Hi
All,
2017 Great Demo! Public Workshops
Our next scheduled Great Demo!
Public Workshops will take place October 5-6 and 18-19 in Amsterdam and in Sunnyvale,
CA, respectively.
Registration and additional
information for these Workshops can be found as follows:
- October 5-6 European Great Demo! Public
Workshop – click here or contact Natasja Bax at natasja@thedemoscene.nl.
We are also looking at offering a
Public Workshop in Atlanta,
currently targeting either the week of October 16 or November 13. If you have a preference, please let me know!
Public Workshops are excellent
opportunities for individuals, small groups or for teams that have new hires.
They are 1.75-Day Workshops, with the first day focusing largely on core Great
Demo! material and the second ¾ day addressing more advanced topics and
techniques.
We’ve found that these sessions
are most productive when there are two or more participants from each
organization – and best when a combination of sales and presales participants
are present (singletons are also fine). This helps to mimic real-life
interactions as much as possible, both when preparing demos and delivering them
in the role-play sessions.
Recent Webinar
Recording Available
“How to Take Your Software Demos to the Next Level”
How indeed?
Join Richard Smith, Brian Geery and myself as we explored life, liberty and the pursuit of demo excellent during this conversational webinar that took place August 1.
You can watch and listen to the webinar recording here (you can likely skip the first 3 minutes of set up…): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXYWBIWdi1U
Join Richard Smith, Brian Geery and myself as we explored life, liberty and the pursuit of demo excellent during this conversational webinar that took place August 1.
You can watch and listen to the webinar recording here (you can likely skip the first 3 minutes of set up…): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXYWBIWdi1U
Great Demo!
Spanning the Globe
With
the availability of my crack crew of carefully chosen, finely honed, and
immensely well-qualified Affiliates, we can deliver Great Demo! training
(nearly) anytime, anywhere…!
However,
our schedules do fill up rapidly – so if you have specific dates and/or
locations in mind and would like us to block or hold dates for you, please let
me know.
For
example, we are already receiving requests for sessions at sales kickoff events
next January (now that’s good
planning!).
Great Demo!
Masters Classes and Doing Discovery Sessions
If
you are a Great Demo! Workshop Graduate
and are interested in ascending to a higher level of performance, we offer a
range of Master classes that may be a good fit for you.
If
you are the Manager of a team that
you’ve delighted by providing them with Great Demo! training and wish to guide
them to a higher level of performance, we can design a customized Master Class
specifically for you and your team.
If
you survived some other demo skills training that yielded some small
improvements, but would like to move from slightly improved to truly terrific,
we offer Master Classes specifically constructed to help you or your team
ascend to a surprisingly high level of performance – again, customized to your
specific desires.
If
you realize that you or your team could do a much better job doing Discovery (where many sales cycles are
won or lost) we offer a range of Doing Discovery sessions, full Workshops and
Masters Classes.
Contact
me if you’d like information on any of the above…
Great Demo! Certified Affiliates
Here is the current list
of Certified Great Demo! Affiliates, ready to deliver Great Demo! training and
coaching:
Paul Pearce – Located
in Illinois
Winning Demo
+1.630.909.9202
Art Fromm – Located
in New York
Technical Sales
Development
+1 (716) 688-4351
Julie Hansen –
Located in Denver
Performance Sales and
Training
+1 (872) 228-7762
Natasja Bax – Located
in The Netherlands
The DemoScene
+31 (30) 761 0631
All
are ready to help you make a surprisingly compelling improvement in your team’s
demos!
Great Demo!
LinkedIn Group – Our Online Users’ Group – Well Over 5000 Members
We
have an active Great Demo! Group on LinkedIn – and you are
welcome to join. There are now well over
5000 members in the Group, many of whom are Great Demo! Workshop
graduates. We post topics and ideas for
discussion, tips, and information on new tools.
Group members are contributing their own thoughts, adding comments to
existing dialogues and raising new topics.
