What’s Your Discovery-to-Demo Ratio?

 

Do you track your Discovery-to-Demo Ratio? You should!

A high Discovery-to-Demo Ratio is good, for example anything close to 1:1. This means that you are doing discovery prior to your demos (hopefully!), yielding much more focused and precise demos. You are also likely enjoying less “wasted” demos and fewer No Decision outcomes.

A low ratio suggests that more discovery should be done prior to your demos. Low ratios correlate with delivering too many traditional “overview” demos (aka Stunningly Awful Harbor Tours). Demo “waste” is likely high and potentially very frustrating for presales staff. 

Demos with high Vendor:Prospect (Talk:Listen) ratios is another indicator for this. Anything above 60:40 (Vendor:Prospect) suggests that more discovery was required!

A key question is, of course: How much discovery is needed to be considered “enough”? One simple measure is a complete (or reasonably complete) Great Demo! Situation Slide, including:

• Job Title and Industry
• Critical Business Issue
• Problems/Reasons
• Specific Capabilities
• Delta
• Critical Date
• (Bonus points for including one or more VREs – Value Realization Events)

A complete Great Demo! Situation Slide is also an effective definition of a “Demo Qualified Lead”.

A simpler method is to ask yourself, “Do we know what to show – and why?” The “why” aspect is important to understand, of course! 

On the other hand, qualification (such as BANT) cannot be considered sufficient discovery. You may have determined whether the prospect is in an active buying process and has “pain”, but you don’t have enough information to deliver a focused, compelling, successful demo.

What’s your Discovery-to-Demo Ratio?