Great minds, great friends, and a fire alarm: DEMOFESTx London 2023

When life hands you lemons, make lemonade...or maybe a nice and smooth Limoncello. And when a Wednesday morning in London surprises you and hundreds of other DEMOFESTx attendees with a fire alarm, make a spontaneous networking session out of it. Thank you again for the team at etc.venues for guiding us safely. Nothing bad happened, so the worst thing that came out of it was a 30-minute delay to the session schedule. DFX feels like it's quickly becoming Europe's biggest Presales conference. I enjoyed attending, and I am happy to share my thoughts about it below.

The Keynote, Speaker: Garin Hess, Consensus

First up was Garin Hess, CEO of Consensus, who presented the keynote titled "Three Dimensional Interactive Demos: How Personalization, Context, and Explorative Experience combine to meet the needs of today's sophisticated self-directed buyers." Unfortunately, I missed the beginning of the talk thanks to GWR (you know how it is), but based on what I did catch, Garin had some fascinating insights into how customers learn about products and services. Being a former L&D professional myself, I could wholeheartedly agree with his findings. The key to make customers learn about your products or services, according to Garin, is to strike a balance between direct instruction and free play. Use too much instruction and your buyers will get bored; let them do too much free play and they'll get lost in the weeds.

The solution? A combination of personalisation, context, and exploration that keeps buyers engaged and focused. I took away some interesting ideas for how we approach trial environments here at Quantive, and I couldn't help but notice that Consensus is about to release a new tool for exactly this use case, soon.

Session: "Rapid Personalization: How to use teamwork and AI to strengthen buyer connection", Speaker: Daniel Conway, 2Win Global

Daniel's session, "Rapid Personalization: How to use teamwork and AI to strengthen buyer connection," was packed with practical tips and tricks for leveraging AI to prepare for meetings, hone your messaging, and tailor your approach to local audiences. Some of the examples he brought along were truly eye-opening, from asking for insights and threats to gathering key terminology and other relevant details. While these prompts won't make you an expert in every industry overnight, they can help you build rapport with prospects and establish trust more quickly. There we also words of caution: while AI is a powerful tool, don't rely on it blindly. Always fact-check to ensure that the content it generates is accurate and relevant.

Or, as Daniel said:

"AI is just the accelerator, you are the superheroes."

Session: "Extreme Ownership – Elevating PreSales Impact", Speaker: Adam Freeman, The Access Group

After a little fire alarm-induced break, Adam started his session on how applying Extreme Ownership in Presales roles. He kicked off his talk with a little exercise about decision-making and an inspiring message about the power of proactive thinking.

Drawing on Jocko Willink's book and TED talk "Extreme Ownership," Adam outlined a mindset that emphasizes personal responsibility and a refusal to make excuses or shift blame. As he noted, it's not about being perfect or never making mistakes; it's about embracing failure as an opportunity to learn and grow, and taking proactive steps to prevent major failures from occurring.

For example:

• take ownership of everything that happens in your world, the success and the failures
• be proactive, not reactive
• at some point, you will mess up, so don‘t aim to be perfect

So how does this mindset translate into the world of Presales? Adam had some great examples of how to apply Extreme Ownership principles in your daily work. For example, instead of just waiting for sales results during the Prospecting or Negotiation stages, think about how you can create valuable insights or content that help your sales and marketing teams do their jobs more effectively. And after a deal is signed, don't just move on to the next project – stay engaged with the customer and leverage that relationship to benefit your Success and Implementation teams.

Overall, this session was a powerful reminder that we have the ability to shape our own success through proactive thinking and a willingness to take ownership of our work. Whether you're a seasoned Pro or just starting out in the world of Presales, this is a message that's well worth taking to heart.

Session: "The cost of doing nothing: Leveraging Accounting Metrics to Drive Action", Speaker: Tom Edwards, Blackline

After talking for weeks about how much I was looking forward to see Don Carmichael's session, changing my mind at the very last minute seems like a very counterintuitive thing to do. (I am very sorry, Don!)

I had a hunch that hearing a fellow Presales pro with a background in Accounting in Consulting about how to build a business case on financials might not be the worst thing for me to do. And how right I was!

Tom Edwards was dubbed a "recovering accountant" in his bio and does not only have a Finance and Consulting background - he also has experience in buying enterprise software.

Bringing all this together created an immensely interesting session that I still can't get quite out of my head. We learned that in many deals there is a mismatch of where the customer is in their buying process and we think we are in our selling process. "Sure, I'd love to see a demo", is what a friendly prospect might say, and the optimists among us would happily move the deal to the "Demo" stage (or "Validation", or whatever term you guys are using), while the prospect is just at the beginning of his journey and is curious how other people think about the problem they think they have.

With three main reasons for companies to buy software

• efficiency
• mitigate risk
• increase revenue

we talked about numbers quite a bit, from process costs to ROI, and beyond. The important takeaway: once you have established the cost of doing nothing/doing something else and the corresponding business metrics, feed that information to your Success teams, so you can rack any improvement and use in in your cases studies.

Session: "When is PreSales not a PreSales?", Speaker: Rob Dean, The Access Group

The Access Group seems to have cracked the code on doing Presales right, because not only did Adam Freeman deliver a great session earlier, but his colleague Rob Dean didn't disappoint either. Starting with the evolution of Presales from a very solution- and demo-heavy profession to today's version of enabling buyers and creating outcomes, this session was an inspirational talk about what Presales can be, what people you can and should recruit in Presales and what skills will be needed in the future.

"In Presales, we create and change outcomes. We are the masters of the mid-funnel.” (Rob Dean)

Rob described a convergence of Buyer and Sales Enablement in Presales, pointing out how in both roles, we'd impart knowledge on stakeholders outside of our own team.

Highlighting the increased reach of Presales across the funnel or customer touchpoint map, we heard about a future Presales skillset that will enable us to do more cross-functional activities and digital content creation, whereas the low-value transactional deals would be guided into a "no touch"/"tech touch" tier where automatically provided digital content would take the role of standard demos. In that light, Rob's book recommendations are spot on:

After a short break, we were able to watch a preview of Consensus's Tours feature, presented by Chief Product and Technology Officer Mike Trionfo. Garin Hess had already referred to it in his keynote: the tool seems to bridge the gap between direct instruction-style videos and interactive sandboxes and could be a nice addition to their platform.

The Closing Panel with all speakers was a round-robin Q&A session with the audience. Without going into details with the individual questions and answers, it made for a great ending of the conference. And from what I heard, DFx London 2026 will take place at the O2 in London. Or will it? ?? ??????