We
work diligently to keep the Group as high-value a tool as possible: Postings are monitored; members are vetted,
and the Group is kept spam-free. We do
encourage carefully selected job postings from vendors with openings (but not
from recruiters) and individuals looking for new opportunities.
Recent
Articles
My most recent article is “The Role of Sales
in Great Demos” and can be found on the Articles page on my website at www.SecondDerivative.com/Articles.html, along with many more. All articles are available in both HTML and
PDF format and you are welcome to download and pass them along.
Recent
Podcasts
Andy Paul, noted sales
acceleration podcaster, interviewed me recently – the result is this 43 minute
conversation about life, liberty and the pursuit of crisp, compelling
demos. The first few minutes are
[boring] chit-chat [not my fault, but does violate some Great Demo!
principles!]; once you survive these the balance is tolerably amusing and
potentially useful… Enjoy it here: http://bit.ly/399SN.
A good introduction to some of
the key Great Demo! ideas is available in a conversational podcast done earlier
this year with Chris Orlob at Gong.io – you can listen to the recording here. The intro begins about a minute in; the
trouble starts a few minutes later!
Great Demo!
Books
Many
customers have found that the Great Demo!
book can have surprisingly large impact on improving the team’s demos. Copies of the book are available on Amazon.com in hardcopy,
Kindle and audio-book formats (US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain,
Japan, China), BarnesandNoble.com in both
hardcopy and Nook formats, or directly from me at The Second Derivative.
Amazingly,
over 25,000 new copies have been purchased to date, including over 1100
audiobooks (not counting those that are resold on Amazon, or passed
around…).
The Great
Demo! Blog and LinkedIn Group are designed to provide an evergreen extension to
the book – you are welcome to explore both.
Great Demo!
Topics – For Workshops, Remote Delivery or Coaching Sessions
Here
is a range of topics and challenges that we’ve helped other groups address,
often with remarkable results!
·
Improving
Discovery and Qualification – Way Beyond “BANT”: Many demos fail due to a lack of customer
information – we’ll introduce methods to uncover and organize the key
information needed to prepare effective demonstrations.
·
Making
Complicated Look Simple: Most enterprise software can
appear to be too complicated or complex to customers – participants learn how
to make richly featured offerings look easy to use.
·
Communicating
Business Value: nearly all demonstrators are
good at showing features, some are skilled at communicating the benefits, but
few seem to remember to express the business value for the customer – we’ll
make communicating the business value a consistent habit in demos.
·
Remote Demos and
Presentations (e.g., via WebEx, GoToMeeting, etc.):
a topic of high interest – we share best practices, tips and some
surprising strategies to increase interactivity and improve success.
. Mobile and Tablet Devices: The growing use of smart phones and
tablets (e.g., iPads) is enabling major changes to demo dynamics – now you
can literally bring the demo to your customer.
·
Challenger/Insight
Selling Models: As marketing has
struggled to move “latent pain to pain”, many sales teams have adopted a more
assumptive approach to engaging customers.
We’ll explore have to create and deliver demos for these “challenging”
situations.
·
Value Analysis
and ROI: The value perceived by the customer is often
a key driving force to make the change – we discuss and explore aspects of
uncovering value and calculating ROI.
·
Dealing with “A
Day in the Life”: Many
demos present “A day in the life” of a customer – often a series of confusing fictional
characters working through a set of tasks, interspersed with loop-backs, “if”
and “or” pathways and extensive
excursions into “Setup Mode”. We’ll show
how to reduce a painful “day in the life’ down to “Just a few minutes in your
life.”
·
Set-Up vs. Daily
Use: In many demos, far too much time is spent
teaching users (and management) how to set things up – operations that are
often only used once. We’ll help the
team focus on Daily Use mode first and Set-Up mode second – or as needed.
