A Sales Demo Challenge
At one of my previous companies our new logo sales – that is, new customers – were tanking. The account reps were not hitting quota on new logos.
The sales engineers felt this was due to a large degree to our “story” on agile. Our product was not as strong as some of our competitors for managing agile projects. Even though we had a lot of customers successfully using it for agile projects, the sales engineers felt severely challenged because we didn’t have the features to show in the sales demo.
Doing a great job of go-to-market is one of my passions. I love working with marketing and sales to make sure they can sell my products effectively. But as I wrote the recent post on how my various articles align with the Secret Product Management Framework I realized I didn’t have many articles on go-to-market. So I thought I’d share a few go-to-market related stories. The first one is about “how to demo.”
Problem One: It’s Not About Agile
Because I have a long, strong background in agile, having created an agile tool myself (as a component of Accept360) and been involved in multiple agile transformations, the sales engineers asked for my help.
After reviewing the current sales demo, and following several long discussions about how to sell (from me to them), I gave them two specific areas to improve.
First, they were doing a feature-function type of demo. It was full of “Our product does X” and “Let me show you how our product does Y.” All without reference to whether the customer cared about X or Y. That wasn’t doing them, or our customers/prospects, any good.
Focus on customer’s problems
I had them rework the demo to be focused on the customer’s problems and how our product solved them. We had to learn about the problems in earlier discovery calls, or simply by asking questions during the demo.
Making the demo about the customers themselves is a very powerful technique. Talking about the problems that concern them shows we care about them.
Problem Two: Use all your ammo
To get out of the “agile project management” minefield, I had them move the agile discussion up a level. Our product’s portfolio management capabilities were a significant differentiator. But they weren’t being used effectively to differentiate in the demo.
Portfolio management has always been an “agile” activity. You take all the projects you want to do, and figure out which is the most important, and do those. You can think of it as “stack ranking” your project portfolio. Our solution was better than the competitors in this area, and we could reset the conversation.
Back on Track
These changes made it easier to sell, and easier to beat competitors. As a result we reversed the trends on new logo sales, where the demos are most important. I asked the Sales Engineering VP for her assessment, and she said “We really changed the way we demo. And we beat our quota on new logos the last three quarters in a row.”
Tying it All Together
The key takeaway in this story, and the relationship to the Secret Product Management Framework is this: if your product doesn’t actually solve a market problem, your demo doesn’t matter much. No one is going to buy it no matter how you take it to market.
On the other hand, if you solve a problem, as this product did, then your go-to-market can have a significant effect on how successfully you can sell the solution.
For more on demoing check out the article Everything I Wish I’d Known Before I Started Demoing SaaS from Joanna Weibe of Copyhackers. She goes into a lot more detail about these and other techniques for making your demo a LOT better.
[…] In this article I show you how to take what you know about the problems your product solves and turn it into tools that enable sales to blow out their numbers. (This is the fourth installment in my ongoing series about better go-to-market and the leverage that product managers have on sales success. Read the previous articles here: Sales Team Missing Quota? It’s Not Their Fault, What Successful Companies Do To Get Better Leads, The Secrets of Highly Successful Products: The Sales Discovery Call, and A Better Approach To Demoing Can Turn Sales Around.) […]
[…] like these upfront. Asking good questions during discovery (see the previous article) and doing a good prospect-focused demo will help reduce objections. But they’re always likely to come […]