Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Podcast: An Interview with Peter Cohan

Scott Sambucci, who leads SalesQualia, drives a discussion with me on demos, life, the universe and everything (OK, mostly on demos).
Here’s Scott’s description of what we covered and more detailed notes:
  • Why you only have once chance at a product demo and how to do it right the first time.
  • There no such thing as standard demos and how to discover the “Critical Business Issues” of your target accounts in preparing your demos.
  • “The Curse of Knowledge” and how answering your prospect’s questions before they ask can KILL your demo.
  • How to demo your software crisply…!
Notes:
  • How did Peter get into demo skills training.
  • Do the Last Thing First – don’t teach people how things work, rather show them what good things will help them solve their problems.
  • Assembling and using data from demos, delivery and sales results.
  • Doing it right the first time – your demos will be much shorter and you’ll likely do fewer demos to get the business.
  • No such thing as a standard customer/demo.
  • Doing Discovery, ask sufficient questions to be able to design a demo that fits the customer’s need.
  • The “Curse of knowledge”, when you have seen it all before and you forget that every customer is unique. 
  • Pre-answering questions before they are asked takes away the role of the audience.
  • How to address having new people in the meeting that you haven’t had a chance to do needs assessment with.
  • Always start a demo with three questions:  What’s your name, job title and what would you like to accomplish?
  • Turning the demo from being all about the vendor to all about the customer.
  • Use the fewest number of steps to complete any particular task.
  • Manage your infrastructure. Expect your hard disk will crash! Be ready for anything.
  • Do the Last Thing First reprised. 

The entire podcast runs just about 1 hour in length – that should be just about perfect for 1 or 2 commutes…!

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