Running a 7-star Demo?Call

Demo calls are usually the first-interaction a buyer has with your product, team, and company. It’s your first and last chance to give your prospect a “wow” experience.?

In an interview with Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn’s co-founder), Airbnb co-founder & CEO Brian Chesky revealed his approach to designing a viral experience that your customers will want to talk about.?

The idea is to think through what a 5-star service would be like and then extrapolate that out to 11 stars. The point of this process is that the 10 or 11-star experiences are likely not feasible but there may be a sweet spot that you can achieve. This framework makes you think and design to the extreme and then work backward to develop a delightful and word-of-mouth worthy experience.

Ever since listening to that, I thought what would a 7-star experience look like when it comes to giving prospects a demo of your platform.

Here’s a few suggestions to make that happen.?

1) Listen first, listen (more) second, demo?third

One of the biggest mistakes I see sellers do is jump into the product right after introductions (I used to do that myself). Huge opportunity missed. You need to have your buyer open up about their role, responsibilities, and challenges they’re facing today. Mere introductions are insufficient.?

If you don’t ask them to open up, you’ll miss the opportunity to tie back their pain points into your conversation and product.?

Plus, having someone speak first in a conversation is a huge physiological tactic.?

Try saying: Hey, I’d love to spend 2 minutes to learn more about your role, responsibilities and challenges you’re facing today.?

2) Set the rails using a context?deck

We all know the book Start With Why by Simon Sinek — which talks about starting with the why, then the how, then the what — yet we rarely implement that approach in our demo calls.?

A game-changing approach to demo calls is to walk the prospect through a context deck after the first step above. The context deck would revolve around “the why” behind your solution. It would be 5 to 6 slides outlining the problems your solution is built to solve. This deck should barely mention your solution. It should talk about industry research and the problem(s) your space is facing today.?

(extra points if these same problems were also mentioned by the prospect earlier)?

Think of this as running the prospect through a investor deck of your solution.

Which brings me to my next point.?

3) Value sell, don’t feature?dump

Value selling is talking about the “why” behind each feature – the reason it was built and what the prospect will get out of it. Feature dumping is talking about what the feature does.?

As sales folks, sometimes we slip into feature dumping throughout our demo call, putting ourselves on a huge disadvantage.

My recommendation: go through your demo call talk track (line by line) — check if your starting your sentences with the feature itself or the value it brings to the end-user.?

4) Branded?demo?

If your product offers custom branding (whether internally facing or externally), then brand your demo instance for the client before kicking off the demo — add your prospects logo, colors, company name, etc?…?

Yes, it might seem like a small touch — but it goes miles. Plus, your prospect will appreciate the extra effort.?

5) Simple recap?email

You might think this is not part of the demo call – but the impact this has makes it crucial to be mentioned.?

How do I say this in the most simple terms. Buyers don’t read long-ass recap emails. They have tens of tasks on their plate and the last thing they will do is read that long recap email with 5 attachments (case studies.pdf, customer journey.doc, industry statistics.pptx, etc?…)?

Keep your recap email simple — 2 short paragraphs max.?

But here’s the secret sauce

6) Condense your demo into a 2-min?video

?Condense your whole demo into a 2-minute Vidyard or Loom and send that as the only asset with your recap email.?

First, this serves better than sending multiple different assets.?

Second, your prospect will want to talk about your product to their colleagues or boss – and if you send that 2-min video through, they’ll share that instead. There’s no better person to explain your product than you.?

Now you know some suggestions to run a 7-star demo to your prospects, so go ahead and run one heck of a call!

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