Stunningly
Awful Sales Kickoff Demos
Selling to
Your Sales Force – The Toughest Customer of All!
Cries of “Who
cares?”, “So what?” and “What’s this good
for?” issue from the more vocal members of the audience – and everyone else
appears to be apathetic. Bad news!
The
situation? You are demonstrating your
new, earth-shattering, game-changing product at the annual sales kickoff
meeting – but it is not going well. This is your big opportunity to “sell to
sales” and put your new product foremost in the minds of the sales team – and
they’re not responding as you’d hoped.
Most demos
to the sales force of new products, and new releases of existing products, are
uncompelling, unconvincing and fail to generate the desired excitement.
What’s going
wrong and what can you do?
Here’s a
rapid answer: capture and communicate Customer
Success Stories or Use Cases to generate a vision of how your
customers will benefit from using your new offering. Start with your customers’ business issues,
present these up-front and then map the balance of the demo to the specific
capabilities customers need to solve their business problems.
The
result? You gain sales force
“Share-of-mind” – and achieve your roll-out objectives!
A Lack of Vision
Most demos
of new products are all about certain
key features – key features, that is,
from the perspective of marketing. Most
demos of new releases are all about
the new features.
Product
Marketing and Product Managers live and breathe their new products over a
period of months or years. They know their
new offerings intimately – every new feature, every bug, every blemish – and,
of course, the missing major feature or two they couldn’t get into the release
(sadly, these are often important dashboards or reports, the very deliverables
most desired by customers!).
Marketing generally
has a strong vision of how customers should
use the new offering in their minds.
The question is: does this vision coincide with reality?
When marketing
folks demo their new products, they tend to focus on the key and new features, describe
the underlying technology, show how they work and all the cool options
available. However, they often fail to
build a vision with their salespeople of what
good things these new features will enable for the customers – and that is the critical element missing in their
demos.
The key to a
successful product launch or new release demo is Vision Generation for the sales team. You must build a vision in your salespeople’s
minds of how your offering will help your customers solve their business
problems. The new offering needs to be
perceived by the team as “Easy to sell, easy to buy”.
Vision Clearing…
Why do you
build and sell software? Two answers:
- To make a profit.
- To help your customers solve
their business problems.
When you
“sell” to the sales force you need to keep both of these in mind. Your sales people will preferentially sell
the products that are easiest to sell and easiest for their customers to
buy. Most typically, new products are not the easiest to sell, in comparison
with existing offerings.
Salespeople
know that new products will often have bugs and may lack important
functionality. New products also often
suffer from the challenges of “Crossing the Chasm” – they may have a limited
initial audience of interest in the customer base. Salespeople may choose to keep on selling
existing, proven products, in order to make their quotas comfortably and
predictably.
Put yourself
in their shoes: you are in the audience
and another product manager is demoing his new product. Over a period of 50 minutes he shows a pile
of “really cool” features and options.
He used a set of fictional characters, “Susan, the Manager”, “John, the
user” and “Bob, the IT guy” to tell a story.
By the end of the 50 minutes you’ve seen a lot of screens, options and
dialog boxes, but you are more confused (or bored!) than excited.
The new
offering looks complicated and confusing – and you are not sure which customers
to approach or how to present the product.
“Let someone else waste time
with this,” you think.
Vision Clarified
Now
contemplate the following scenario: move
the clock forward one year. You are
listening to a sales success story for your recently released “TurboForecasterPro”
product at the next year’s sales kickoff meeting. The successful sales person is relating why
the customer made the purchase and presents a slide with the following
information:
Job Title
and Industry: VP of Sales, Acme Software
Critical
Business Issue: Concerned about
achieving forecasted revenues
Problems/Reasons: Forecast
data sits in local, regional spreadsheets, requiring hours of manual “roll-up”
work from reps, regional heads, and admin staff each time the forecast is
updated. Lots of errors, takes too long,
always late. Unable to see which
projects need attention, which are likely end as “no decision”, difficult to
assign resources wisely.
Specific
Capabilities: A way to aggregate
the data from the sales offices around the world and generate real-time reports
showing forecast and pipeline, on-demand, right from the VP of Sales’ laptop
computer; identify key opportunities to
address and coach; deploy appropriate resources effectively.
Delta: $30M
in incremental revenue; redeploy 4 sales operations FTE to more productive
tasks.
Critical
Date: In
place to roll-out at sales kickoff meeting January 20, 2014.
We
Sold: 200
licenses of TurboForcasterPro, plus services, totaling $575,000.
The other
salespeople in the room get excited and start asking for more details. Why?
Because they have similar customers with similar situations and rapidly
realize that your product can provide the capabilities these customers need. They realize that the slide is a terrific Customer
Success Story, a compelling and successful way to introduce the new product to their customers – it is a template that
can be applied right away.
