Great Demo! Chat Recording: XO: eXtraordinary Outcomes - Episode 34

Hosted by Subhanjan Sarkar, The Buyer-Led Sales Expert

 

Rather than describe this session myself, I asked a customer to offer their observations of this recording – here’s what they said:

 

“We found the origins stories [about the methodology and the book] interesting, but the next sections were particularly useful, as you described and developed many of the Great Demo! key ideas. The segment on Vision Generation Demos clarified my understanding and your discussion of Technical Proof Demos is an excellent introduction for new people and a great refresher for our Workshop graduates.”

 

You can find the recording here.  Enjoy!

Webinar Recording: First Call Demos and Discovery – A Surprisingly Effective Approach

Your prospect is interested in a demo, but you’re not sure what they want to see – the prospect looks like a good lead, but that’s all you know…

How do you satisfy your prospect’s desire to see a demo without inflicting them with a Harbor Tour?  How can you move them (gently, but firmly) into a discovery conversation in the same call?  Is it possible to do both and even offer a reasonable focused demo as well?

Yes!  

We shared methods to accomplish this, while leveraging the capabilities of a fabulous new tool (Demoflow).

You can find the recording here.   Access Passcode: 1Xz5pY%7.

The actual webinar begins about 4.5 minutes in…  Enjoy!

Presales Metrics: What Are Your Goals, Objectives and KPIs?

What are yours?

To refresh, goals express your overarching aspirations and provide the first step of clarifying vision.  Another way of articulating goals is to ask, “What are our desired outcomes?”  For example, “We want our customers to be truly delighted with our products and services.”

Objectives define the specific strategies for achieving your goals.  Aligning to the “delighted customers” goal above, an example objective might be, “We need to onboard our customers as quickly and successfully as possible” or “We need to ensure that customers enjoy the expected value from their investment with us.”  Note that a single goal might involve several objectives.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) express and measure progress towards realizing an objective.  For the onboarding objective above, “Time-to-Go-Live” is a KPI as is “Time from Go-Live to getting the first value from use.”  Monitoring these enables you to establish baselines and track progress.

What Goals, Objectives, and KPIs have you established and track in your presales organization?

Intriguing Webinar: "Change Before You Have To: Leading the Presales Transformation Inside Your Organization"

Took place Thursday August 12 – registering here will likely enable you to access the recording, when available - and we'll post the link to the recording once it is ready.

This was an insightful discussion!  Join Adam Freeman, Garin Hess, Freddy Mangum and Great Demo!’s own Peter Cohan in this conversation about life, liberty and the pursuit of positive change in presales organizations. 

How will the impact of presales change or increase in the next several years?  For example, presales is moving from a cottage industry to intelligent industrialization with the appearance and adoption of tools and skills training specifically built for presales.  What do this mean for you?

Doing Discovery with Groups? Divide and Discover

The takeaway is, “The Smaller the Group the Better...”

Many sales and presales folks often try to gather as many prospect players together as possible for Discovery calls.  This is not recommended…!  

Your best strategy is to have an individual or two prospect participants (next best) on a call at a time.  Why?  Several reasons:

• Many individual contributors and middle managers are uncomfortable sharing information with an executive on the call, particularly if that exec is their manager’s manager.
• Similarly, folks from one department are often reluctant to expose departmental issues when representatives from other departments are on the call as well.  
• Managers of teams may hesitate discussing specific team issues with the team members present.
• A single open-ended question may consume a surprising amount of the scheduled call time if all or most of the prospect participants take a turn to answer.
• Additionally, an opinion-based anchoring effect can take place, particularly if a senior manager or exec presents an initial opinion (effectively gagging contrary or differing perspectives from others).

So, if you are presented with a Discovery call with multiple prospect participants, here are some guidelines:

• Use the time to answer many of their questions – it is quite likely that some of the players are not fully up-to-speed with the information provided so far.  This may be a good opportunity to get everyone aligned.
• Focus on demographics and other “easy to ask, easy to answer” questions and topics.
• For managers and execs, ask about their objectives for the project.
• Finally, gently (but firmly) recommend to “continue” the conversation with individuals or related pairs to enable more specific discussions.

The Smaller the Group the Better!