“We brought back the Demo Guru, Peter Cohan, back for another session. Last time Peter blew our minds and completely changed our approach to speaker switches (76 seconds, come on!). We talked about how in this session. What about discovery though? We go deep into discovery and how to do it. Yes again, Peter shows that most of us simply aren’t doing enough. We also got Peter’s opinion on virtual technologies (sorry, Microsoft).”
The recording is available here. Enjoy!
Peter Cohan joined David Siles and Enrique Barreto (rrrrrroll the “r”, please) to discuss demos, forms of proof, Vision Generation, Lunch and Learn sessions, web demos tips, and sundry other burrito fillings and toppings. The recording is available here. Delicious!
If you had trouble registering for the upcoming "Why Your Discovery Calls Are Hurting Your Sales" webinar on October 27, here is an updated link: https://www.linkedin.com/events/whyyourdiscoverycallsarehurting6721789899978108928/
Great Demo!’s Peter Cohan will be joining the fine folks at Demodesk for this webinar:
“I hate to break it to you, but your discovery calls might actually be hurting your sales...
The discovery call is the first time you have a real discussion with your prospect. It sets the tone for the entire deal. It's important.
But so many sales reps are unknowingly repeating the same mistakes call after call.
Why is that? And what can they do to fix it?
We're answering those questions and more in a live webinar with veteran sales coach Peter Cohan and Demodesk's Joachim Van Erps.
Join us on Tuesday, October 27 at 5pm CEST / 9am PST for a live webinar that will help you identify common discovery call mistakes and give you the tools to address them.
You'll get:
Register for the webinar to save your spot.
See you there!
Veronika
CEO, Demodesk”
As presales professionals we deal with competition daily. Join presales veterans Peter Cohan, Nidhi Shah, and Marjorie Abdelkrime as they shared stories and provided insights on how you can better manage (and outflank) your competition:
· What to say (or not say) about your competition
· Some horror stories we’ve experienced
· Setting “land mines” (and exposing competitor’s)
· What if their product is really that much better – leveraging “whole product analysis”
· Navigating head-to-head evaluations
You can find the recording here. Enjoy!
What you can expect to get out of the webinar:
· What to say (or not say) about your competition
· Some horror stories we’ve experienced
· Setting “land mines” (and exposing competitor’s)
· What if their product is really that much better – leveraging “whole product analysis”
· Navigating head-to-head evaluations
When: October 1 at 11:00 AM Pacific Time; 2:00 PM Eastern Time
You can register here for this webinar – looking forward to your questions and comments during the session as well!
Translating Face-to-Face Meeting Audience Scans to the Web
Many presales and salespeople report that they find it difficult to consume and act on the various inputs when presenting demos and presentations over the web using Zoom and similar tools.
They note it is hard enough to present over the web – and taking in audience impressions via webcams, checking chat, scanning the participant pane, the Q&A pane, monitoring audio and one’s own video is tough to observe and incorporate.
It is very important, however. Why?
When we are face-to-face delivering a demo or presentation in a conference room, we have developed – almost unconsciously – skills to scan the room while we are presenting. We talk and drive our software while also watching people’s expressions for comprehension, questions, agreement or disagreement, and whether people are paying attention.
In these face-to-face meetings we have learned to perform a Face-to-Face Scan. As seasoned face-to-face presenters we do this naturally. If we simply ignored the audience, it is likely our demos and presentations would be much less successful.
We now need to translate our Face-to-Face Scan to web meetings…!
So, here are some simple guidelines for developing your personal Zoom Scan (or WebEx Scan etc.):
1. Get familiar with your web collaboration tool (Zoom, WebEx, GoToMeeting, etc.). Set up sessions for yourself (even better with a colleague, who can give you feedback) and explore all of the tools and relevant settings so that you know what is available and how to use them.
This is very similar to what we do in face-to-face meetings – we make sure we are comfortable with our laptop and software, our plan for our demo or presentation, and any other materials or visual aids that plan to use. We organize and have ready our equipment, presentation tools, visual aids, notes, phone hotspot, etc. that we might expect to need.
