Great Demo! Terminates Relationship with PreSales Collective/PreSales Academy

I am sad to report that I have terminated my partnership with the Presales Academy and the Presales Collective. I do not agree with their program, their directions, or their principles.

- Peter Cohan

Lead Limbo? – Burning Presales Podcast

 

“How do you qualify good prospects and deal with people 'just browsing'?”

Peter Cohan once again joined Consensus’ Aaron Janmohamed in this 12-minute conversation. We covered:

• What is a qualified lead?
• How do you distinguish between a lead that is in an active buying process vs. those who are just browsing?
• Avoiding Lead Churn
• Vision Generation Demos – examples with Legos and cooking shows

Browse this podcast for yourself here!

Demo Tip: Go Full Screen!

I can’t tell you how many folks presenting demos forget (or don’t know) to enter full screen mode in their browser for browser-accessed applications. Instead of only seeing their software, we see the open tabs, bookmarks and toolbars in their browser and the applications in their Macintosh Dock or Windows Taskbar.

Operating this way has (at least) three problems:

1. You are only using 80% of the available screen for your application (about one fifth of my MacBook screen is consumed by non-app items)!
2. Prospects look at your tabs to see what you are browsing… (Anyone have any horror stories to share about this?)
3. And, intriguingly, you are making your application look more complicated.

So, try this experiment yourself, without a customer present:

1. Start an example demo in your browser as you normally would, and see what things look like.
2. Now, turn off your Bookmarks Bar, your Toolbars, etc., and then Enter Full Screen mode (these commands are typically found in the View menu or hot keys, e.g., fn-F or F11).
3. Compare!

You will likely notice:

1. Your see more of your software screen;
2. No potentially embarrassing tabs;
3. And your software looks less complicated!

Enjoy!

Burning Presales Podcast – Discovering Discovery

 

What exactly is good discovery and why is understanding it so important?

Great Demo!’s Peter Cohan joined Consensus’ Aaron Janmohamed for this 15-minute exploration of:

• A surprising story about discovery skill levels
• Research vs. Qualification vs. Discovery
• Discovery On-the-Fly (When and when not to use)
• Discovery elements examples
• Discovery as a methodology

You can discover this episode for yourself here.  Enjoy!

Paul’s Practical Presales Partnering Principles – Pragmatic, Practiced, and Proven!

 

Great Demo!’s Paul Pearce joined Patrick Pissang for this impromptu, but extremely insightful discussion of real-life presales-sales partnering. There are some really excellent ideas here!

 

We suggest folks fast forward to minute 13:30, where the interview begins. Fun and very informative!

https://www.linkedin.com/video/event/urn:li:ugcPost:6940234396876603392/

The Content-Free Buzzword-Compliant Vocabulary List

 

“Our powerful software is flexible, intuitive, easy-to-use and integrates seamlessly with your other tools. Robust and scalable, your organization can enjoy the benefits of our best-of-breed world-class offering.”

How many times have you heard these phrases in demos and sales presentations? Does it provide you with any real information – or is it simply a string of meaningless buzzwords?

When you or your team use these words and phrases in a presentation or software demonstration, you risk loss of credibility. Presentations and demos, in particular, need to focus on facts – not fantasy – in order to achieve technical proof or generate a real vision of a solution in your prospects’ minds.

Here’s a list of words that can get you and your team into trouble – we call it “The Content-Free Buzzword-Compliant Vocabulary List”:

1. Robust
2. Powerful
3. Flexible
4. Innovative
5. Collaborative
6. Purpose-built
7. Sustainable 
8. Integrated
9. Seamless
10. Product-led
11. Actionable
12. Journey
13. Pivot
14. Extensible
15. Scalable
16. Interoperable
17. Easy-to-use
18. Intuitive
19. User-friendly
20. Comprehensive
21. Best-of-breed
22. World-class
23. Disruptive 
24. Awesome

Awesome list, don’t you think?

