Demo Disasters - Why poor discovery leads to miserable fashion shows

On a recent webinar I was on with software demo gurus Peter Cohan and Brian Geery, it was pointed out that the single biggest mistake salespeople make in the ‘demo process’, is not doing sufficient discovery. Namely, not diagnosing enough of the prospects situation, challenges, pain points, or desires in order to deliver a personalised and high impact demonstration of an aligned solution. Peter and Brian are certainly not alone here. A question I posed on LinkedIn last month, received an overwhelming response from people who also shared similar views. Alan Allard made the compelling point that:

“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?’”

But how ineffective really is doing a demo without exercising effective or indeed ANY discovery up front? What if the product is so fantastic that it doesn’t matter if you find whether it meets the needs of your prospect or not?

Well I’ve had first hand experience of this very recently.

A salesperson setup a call/demo with me in order to share with me their SaaS product. In the interest of confidentiality - I’ll not expose the person nor what they were selling. But assume correctly that the product did bear some relevance, hence why I was happy to take the call. From the first minute of the call starting, the screen-share began. BANG. We were straight into the demo. There I was, sat there, like a fashion critic watching a catwalk - where one after another, feature after feature came walking down the stage.

“What I really like about this feature is you can do this”

“This menu is really cool as you can do this”

“Moving on to the next button here, watch what happens when you click here”

Ten minutes in and not one question had been asked. I sat there giving my verbal nods as the fashion show became more interactive. I was handed control of the mouse myself....

“If you swipe left, look at how you can create a product menu and change the colours.”

Fifteen minutes in I had to intervene. I had to inform the sales person that so much of what was being shown to me was not relevant nor useful for me or my sales team. As good as their product clearly was, it didn’t appear to be the right fit for my company when benchmarking it against how we currently use similar platforms (they hadn’t asked whether we had a current vendor).

The whole selling experience for me was so incredibly poor. No discovery, no questions, no understanding, just 15 minutes of ‘spray and pray’.

Maybe, just maybe, they would have had more success had they asked me even basic questions such as ‘How do you do this now?', or ‘Who do you currently use for this and what do you like/not like about them?’, or ‘In order to carry out this process better, what would be valuable for you to do?'.

In fact, I daresay that if the salesperson in this example had even a small understanding about my business, my sales team, and how we sell day-to-day, they could have delivered a far more effective demo. In hindsight, perhaps if they had got under the skin of why I would ever want to look for a new solution in this space (I’m definitely open to it), they may have even half closed me before the demo had even began. On the flip-side, if they had established up front that their product was not going to be a good fit, they could have better invested twenty valuable minutes elsewhere. Time is crucial to sales people.

On reflection, the thing that concerned me most is how many of those types of demos they conducted that day/week/month? How many other prospects were sat at the cat-walk quietly awaiting something of relevance to come out from behind the curtains? How many valuable sales opportunities would ultimately be burned and how much time would be wasted? Is the sales person's manager observing how they are selling and identifying the big gaping mistakes in the sales process here? Do they even have a way for managers to actually understand what is happening in their company’s sales conversations which is leading to lost opportunities and revenue? Or do they simply just go off the word of the rep, at how ‘great’ their demos were and how ‘strong’ their pipeline is looking. Does the company even take coaching of their reps seriously to stop this from happening?

As Kevin Davis said in his brilliant article yesterday, “you cannot provide effective sales coaching if all you have to go on is your conversations with a rep or their monthly sales reports.”