2. Launch your Zoom (etc.) meeting 5 minutes early. This gives you time to test and make sure things are working properly before your customer arrives. Check latency, audio, video, and screen sharing with a colleague or key customer contact. Then open the participant and chat panes, organize the video pane to see all the participants, as well as the annotation toolbar – arrange them where you can see what you need of your presentation/demo and have good visual access to the various audience panes. Ensure your webcam pane is showing as many of your audience members as possible (“Gallery” mode shows the most but may cover more of your screen than desired).
This is again what we do in face-to-face meetings – we typically arrive in a conference room before the meeting to familiarize ourselves with the layout, arrange chairs, connect to the projector, find pens and clean whiteboards, and generally organize in accord with our needs.
And like face-to-face meetings, we may need to move things around during the meeting – to more clearly see a person asking a question, to draw on a whiteboard, or access a visual aid. When operating over the web, we can expect similar needs – and have to rearrange our screen. For example, we may need to move a pane aside to annotate on a specific part of our display.
3. Greet and Meet attendees as they join. Ask them to turn on their webcams and unmute their microphones as they enter. Monitor the participant pane to note new arrivals and the status of their video and audio, accordingly (hey! you are now building a scan element).
In a face-to-face meeting, we greet people as they come in the conference room, shaking hands and doing brief mutual introductions – now you are doing exactly the same thing over the web!
4. Build your Zoom Scan. As the meeting begins and you share content, glance at your slides or software as you start presenting – then glance at the participant pane (anyone new?). Scan the participant faces in the video pane for comprehension, questions, attention (any confusion or comments?). Now repeat: content, participant pane, video pane, content…
After a session or two this will begin to feel natural – and you can expand your scan to include the chat and Q&A panes. Note that chat and Q&A often have red “alert” marks, which means you only need to glance to see if an alert is present – if yes, then scan the pane.
Next, incorporate the use of annotation tools – these really help to make an online demo come alive…! Select a tool, annotate, then erase – and remember to click the mouse cursor on the annotation pane to re-enable “normal” mouse control.
Your scan now includes content, participant pane, video pane, alerts, annotate, erase, repeat…
Pro Tip: let your audience know what you are doing. For example, rather than have your audience wonder why your mouse moved to a blank part of the screen (from the audience’s perspective), tell them, “OK, let me grab an annotation tool…”
Is there an analogy with face-to-face meetings? Absolutely! You have just translated your face-to-face scan to Zoom: You are talking and driving your software while also watching people’s expressions for comprehension, questions, agreement or disagreement, and whether people are paying attention. Congratulations!
Here’s another analogy: Driving a car. Most of us likely don’t recall how overwhelmed we felt when we first learned to drive – but most of us can appreciate the differences between being a passenger in a car vs. driving.
Most of us are passengers in web meetings (even if we host the sessions) – we join the session, listen, talk, and sometimes present content. But we aren’t really driving, compared to what we do when we drive a car.
Consider – when driving a car, we are managing the speed (accelerator, brake), direction (steering wheel), checking the speedometer, glancing at road signs, occasionally checking for problem lights on the dashboard, using the turn signals – and quite likely also eating, drinking, listening to GPS instructions as well as music or a podcast, and chatting with passengers.
Our scan for driving a car has become natural to us. And note (I hope!) that the majority of the scan is on the road ahead…
When presenting over the web, the same type of scan can take place – and again, note that the majority of your time will likely be spent presenting your content – but you’ll still want to check on the “passengers” (participants’ video), the “GPS” (participant pane), “road signs” (chat and Q&A), as well as sip your tea or coffee, etc.
5. Practice your Zoom Scan. Now practice your Zoom Scan with each session – you’ll find you get more and more comfortable with the process. And you won’t have to think about doing the scan – it will begin to become a habit.
Establishing your personal Zoom scan is a key element in transitioning to our “new normal” of operating over the web for our meetings.
Pro Tip: Many presenters report that they focus (too much) on their own webcam video. While you do want to include yourself in your scan, occasionally, the main focus should be on your audience. Experiment (with a colleague or by yourself in your own web sessions) to get comfortable with how you appear – your physical location and size with respect to your webcam, the lighting (is your face clearly visible – is there distracting backlighting?), what else is visible (or use a Zoom background), how much space you have for hand motions and the use of physical visual aids or props, etc.
Even Better Pro Tip: Record your sessions and occasionally play them back… Very humbling, but very effective! You’ll hear your voice, your tone, your word choice; you’ll recognize if you cut off somebody’s question or if you forgot to close a question; you’ll see your mousing and use of the annotation tools. This is an opportunity for some very rapid improvement and growth!
