Guest Blogger Paul Pearce offers the following:
Promoting
Success as a Great Demo! Manager
It concludes with the typical energy and aspirations that
new training provides. We hear comments like ”Wow, I can’t wait to go try this”
or ”I have been in presales for 20 years and I’ve been doing it all wrong.” One
of my proudest moments as a Great Demo! instructor was when a student thanked
me and said, ”You have changed my life and my career forever! Thank you.”
As with every new adventure, students start off with the
best intentions and with a passion for change in the way they demonstrate
software. Yet, we find that after several weeks or months, many students revert
back to doing traditional demos. While they incorporate many best practices
shared in the training session, they start to revert back to feature and function
diatribes that take 20-60 minutes to complete. The harbor tour returns.
This is why it happens and here is how managers can help.
Below are several reasons the Great Demo! Methodology (and
all demo methodologies, for that matter) fail to recognize their potential:
1.
Culture: Altering the way a company does
demonstrations is a dramatic change for many groups including Sales, Services,
Marketing and Training. If Presales Managers and leaders do not fully share the
value of the new approach with the company, the presales community will receive
immediate pushback. There is an organizational change management opportunity
that must be explored to ensure a successful rollout.
2.
Experience: As with anything in life, becoming
an expert takes considerable practice. Those who are coached effectively can move to
an expert or mastery level sooner. Effective managers must create a safe,
team-based environment in which the team can practice and receive constructive
feedback. When I implemented the methodology, we promoted group conversations
about successes and challenges as a standard topic on our weekly team calls. The
most effective demonstrations of new features ever created were from Great Demo!
demonstration competitions. These competitions were held at quarterly meetings
where each team member was encouraged to perform their own Great Demo! After
each group saw the demo numerous times, they were able to quickly master the
topic. As a group, we discussed each demonstration, what worked best, and what
the team would want to replicate. We did that across regions where within
several days we had accumulated the best demo from each region. The results
were complete buy-in, mastery level articulation of value and reinforcement of
the methodology.
3.
Onboarding: Technical Proof demonstrations
require significant discovery and preparation. They cannot typically be created,
rehearsed and presented in 24 hours. That notion is a hoax and thoroughly undermines
a company’s ability to articulate personalized value to clients. However,
Vision Generations Demos can be created, rehearsed and presented in 24 hours! Presales
Managers and leaders need to create a repository of Vision Demonstration Situation
Slides and Illustrations that highlight the value the organization has created
for other clients. These stories are a brilliant way to train new employees
(not just in presales). If you are not doing this today, this is a must for
increasing the effectiveness of your demos while increasing the onboarding
potential for new employees. In Chris Orlob’s recent post:
VP of Sales Success Comes Down to These Two Levers, he suggests that, ”The best way to
equip reps to understand what “good” looks like is by giving them a
repository of call recordings to learn from.” Applied to presales, the
repository can be a master presentation deck of Situation Slides and Illustrations
that the team can use to share similar customer experiences while painting
enough information to drive additional discovery.
4.
Share Success: Every win should be celebrated
and supported with the Situation Slide and Illustrations created for the
demonstrations. Want to be on stage talking about your deal at the next sales
kick-off meeting? Share your Great Demo! slides. This is a no-prep way to
re-illustrate the value you created for the win. It’s perfect. The Situation Slide
explains what the customer’s critical business issue was, the problems they
were having, the features needed and the value created. The associated Illustration
provides a quick overview of the end result.
One of the greatest sources of pride we have as a Great Demo!
Training team is seeing our clients successfully implement the methodology. That
is why we offer post-training consulting packages to help coach and mentor presales
leadership teams, provide ongoing deal coaching for strategic deals and share
ongoing best practices.
Many organizations have now extended the initial Great Demo!
Training to include the Master’s Series, which provides advanced training
focused on helping organizations extend their use and provide higher win rates
on deals. Topics are typically organized to focus on your company’s biggest
need and provide for better discovery techniques, presenting multi-solution
demonstrations and further insights on making demonstrations remarkable.
If you are interested in learning more or helping take your
team’s demonstrations to the next level, please contact Paul H. Pearce at
PPearce@GreatDemo.com or visit
www.GreatDemo.com.
