that, ideally is based on the information discovered during the previous meeting. And if it is not possible for any reason - on the examples from customers in the same industry or market. Also, presenting through a use case ensures that the demo is easy to follow since one thing leads to another, and in the end, the customer gets a clear understanding of how the product solves the business problem. For example, the demos we deliver here at Wrike often include multiple solutions that combined address a certain challenge. “Streamlining the intake process” use case involves solutions such as blueprints, folder structure, and request forms. We do not just talk about these features one by one, but start by presenting the state of things before the solution implementation. Then we explain how these 3 solutions work together and what particular problems are addressed. Obviously, if certain specific questions emerge we might dive deeper into a particular component, but it doesn’t mean that the demo would be derailed and the presenter would convert it into a feature talk.?

Not keeping the client engaged

Every demo should be a dialogue. The person delivering it should present in a conversational format and pause regularly to confirm that the client understands the solutions presented and follows the narrative. I recommend breaking the presentation into a number of relatively short logical blocks and after presenting each pause and ask the client whether everything is clear and whether the use case presented resonates with the challenges they would like to address. Unfortunately turning a demo into a monologue is quite a common mistake made by the junior reps. They may demonstrate an amazing knowledge of the product and talk for 30 minutes in a row only to discover in the end that the solutions shown were completely irrelevant to the client and that a significant part of the demo was a complete waste of time for both parties. Calling out the names of people present at the meeting is a simple and effective way to keep the client engaged. When I was delivering demos myself I used to call out someone from the audience. E.g. “So let’s imagine that Patrick (one of the people present at the meeting) is my manager and he needs to achieve visibility into the work I’m doing. Let’s review what tools Patrick would have available to do it!”. If it becomes apparent that a certain solution is not relevant to the customer, do not finish presenting it just for the sake of doing that. Be flexible. It’s highly likely that other solutions you have would resonate with the client and serve as catalysts for the deal.?

Switching into the training mode

There’s a big conceptual difference between a demo and a training. The purpose of the demo is to show the end result - what’s going to happen when the solution is deployed, the process implemented, etc. The goal of training, on the other hand, is to educate the team on the how behind the process and guide the client around the specific steps needed to deploy the solution. Understanding the difference is essential when delivering the demo. For example, when I need to do a training on the basics of Wrike I would dive in details when explaining how to create a project and spend at least 15 minutes on this topic. However, during the demo, my goal is to show the end result (a created project) and I would showcase the process within 3 minutes or less. Even if your product has complex solutions, showcasing the value of them should not turn into an hour-long lecture - each value statement needs to be clear, concise, and to the point. I would even put it like this - if a value statement takes more than several minutes to present, I would seriously consider reworking such a statement to make it shorter and easier to comprehend. Any aspects of the features that are non-essential for the use case should probably be removed from the demo or covered quickly.?

Making assumptions about the client’s understanding of the product

Making assumptions creates risks almost in every area of the sales job. However, I would like to cover a particular aspect of making assumptions associated with delivering demos. Sales reps are likely to work with clients with different levels of tech-savvyness. Some of them will understand what the rep is talking about after a minute while to others the concepts presented may be brand-new and before anything advanced can be demonstrated the basics need to be covered. I strongly recommend never making any assumptions about the client’s understanding of the product. The only assumption that is safe to make is that the client doesn’t know anything. It can be easily positioned during the demo - e.g. “Since the solution XYZ is heavily based on solutions A, B, and C, before we begin I want to confirm that your team is already using those solutions, or at least - clearly understands what they’re about. If not I’ll be happy to make a quick overview and then we will proceed to discussing XYZ”. Usually, it is not too time-consuming to cover the prerequisite basics, and by doing it you would ensure that the client would be following your narrative when you’re presenting a more advanced solution. Underassuming is always better than overassuming. If the client confirms that they already know the basic things - even better for both parties since some time would be saved and could be repurposed to showcase other solutions.?

Avoiding these mistakes during the demo significantly increases the probability that it hits the right spots on the customers’ side and leads to successfully closed deals. As you can see most of these mistakes are relatively easy to fix - especially with regular practice.