“Show us the
demo you used to make this sale,” say the other sales folks.
The presales
colleague to the successful sales person does so – and takes only eight minutes
to show what is needed.
The other sales
reps are now excited and ready to go sell your new product. They have a clear vision of:
ü
Who are the
target customers – by job title and industry
ü
What
overarching goals or objectives are at risk (Critical Business Issues)
ü
The underlying
problems and reasons that are keeping these goals and objectives from being achieved
– what is getting in the way (Problems/Reasons)
ü
The specific
capabilities provided by your new product to solve the problems (Specific
Capabilities)
ü
The value of
the solution, in your customers’ minds (Delta)
ü
Critical
dates or events that drove customers’ implementation timelines (Critical Date)
ü
And: The size of the sale, for the sales people
(very important!)
Good
stuff! Now, contemplate how you might
have accelerated the sales of your
new product if you’d provided this information at the first sales kick-off meeting…
Capturing Customer Success
Stories
When
presenting and demonstrating to your sales people, you need to make your new
product as attractive, as easy to communicate and as easy to sell as possible.
For existing
products, Customer Success Stories are often the best way for salespeople to
engage and begin a sales process with a customer. However, new products often don’t have the
benefit of Customer Success Stories – so what do you do?
First, if
you have any pre-release customers who used your product, interview them to
generate reasonable Success Stories. Ask
them:
o
[List their job
title and industry]
o
What goals
or objectives are now being achieved as a result of using your new software?
o
What were
the underlying problems or reasons that made it hard to achieve the desired
objectives – what was getting in the way, previously?
o
Which specific
capabilities are they now using address these problems, from your product?
o
What is the value
of the solution, from their perspective (in terms of people, time or money
saved – tangible real numbers, not platitudes!)?
o
Was there a
critical date or event that drove a timeline to implement (did they need to have
the new solution in place before a specific date – and why)?
o
[Then, list
the size of the sale or expected sale, based on the scenario]
“Sanitize”
as necessary and you have a terrific Customer Success Story for your new
product launch.
NOTE: Since you will not use the name of the specific customer when presenting to
prospects, so you do not need to get legal approval to relate the rest of the
information. These are known as
“Informal Customer Success Stories” and are the lifeblood of a software
organization!
But We Don’t Have Any Customers,
Yet…
If you don’t
have any customer experiences that you can harvest, then you need to create
fictional or “suppositional” Success Stories.
These should be based on your expected customer situations or Use Cases. Create these fictional Success Stories from
the following questions:
What are the
target job titles and industries? For
each specific job title and industry:
o
What goals
or objectives are likely at risk?
o
What
underlying problems or reasons do you expect make it hard to achieve the
desired objectives?
o
Which
specific capabilities from your product do you expect will enable the customer
to address the problems?
o
What is a
reasonable expectation of the value of the solution, from the customer’s
perspective (again in terms of concrete numbers: people, time or money saved)?
o
Is there a
critical date or event that you expect will drive a need to implement by a
specific date?
o
[List the
size of the expected sale]
This is an effective
and compelling starting point to help your salespeople sell your new offering.
Vision Clearly Communicated
Now, back to
our sales kickoff meeting… Instead of
flogging your sales team with a long, detailed demo of the new product, start
with building a crisp vision of likely customer success scenarios.
Accordingly,
begin your presentation with a set of existing or fictional Customer Success
Stories. These will clearly illustrate
the opportunities represented and provide the top-level information to target
and qualify customers. You’ll want to
provide a series of Success Stories like a menu, so that the sales team can see
the depth and breadth of the customers the new offering can help.
You then
follow with a demo that shows example outcomes for each Customer Success Story,
from the customer’s perspective. For
example, in our VP of Sales case above, you would start your demo by showing the
completed forecast and pipeline reports, to prove that they can be done and to
generate a vision of the solution right up-front. You then show the specific capabilities
needed to roll-up that forecast and pipeline, using the fewest number of steps or mouse clicks.
Keep it
short, simple, and to the point. In most
cases, you can easily relate a complete Customer Success Story and show its
accompanying demo in less than eight
minutes!
Vision Achieved and Amplified
By
presenting your new offering in the context of Customer Success Stories, your
sales organization can begin to sell your product right away. You’ve succeeded in communicating how
customers can use and get value from your product – via real-life usage
situations.
You’ve
amplified your message as well: you’ve transferred
the knowledge of how to communicate your product’s key uses from a single
person (you) to the entire sales force in a way that is compelling and
resonates with the sales people. You’ve
also built a vision of what good things selling your offering will do for the
sales folks, themselves!
The
result? You’ve equipped your sales team
with the three most important concepts possible:
- Your new product will be
compelling and easy to introduce to their target customers.
- It will be easy to prove and
demonstrate – to move the sales process forward.
- The sales team sees your new
offering as a terrific way to achieve quota.
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