Recently we wrote a blog post, When Demos Sabotage the Sale, about the dangers of showing a demo too early in the sales cycle. At least one reader reached out to us to ask a logical question -- if you’re not going to lead with the demo, what should you lead with?
In our view, the answer has something to do with that old quote, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” The best opportunities can be found when initial conversations are centered around the prospect’s business problem. Both the salesperson and the prospect need to understand that business problem before they can enter into a mutually beneficial relationship.
Salespeople need to know that the goal of initial-stage conversations is not to convey information about your offering and simply apply it to the context of the prospect’s business. The goal is to actually dig into the prospect’s business and understand it from the inside out. If you fail to do that, you expose yourself to one or more of the following risks.
Risk #1 – Missing Opportunities
When you lead with the sales demo, sometimes you miss sales opportunities to help a prospect to see a problem that can be solved. Consider the case of one of our clients. They sold a material that allowed scrap from a plastic injection molding process to be ground up and reused. In talking with a customer, however, the customer kept claiming that scrap material cost was not that big of a problem. It took deeper questioning to uncover that the client didn’t see scrap as a problem because their actual scrap rate was only half of their budgeted scrap rate. What the customer didn’t realize was that even at the lower scrap rate, their scrap material costs were four times the industry average.
Risk #2 – Focusing on Immaterial Problems
When you go straight to the sales demo instead of uncovering business problems, you risk spending time trying to solve a problem the customer doesn’t care about solving. Say you are selling a CRM offering. While you see an opportunity to replace the prospect’s homegrown solution, the prospect may be content with their current system and instead focused on hiring more salespeople.
Risk #3 – Solving the Wrong Problems
We have used this example before. Nuance, one of our clients and a leading document management software provider, was focusing on how much paper and ink its solution could save customers. Although saving paper and ink is important, Nuance’s offering really resonated with prospects when it started talking about how much time it could save employees. The real problem wasn’t how much money was spent on office supplies, it was the wasted time employees spent handling paper documents. If we hadn’t taken the time to dig into these issues, we wouldn’t have been able to help them identify the time factor as a winning value proposition.
Why Problems Lead to Opportunities
In other words, digging into the customer’s problem is the key to opening up sales opportunities -- not deluging them with information about your offering. Once you can identify and highlight the problem, you can also figure out how much financial benefit there would be to solving that problem. At that point, you can focus the sales demo to help illustrate how you specifically can help with that problem.
Even if the customer comes to you and says, “This is my problem,” it’s typically still in your best interest to hold back and ask more questions instead of launching into a demo. For example, when people come to us and say, “I need an ROI tool,” we ask several questions to figure out what’s behind this request. Does the prospect want to get a higher volume of prospects? Do they need better-qualified prospects? Do they have issues with close rates? Sometimes prospects jump to a solution without realizing that you can help them solve their problem in a different way.
In essence, this is the classic reason that prospects and customers actually want to talk with a qualified salesperson -- because that relationship can help them identify, quantify, and solve their financial and business challenges. Is a demo helpful? Absolutely. But in the end, it’s a tool just like any other. The real skill is in the hands of the sales professional.
Do you believe there’s a risk in showing the demo before you help prospects understand the value of their business problems? Share your thoughts in the comments section.
[Image via Flickr / Vanessa Arn]
