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Comment by notaclevername | Hacker News Reader

The advice for sales reps to stop talking and listen certainly rings true in my experience. I see a lot of sales materials that are geared towards a scripted pitch: generic powerpoint decks, exhaustive demos, and boilerplate feature description flyers. There's probably a lot of value in sales teams having access to that kind of collateral, but I would wager that there's even more value in knowing how to step away from that material and follow the customer's lead in what to showcase.

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I’m a founder, not a sales person, but we don’t have any sales staff. So I, along with my CEO, do all of our demos. We split the responsibility. Our product does many things, and I could just speed talk through a demo. But I don’t. I directly ask the person what they want to see, and how they feel we can help them. If they don’t know, that’s fine, I have material prepared. But I’d much rather you tell me how I can help you, and then we drive the call from there.

Yeah, I have been in calls like those. Despite me pushing for "can you show me what your product can just do?" I kept getting "Please tell us what you want first" and that finally culminated into a follow up demo call. The demo was super generic and nothing I said (except 1 item) was really considered). Frankly, by the time we were done I was zoned out and doing other things.

If the CEO had considered to demo in the first call I would've almost pushed to buy it right away but at the end we decided we'll just do a light weight solution in house with a few devs

Not that this works all the time. But the point is to listen to your customer instead of just taking a single approach and sticking to it

This is why I laugh every time I hear that salespeople are obsolete.

While some drone is pushing forward to collect their brownie points for identification of next steps, the people with agency are finding a solution to my problems.

I am working on a project to try to quantify exactly this. Where are our standard assets and demos creating obstacles rather than opening doors? Are there opportunities to deliver something to the customer that will accelerate processes, based on all other deals that have been worked on.

I'm in a sales related role for the first time and it seems like half the customers expect and want a 'deck' and the other half balk at a deck. Right now we're tending to stick with just talking on a call rather than presenting glitzy materials.

So, prepare a deck and ask at the start if they want to see one? Just make clear what the alternatives are (interactive demo, just talking, ...)

That’s a nice theory that works better in theory than practice. Specifically, launching into a demo without having a common framework of understanding — terms, how the solution works at a high level, etc. is risky. Sometimes your prospective customer will understand the space where your product fits and you can safely conduct a demo (if that’s what the customer wants,) and sometimes they won’t know what they won’t know, say they “just want to see a demo and not a bunch of marketing slides” and will smile and nod during a demo of which they have little understanding and the meeting will be a waste of everyone’s time.

I’m not advocating for “show up and throw up”, but connecting with your prospect and giving them just the information they need/want is an art form, and simply asking them produces…mixed… results.

That’s a technique to throw you off your process and actually provide information.

When you’ve validated that you’re not an idiot, I want to see the architecture or whatever that should be in your deck.

All of these processes are about control.

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