It only took a few face-to-face meetings (hopefully) to develop and grow comfortable with our face-to-face meeting scans – which then became second nature. Now it’s time to fully translate our face-to-face practices to the web!
Copyright © 2020 The Second Derivative – All Rights Reserved.
PowerPoint has a very useful but rarely used zoom/magnify tool in Slideshow mode (in PowerPoint 365 for Windows only, sorry Macintosh folks…). It works as follows:
(Assuming you are in Slideshow mode)
- In the lower left corner of the presenter view (lower left corner of your slide), click the magnifying glass icon.
- A bright rectangle appears on the slide and the mouse pointer changes to a hand.
- Point your mouse over the area of the slide that you want to magnify, then click to zoom in on-screen. The mouse pointer becomes a hand to indicate that you can click and drag to move the zoom effect to a different area of the slide.
- To turn off the zoom effect, press the Esc key or click the magnifying glass icon again.
This is very useful for (smoothly) focusing on specific areas of your screen – and/or enlarging sections that are hard to view or read for the audience. Try it!
“On the PreSales Podcast, James Kaikis and Peter Cohan connect on the topic "Analogies and Metaphors in PreSales”.
Peter, founder and principal of The Second Derivative and the Great Demo! methodology, talks about how using analogies and metaphors in your sales cycles can be extremely impactful and allow for customers to connect the dots more so than seeing your product.”
You can find the podcast here. Enjoy!
Here are a handful of emerging and established tools – either created specifically for presales and/or having terrific application for presales folks. We are listing each with text from the vendor followed by a few of our comments. Enjoy – and let us know of other tools to explore…!
Vivun
From the Vendor:
Vivun is the world’s first AI-powered platform for presales, unleashing their strategic potential and creating a seamless interlock between sales and product. Vivun helps presales leaders achieve operational excellence by equipping them with the metrics they need as the result of individual contributors having a single place to manage their work. Using Vivun, organizations increase forecast accuracy by leveraging the technical conscience of every deal, find revenue by reviving dormant opportunities, and deliver winning products by tapping into the collective insights from the field. Vivun works with startups like Harness, growth companies like Seismic, and global enterprises like Autodesk. Visit Vivun.com to learn more and request a demo.
Our Comments:
If you are a presales manager looking for ways to track, manage and improve activities and outcomes for your team this is a truly terrific tool. And if you are currently laboring using Excel to accomplish this, then you are the perfect candidate!
DemoFlow
From the Vendor:
At Demoflow, we believe it's now harder now than ever to run a great sales presentation and connect with your audience. Demoflow pieces together disjointed systems of record into a cohesive system of action to help sales reps show the most relevant sales content helping them connect with their audience remotely. Ensuring everyone tells a story about their product that sells... every single time.
Our Comments:
Excellent for Vision Generation Demos, this tool enables consistent delivery of early-stage demos, in particular – and ensures that the full history of the interaction and follow-up steps are captured in your CRM. An enablement dream!
Demodesk
From the Vendor:
Demodesk redefines screen sharing for Sales and Success teams, by automating scheduling, preparation, and CRM logging time to help you sell more and increase customer retention. All while skipping downloads and compatible with any browser and device. Create a standardized, scalable process by setting up personalized talk tracks with every pre-loaded playbook to have the perfect structure readily available at all times.
Our Comments:
While Demodesk has some similarities with DemoFlow, they take a different approach, positioning their tool as an alternative to Zoom/WebEx/etc. – enabling interesting collaborative browsing and editing capabilities. Their playbooks offer a guided, structured approach to improving Discovery conversations, in particular.
Consensus
From the Vendor:
Consensus enables you to scale presales effortlessly. Demos are critical to the buying experience, but presales teams often struggle to cope with increasing demand for live demos and growing a team of expert solution consultants takes time. Learn how interactive video demos provide a personalized demo experience on-demand, branching, summarizing, and expounding according to the responses of each prospect.
Our Comments:
Consensus provides intelligent automated demo capabilities, enabling prospects to self-qualify, self-discover and generate vision on their own – while you, the vendor, uncover the buying committee and their specific interests. Even better, this all done without a live human – releasing presales folks from hours of repetitive “overview” (harbor tour) demos. Truly a breakthrough technology!
