Please stop pressing play on your demos!!!!

I don’t think I can sit through one more canned demo without losing my mind. It’s unbelievable how lazy and robotic reps have gotten when giving demos and it’s driving me crazy. Most reps offer up a demo before they’ve even talked to the prospect to understand if they even need what they are selling. They blast out template e-mails that pretty much say: “Hi (name), I don’t know if you’re the person I should be sending this to and I really don’t know how to sell so I’m hoping to trip over someone who is desperate enough to respond and agree to sit through a canned demo my Marketing department put together in the hopes you will be so impressed that you’ll end up buying my solution so I can get a commission without actually having to do any real work.”

I wrote a while back about the Death of the Average Sales Rep which focused on how Marketing was creeping further and further into the world of Sales and eating away at the traditional value sales reps provide. This isn’t just with lead generation, it’s throughout the entire sales process, including demos. If a rep doesn’t customize a demo what difference is there than sending a link to a video? Actually, the video will probably do it 10x better since it’s in a controlled environment and usually delivered by the expert who developed it. If that’s the case, then what value does a rep bring to the equation? Zero.

I sit through demos all the time and recently I sat through one that pushed me over the edge. I had a qualification call with this company to help them understand what I was looking for. We then scheduled a call to walk through their presentation and the solution they were offering me. Throughout the process it seemed like they were listening and put a lot of work into customizing a solution and presentation for me which is way more than I can say for most. I was actually looking forward to the “demo” this time. As we started the call, my main point of contact introduced me to all the players on their end who would be involved. He then proceeded to go through the presentation slide by slide. It was pretty evident within the first 3 slides that this was a stock presentation and wasn’t customized to me at all other than some of the numbers on the slide. To make thing worse, he spent the first 20 minutes going into detail about an aspect of the solution we had already told him we didn’t need. He finally stopped to ask me for my thoughts on what he had just presented. Unfortunately for him I had plenty of thoughts I wanted to share, but none of them were about the quality of the solution. All my comments were about the quality of his presentation and listening skills. It was obvious he hadn’t listened to me at all during the qualification phase and therefor wasted everyone’s time. The presentation was over at that point regardless of how good the rest of the solution might have been for me.

Here are some tips on how to make your presentations/demos more effective:

• Start presentations off with an agenda and ask the client what they would like to get out of the presentation
• If multiple people are on the call, then ask them all what they want to get out of the presentation and reference back to each person throughout
• Make sure you are crystal clear on the client’s business priorities and highlight the various aspects of your solution that align with them throughout the presentation
• If you have a 30 page ppt, tell them you’re going to focus on 5 main slides based on their priorities
• Instead of making the first 3 slides in your presentation all about your company’s awards, background and clients, make them about the customer. Ask the customer “how much of our background do you need to know? Because I can go into detail if you want but I’d really like to focus on what is most important here – you.”
• Put logical breaks in your presentation to stop and ask questions to ensure the client understood what you presented and sees value in it.
• Let them know you will be pausing along the way to get their feedback
• Don’t ask “does that make sense?” That’s insulting. Instead, ask them to pitch back to you what they just saw and compare it to what they are currently doing now
• Don’t ask “do you have any questions?” Instead, ask “what questions do you have?”

Good luck and happy selling.