Product Demo Sucks Because It's Focused on Your Product
firstround.com
firstround.com
Prior to that it had felt hard - I thought it was hard because I wasn't an experienced salesperson.
It's got to be the same with demos - what you are demonstrating matters. If you're demonstrating something that people want, like, are interested in and understand then the demo will go one way. If you're trying to demo something they don't need/want or understand then it will go another way.
If you are demoing something people are ambivalent about for some reason then IMO you are better spending your time on making some other product rather than trying to craft the ultimate demo for the thing they are "whatever hohum" about.
It's the product/market fit thing. If you've got product market fit then the customers will pull it out of your hands.
The REALLY hard thing is of course making something people want, but I'd rather spend my time on that than being really good at selling something hohum.
That said, prior to product market fit, it can be difficult to know whether the problem is that you haven't found the correct market, or that There is no market for what you're selling.
The best demos I've seen were given by people who, in another timeline, could be among those hearing the demo.
A smaller item, one widely counterintuitive to me and that I am not modeling right now, is that you want to focus on your best 1-3 points to the complete exclusion of everything else. Every new idea is a chance to lose someone, if they want the laundry list they'll ask for it.
I think this only works if the presenter lived with the same problems the audience wants a fix for. A demo by an engineer who's too close to the solution is infinitely better than a demo by a sales rep who can't relate to the problem or its solution because the engineer at least understands what they're trying to fix.
Sales is the very intimate act of getting a stranger to reach into their pocket and give you their money. To do that the customer has to balance their priorities and desires and make a difficult personal decision. This might mean having less money to feed themselves with (figuratively or literally).
There are a number of ways you can go about this but in the end it’s very personal to the buyer, whether it is in-fact their money or not. Corporate software sales are just as personal, if not more.
So how do you get a stranger to give you their money? You can hustle them, fool them, pressure them, befriend them, help them, be a human vending machine for what you both know they already want, you can help them find what they want, you can do so many things, but just showing off how great you are isn’t likely to work very often. Showing off how great you are is called marketing and that’s a whole other discussion.
If you get the wrong customers unnaturally far up your filter you will burn your budget trying to do conversions that can never, ever really happen.
Everyone is happy - you have interested new big customers. They may even buy a taste.
They want what you have sold them.
They think you understand their needs - and you do.
But your product won't meet them.
Eventually they realise this, they are then gone and they won't come back because now not only do they know your stuff doesn't really help, but they don't trust a word that comes out of your mouths.
As far as sales are concerned this is somewhere between a natural disaster and the engineering teams fault. There may even be some truth in the later but - perhaps the product could have been pivoted and focused on what the customer really wanted - but while ppt decks can be changed and honed every 3 hours software products have a hellva more inertia, and it's all too late now.
Meanwhile the clock is ticking.
Your sales must cleave true to the reality of what you can deliver, you must feed information back into engineering and delivery, but if the customers aren't buying what you can deliver find new customers.
The exception is obviously if you are looking to convince investors that you are for real and getting some interest will open you for more funding - but that's also fraught with problems too as every ful kno.
1. https://medium.com/the-mission/the-greatest-sales-deck-ive-e...
The order of a sales pitch should be like this:
* here is the problem we wre trying to solve. Is this your problem, mrs. Customer?
* here is how our other customers were trying to solve the problem before they met us. Is this you, Mrs. Customer?
* here are the benefits of our product. If we could do all of this, would you want this product?
If you haven't moved them to a place where this hypothesis is true (if yes, then buy), no product demo in the world will help.
Then yes, by all means prove you can deliver what you say.
"How do you make people buy in? You don’t. I speak only to the converted, and you should do the same."