Refract
From the Vendor:
Refract analyses every call and demo, profiling the revenue defining moments, revealing what leads to successful outcomes for your team today. Profile where revenue is won and lost in every interaction. Identify the most valuable conversations and key moments to review, coach, and share. Learn the DNA of your conversations that leads to successful outcomes.
Our Comments:
Refract is a truly terrific coaching and best practices environment for presales, providing capabilities to “slice and dice” demos to uncover key moments, words, phrases, and software screens that “wow”. Libraries of “what great looks like” include snippets as well as full demos to enable rapid onboarding of new hires and ongoing development of existing team members. This is the best choice in the “coaching” category for presales.
The next several tools are of more general use (for sales, BDR’s, SDR’s, and customer success folks, for example), but can certainly be applied to improving presales practices:
Gong
From the Vendor:
Trying to figure out what happened on a sales call? Reading the summary in your CRM is useless. 30 written words never truly recap 6,000 spoken words. Gong captures and analyzes every word of every sales conversation (meetings, calls, and email) – so you have the unfiltered voice of the market. Gong then uses AI to help you win more deals, improve rep success and gain critical market intelligence. Gong helps you see what’s working and what’s not so you can respond in real-time.
Our Comments:
Gong is focusing less on individual coaching and more on uncovering what contributes to closed business – “Revenue Intelligence”. Gong also continues to publish enlightening studies – they authored the seminal study on 67,149 demos that delightfully validated Great Demo! methodology.
Chorus
From the Vendor:
Chorus provides a simple, scalable solution to capture and analyze all customer calls, meetings, and emails to create visibility, drive process and behavior changes, and deliver bottom line impact. Our proprietary AI helps Revenue teams capture, measure, and act upon every customer interaction to drive team performance, build stronger relationships, and gather unbiased market intelligence.
Our Comments:
While Gong, Chorus and ExecVision have many similarities (and some overlap with Refract as well), Chorus appears to have particular strengths for onboarding. An intriguing capability is a view of presentation and/or demo activity as a “voice” (in addition to “vendor” and “customer”).
ExecVision
From the Vendor:
ExecVision provides sales leaders and enablement teams with data mined from calls and web conference conversations with prospects, which helps them close the Insights-to-Performance Gap. Discover the key words, phrases, and behaviors that generate pipeline and drive deals so you can replicate best practices that increase results. Insights alone won’t improve outcomes, which is why ExecVision is designed to facilitate human behavior change that improves performance and gives leaders the ability to make more informed decisions. No more assumptions or guessing on activity metrics alone.
Our Comments:
Like Gong and Chorus, ExecVision enables reps, managers, and enablement folks to surface key moments, words and word phrases. However, ExecVision offers additional focus on coaching, with capabilities to track and manage coaching effectiveness. Further, this tool’s recommended implementation process includes training on how to coach – that’s a key differentiator.
Balto
From the Vendor:
Balto is the first real-time call guidance software. Powered by AI, Balto analyzes speech on both sides of the call and immediately delivers critical information to reps using Balto. For leaders, this means your entire team can respond to the most difficult questions in your own words, every time. For reps, this means you’ll never have to worry about forgetting what you should say or how you should say it. Never forget your training again.
Our Comments:
Balto’s intrigue is its real-time AI analysis and prompting, providing guidance and suggested scripts to reps during calls. While it is designed more for call centers, it offers capabilities that could rather dramatically improve demo delivery. For example, it prompts the rep when they are exceeding speaking 70% of the time – a common challenge for most demonstrators!
Please let us know:
1. If you are using and recommend any of these tools.
2. If you know of other tools you’d suggest we investigate!
I joined the fine folks at “Tripping Over the Barrel” to explore life, liberty, and the pursuit of demo horror stories. We discussed best and worst demo practices, richly illustrated with a delightful selection of horror stories, touching (lightly) on:
- The Great Demo! Origins Story (yes, there is one)
- Doing Discovery
- Vision Generation Demos
- Technical Proof Demos
- Buying It Back
- The Menu Approach
- Fewest Number of Clicks
- Speaker Switches
- Making Your Demo a Conversation
- Setup Mode
You can find this fun, yet extremely useful podcast here – Episode 13: https://digitalwildcatters.com/podcasts/tripping-over-the-barrel/
Enjoy!