True Story

We had invited a vendor to present and demonstrate their offerings to help us improve and automate our operations processes. The demo meeting was scheduled for sixty minutes and the vendor had asked us to invite all of our stakeholders, which we dutifully did. Their salesperson began the meeting by sharing an agenda, then launched into a corporate and product overview presentation.

About eleven minutes into his saga, one of our team-members yelled, “BINGO!” The salesperson paled visibly and asked, “What do you mean by ‘bingo’?” In response, our team-member held up a Buzzword Bingo sheet with the diagonal fully completed. “I won…!” she exclaimed, enjoying the admiration of her colleagues…

Another True Story

Our very crusty CTO, Gunther, joined a meeting with another vendor who sold a product providing data for our vertical. Their salesperson described their offering’s coverage of the data as “the most comprehensive in the industry”.

Upon hearing these words, Gunther growled, “You’re an idiot…!”

“Excuse me?” asked the salesperson. “What do you mean?”

“It’s either ‘comprehensive’ or it isn’t. That’s like saying something is ‘the most biggest’. You’re an idiot!” he repeated – and the meeting was over.

Some Solutions

How can you communicate the ideas behind these buzzwords and be believable? Look for concrete, fact-based examples that illustrate the ideas.

For example, instead of saying, “Our software is robust,” you might state “This software is deployed and in daily production use by over 1,000 customers around the world today.” Or, alternatively, try “Our customers enjoy a 99.98% uptime on a 24/7/365 basis.” Specific numbers make these statements more credible and support your claims.

Similarly, you can replace the trite and hackneyed “user-friendly”, “easy-to-use” and “intuitive” assertions by being focused and offering facts. Cite the specific number of mouse-clicks necessary to complete a task, for example. Or, perhaps you can reference that users of your software out-of-the-box have never found the need to purchase training – a truly product-led offering!

A good test you can apply to your own material is to ask the question, “In whose opinion?” If it is a quote from a customer, then that’s terrific and you should identify the quote accordingly. However, if the answer is that it came from your marketing department (or your lips!), then you should find a way to rephrase.

If you find suspect words in your literature or presentation materials such as “Our powerful software…,” then you should ask in whose opinion is it powerful? You can turn this from useless fluff to solid stuff by providing a working example: “Our customers report that our software reduces their typical workflow cycle time from several days to less than an hour.” Not just “faster, better, cheaper”, but tangibly so!

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software is an ongoing topic of discussion in many organizations. Nearly every CRM software vendor says their tools are “powerful”. But in whose opinion? Are they able to lift tons of steel or send satellites into orbit? What makes their software “powerful”?

Replacing items on The Content-Free Buzzword-Compliant Vocabulary List with substantive claims provides you the opportunity to differentiate from competitors. Compare “Our powerful software is world-class…” versus “Our customers report that our software enables 10% increases in close rates, 15% reduction in sales cycles, and 10-20% increases in conversion of leads generated and pursued…” Just the facts – no hyperbole!

Providing real-life, fact-based examples enables you and your team to rise above the competition and earn a positive reputation for being fact-based. Compare “Our powerful software is flexible, intuitive, easy-to-use and integrates seamlessly with your other tools...” versus “Our Salesforce Automation solution automatically enters all activities, tasks, appointments, and communications into your CRM, without requiring a single mouse-click. Set it up once and our software keeps all of your customer interactions synced and up-to-date.” Much better!

“Scalable” is easy to improve upon. With regards to the ability to handle a broad number of users, how about, “Implementations of our software range from single users in sole-proprietorships to over 10,000 users in our Fortune-500 customers.”

When a vendor says their software is “flexible,” are they talking about the ability to embrace a range of workflows, or configuration, or something else? Is it a software yoga pose? Perhaps it is their willingness to be flexible with their licensing or discounting? Use specific examples that are focused and relevant to the prospect at hand whenever possible. Using verifiable, real-life statements will encourage your prospects to respond with a more positive, open attitude, which will help you in achieving your objectives (and they theirs, as well).