·
White-boarding: PowerPoint can be pedantic – we explore
white-boarding and other “non-linear” presentation techniques to engage and
refresh audiences and improve their retention of key points.
·
Storytelling: Strong stories improve demos and help
customers better remember key messages.
We explore how to capture, create and deliver compelling stories for
your demos.
·
Uncovering and
Leveraging Value: Tactics and a process to
determine value in specific numbers from the prospects’ own situations – and
how to re-present this key information in demos and presentations.
·
Out-flanking
Competition: Methods to anticipate, manage and overcome
competitors in demo and related interactions.
How to bias discovery towards your capabilities and block competition.
·
Making Demos Remarkable: Explore, develop and document practices that
help your demos stand out, positively.
·
POC’s, POV’s and
Sandboxes Tools
and Strategies: The essence is quid pro quo – how to manage the process
overall to get the business; when to do and when not to do POC’s and Sandboxes;
strategies to increase your success rates.
·
On-Boarding
Tactics for Demos: Establishing good habits for
presenting demos begins with the on-boarding process – we’ll discuss how to
deconstruct and then reconstruct the “standard” demo.
·
Supporting
Partners and the Channels: Creating demos and demo toolkits
for partners and resellers, and persuading them to sell your solutions
preferentially –key aspects of enabling channels to sell effectively.
·
Highly
Transactional Sales Cycles: How to perform just enough Discovery and present a
crisp, compelling demo based on Discovery just completed – in a 30-45 minute
call…!
·
Crystallizing the Message: What
does your company do? Revitalizing
otherwise boring “Elevator Pitches” and making them provocative – conversation
starters.
·
Regional and Local Cultural Differences:
Strategies and tactics for working with different cultures and mixes of
different cultures – word and phrase choice, pointing (be careful!) and other
culture-specific guidance.
·
Calling and Presenting Higher: Many
organizations are under pressure to call higher into their customers – but most
presales teams are still operating at a lower technical level. We’ll share methods to enable the team to
comfortably move out of their comfort zones.
·
Team Tactics: Team-oriented methods and practices for
presales, sales and marketing staff in preparing and delivering demos. Roles and guidelines are developed and
practiced for the selling teams to improve results – when demos are delivered
face-to-face as well as via a remote connection.
·
RFP’s and Scripted
Demos: Successful strategies and tactics to increase
your success rates with scripted demos and RFP responses, including when to
pursue, when to pull back, and how to gently subvert the process in your favor.
·
Post-Demo
Practices: “How do you think it went…?” Capturing and acting on information gathered
and promised during the demo can be nearly as important as the demo itself.
·
Trade-show demonstration
techniques and interactions: Trade-shows
are phenomenally expensive – we’ll work through clever methods, tips, and best
practices to help you get the best return on your investment.
·
New Product
Roll-outs: Vision Generation at its most challenging –
we’ll help you create your go-to-market messaging and demos for new products,
and shorter the time to getting your first real reference customer!
·
Informal Success
Stories: These are the lifeblood of a software sales
and marketing organization! We’ll
develop the structure and methods to capture this key information and create a
set of your own. The team will be ready
to leverage these immediately.
·
SaaS Software
Demos: SaaS (aka “Cloud”, “On-Demand”, “Hosted”,
etc.) offerings have their own, additional, set of demo challenges. We identify and cover how to address SaaS
customer concerns and demo situations.
·
Demo Metrics: What can be measured, what should be measured
and how to apply and act on the results.
·
Identifying and
Leveraging Demo Capital: Many organizations, teams and
individuals are unaware of the often surprising depth and breadth of capital
associated with demos – ranging from success stories, to tips and tricks, to
demo data and scenarios. We help you
identify, catalog and explore methods to capitalize on this information and
know-how.
·
Other
Challenges? Let us know;
we’ve helped other customers, maybe we can help you as well!
Other
issues, topics or questions? Feel free
to call – I’m typically in my office by 7:30 AM Pacific Time.
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