You can use your spacebar as a “push-to-talk” button when your microphone is muted in Zoom. When you press and hold down the spacebar, it unmutes you; when you release the spacebar it returns you to mute. Simple and elegant…!
Have you ever had someone say, “I can’t really read the text on your screen…” in a demo?
Is their eyesight that poor? Likely not! It may simply be a case where your screen resolution is greater than theirs.
For example, if you are working from a home office using a large monitor and your customer has a small monitor, what are they seeing? Your high-res large screen is mapped to a screen with much lower resolution, resulting in smaller everything – including font size.
For example, the current 13” MacBook Pro has a resolution of 2560‑by‑1600. The iMac Pro, on the other hand, has a 27” monitor with a resolution of 5120-by-2880.
The MacBook’s screen is one quarter the size of the iMac – which means that text that is just comfortable for you to see on your iMac will be unreadable on a MacBook Pro.
Solution?
Share your screen and show an example screen of your software, preferably with representative fonts and font sizes. Ask the audience if they can see and read the text. If they can, everything is good. If they can’t, change your resolution or zoom as needed…!
If you can't change things, remember that you'll have to verbally communicate what your audience is seeing.
The recordings of Peter Cohan’s “7 Habits for Stunningly Successful Demos” presentation and Julie Hansen’s “Acting Tips for Connecting On-Camera” as well the other DEMOFEST sessions and the final panel discussion are available here: https://tinyurl.com/yahoeofo.
In 7 Habits for Stunningly Successful Demos we explored data-driven best practices (as opposed to opinions!).
- Why and what’s in this for you
- A (very brief) example of what Great looks like
- 7 Habits for Stunningly Successful Demos
- Some comments about demo metrics
- Avoiding “No Decisions”
- Some insights into Doing Discovery (as time allowed)
Acting Tips for Connecting On-Camera focused on:
- The secret to “being natural” on-camera
- How to create eye contact with your customer
- Why certain movements and gestures don’t work on-camera
- How to incorporate video into your demo
- And more!
Contact us at Info@GreatDemo.com if you’d like copies of the presentation materials.
“In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, people cannot objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence.” [Wikipedia]
In other words, people often don’t know what they don’t know. Interestingly,
“Other investigations of the phenomenon, such as ‘Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence’ (2003), indicate that much incorrect self-assessment of competence derives from the person's ignorance of a given activity's standards of performance. Dunning and Kruger's research also indicates that training in a task, such as solving a logic puzzle, increases people's ability to accurately evaluate how good they are at it.”
[Note: I am certainly not saying that you are incompetent…!]
But consider: In the field of software demos, have you been trained – and in what ways?
There are a number of potential areas of training with respect to software demos:
The product itself:
- Learning how your product operates – e.g., set-up, navigation and workflows.
- Learning what your product delivers – e.g., reports, dashboards, alerts, and problem resolution.
- Learning the surrounding technologies and infrastructure.
Presenting the product:
- Learning demo flow, scripts, and talk-tracks.
- Presenting workflows, individual screens, and deliverables.
- Communicating value.
Interacting with the customer:
- Engaging multiple players at multiple levels (execs, middle managers, staffers, admins).
- Managing questions.
- Working with customer champions and coaches.
This list goes on – this is a small starter set to spur conversation.
Now consider just two of these items, “presenting screens” and “communicating value”. Have you been trained on how to do these?
Presenting Screens:
- What do you say? (And what does your customer hear and remember?)
- What is the customer looking at while you are speaking?
- What is the customer actually seeing?
- How do you use your mouse?
- How often do you apply annotation tools?
- Do you present meaningful color elements?
- Do you communicate graph information clearly?
- Are you “connecting the dots” for the customer?
Communicating Value:
- Are you communicating value?
- How compelling is the message?
- Are they your (vendor) value statements?
- How often do you communicate value?
- What does your customer hear and remember?
Perhaps it’s time to assess yourself – but not by yourself (due to the Dunning-Kruger effect!).
Start by asking a colleague, a mentor, or your manager to review an example demo – but be aware that they may be at a similar level of understanding as you are (particularly if they were the ones who provided the training!).
So, consider asking a customer or a 3rd party to take a look at a sample demo or two. Do you know what you don’t know? What you learn could be enlightening!
Contact us at Info@GreatDemo.com if you’d like to discuss or pursue this.