How about “world-class” – what does this really mean? And again, in whose opinion? If your customer is concerned about local language and currency support, then you can speak directly to these capabilities. “We provide support for the major European languages, Spanish and Portuguese in Latin America, as well as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, and provide automated conversion of the currencies used in each of the relevant geographies.”

Self-Buzzword-Bingo Assessment

Here’s a challenge: listen to some of your presentations and demos (and/or your team’s), and analyze. How did you do?

For more fun (or grief, depending on your perspective…), build your own Buzzword-Bingo cards and play along! You can find numerous versions online.

A Purpose-Built, Awesome Summary

Stick with the facts, avoid meaningless buzzwords, and enjoy increased success with your presentations and demonstrations!

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Upcoming Webinar: A Perfect Demo Environment - Revealed!

Join us on June 21, as Peter Cohan, author of Great Demo!, and Daniel Hellerman, CPO of Saleo discuss the pillars of Peter's blog "A Perfect Demo Environment", and use those teachings, along with Saleo's Demo Experience Platform, to create the perfect sales demo environment live inside the world's leading SaaS tools.

We’ll be exploring:

• Stop Apologizing: In your demos, how often do you find you are apologizing for an inability to demonstrate capabilities, complete workflows, or present compelling results and reports?

• Include Problems: Learn to show that your tools can find the customer’s problems and directly address those problems or enable solutions.

• Don't Call It a Demo: One of our objectives in a software demo is to “suspend disbelief”. Anything that looks real helps our cause; anything that appears fake is going to hurt us. Learn how to build realistic demo environments in minutes, not days.

• Personalize, Customize! Have you ever seen a demo presented to a large construction firm that used example data from the banking industry? (I did – it failed…) Learn how to easily align your demos to the market you are selling to.

8:00 AM Pacific - 11:00 AM Eastern - 17:00 CET

Register here for the webinar – and please let us know if you have any topics you’d like to explore, as well!

Upcoming Webinar: Are You Using No-touch, Low-touch, and Ignition Demos to Your Advantage?

Ignoring passive “just browsing” buyers may cause you to jeopardize tomorrow’s prospects.

Thursday June 23 at 10:00 AM Pacific – Register here:

https://primetime.bluejeans.com/a2m/register/pdaysthu

Great Demo!’s Peter Cohan will join MercuryGate International’s Karen Oxenford-Melcher and Omedym’s Greg Dickinson for this discussion of:

• What is an Ignition Demo and how does it help both the buyer and the seller?
• How MercuryGate progresses buyers from no-touch and Ignition Demos delivered on the Omedym platform to more effective high-touch Great Demos!
• MercuryGate’s success with demo technology for no-touch and low-touch engagement
• How the digital demos give you more time to utilize Great Demo! methodology

You’ll walk away with a concrete plan on how to save time and focus on qualified “high touch” demos that help close deals. Don’t miss out on the spark needed to engage early-stage prospects in the buying journey.

 

Looking forward to seeing you there!

DEMOFEST Sessions Recordings – Full Access

Good news! The fine folks at Consensus have made all of the DEMOFEST sessions easily accessible here, whether you registered previously or not. 

Here are sessions from the Great Demo! Team:

• Build Trust and Eliminate Credibility-Crushers on Video – Julie Hansen. Excellent, immediately actionable tips and practices for engaging audiences over the web. This is a terrific presentation!

• Stunningly Awful Demos: Insufficient Customization – Peter Cohan. In which I examine why demos fail due to the lack of sufficient customization, and then address five dimensions of customization that yield more successful outcomes. I close with a handful of simple, yet very effective techniques to improve your win rates.

• Scaling PreSales: How to organize your PreSales teams when Resources are scarce, Customers are more demanding, and Software evolves at the speed of light – Natasja Bax. This extremely thoughtful and thought-providing presentation explores strategies and tactics for aligning presales teams with your go-to-customer motions. 

• Category Creation of Demo Automation – I joined this Keynote Panel Discussion. DEMOFEST closed with this shorter segment, exploring life, liberty and the pursuit of demo automation (or, as I suggest, “Buyer Experience Enablement”).

Hope you find the sessions useful!