It’s been a little more than a year since I first wrote about how it’s almost always a bad idea to lead with a sales demo. Yet a lot of salespeople are still out there kicking off conversations with, “I’d love to get fifteen minutes of your time to show you our demo.” Then they’re surprised when the prospect shows no interest or wants to jump immediately to a conversation about price.
I suspect that salespeople simply walk away thinking, “The problem isn’t me. It’s the prospect. These people just can’t recognize a great solution when they see it.” In some cases, that may be true. However, in most cases, prospects just see you as a demo robot, spewing information about how great your product is and how it works.
The bottom line is that the majority of demos are about features. They don’t address the customer’s specific business challenges. Therefore, the customer remains disinterested. This defeats the whole purpose of reaching out to prospects in the first place.
Specifically, let’s review the top three reasons you want to avoid leading with a sales demo.
1. Leading with a demo leaves you vulnerable to objections.
The best way to overcome objections is to preempt them. If your initial conversations are about the customer’s business challenge and how much that challenge is costing his or her company, then you’ve already shifted the conversation away from price.
For example, if your solution can help a customer greatly increase productivity in a certain area, you can calculate how much they will likely gain in terms of time and revenue. Now the conversation is about how much the investment in your solution will offset the prospect’s problem. If you lead with a demo, you’re putting the focus on how your product works and setting up the prospect to ask, “How much does it cost?” That’s a much weaker position to be in.
2. Leading with a demo allows the conversation to center on immaterial issues.
Whenever prospects look at something new and unfamiliar, they tend to see areas to critique. As a result, you end up hearing questions like, “This button is hard to see. Is there any way you can make it bigger?”
The real issue at stake is not the design of your interface or the size of the button. It’s how much money you can help the customer gain or save by investing in your solution. When you start with the demo, your conversation has a real risk of getting mired down in surface issues, which will make it more difficult to gain further interest.
3. Leading with a demo might be a waste of your time.
In any sales cycle, it’s important to get to the decision-maker as soon as possible. Frequently, the first person you talk to is not going to be the one signing off on the decision. If you spend a lot of time showing demos to low-level managers, you might gain their interest, but you’re not necessarily laying the groundwork for an eventual sale.
If you secure a meeting with a decision maker, that person is not likely to care about seeing your demo right off the bat. That’s because decision makers care most about how you can help them solve business problems. They’re not interested in seeing how your product works or hearing about its features (at least, not right away).
In other words, the key to opening sales opportunities is putting a hyper focus on the customer’s business challenges and problem. Although salespeople love to talk about their products and all the latest features, it makes far more sense to keep the initial focus on the customer. What problems are they having with revenue? What about productivity? What is their biggest goal for this quarter or year?
The more you can find out about what they’re trying to solve, the better you’ll be able to understand how your solution might fit into that framework. From there, you can take the step of building a business case and quantify the value you can provide. This will help the customer see you as a trusted advisor rather than a demo robot.
