Great Demo! How To Create And Execute Stunning Software Demonstrations: Third Edition

by Peter E Cohan

Many presales, sales, marketing, and customer success practitioners say they are skilled at doing demos – but are they?

A head of presales commented, “They don’t know what they don’t know…! 50% of our sales opportunities end in ‘No Decision’ and 30% of our demos are just pure waste. We must move from our traditional approaches to a validated, proven methodology that succeeds…!”

Assess where you and your team stand on these ten levels of increasing

Level 1: Follows the standard demo script
Level 2: Customizes based on the prospect’s market/industry
Level 3: Customizes based on the discovery information uncovered
Level 4: Communicates tangible business value
Level 5: Differentiates Vision Generation from Technical Proof scenarios
Level 6: Manages and explores prospect questions
Level 7: Uses Biased Questions to outflank competition and reengineer vision
Level 8: Applies storytelling techniques to reinforce key ideas
Level 9: Applies these skills to the broad range of demo scenarios required, including demos for prospects occupying different portions of the Technology Adoption Curve, presenting new products, Executive Briefing Centers, transactional sales cycles, expansion opportunities, lunch and learn sessions, tradeshows, demos for analysts and third parties, channel partners, internal demos, and other scenarios
Level 10: Captures and reuses demo success scenarios, and integrates, aligns, and leverages the skills above into a cohesive demonstration methodology

Organizations that reach Level 4 enjoy substantial competitive advantages vs their peers, those at Level 7 gain critical differentiation, and teams at Level 10 experience remarkable scaling and amplification rewards.

Consuming and performing the exercises in this book can transform individuals, teams, and organizations from undifferentiated sellers into high-performing experts who truly enable buyers, resulting in mutually successful outcomes that endure.

494 pages, Paperback

Published July 6, 2023

Reviews

[Kai Chevannes · Rating 3 out of 5]

do the last thing first — bringing the end of your traditional demo to the front will already make the demo significantly more successful
1. begin the demo by showing the best, most compelling screen or handful of screens that illustrate your solution. this should fit within 2 minutes — the audience should be thinking “wow this is exactly what we need”
2. walk through how you get to those screens with in as efficient a way as possible: smoothly, rapidly, without detailed explanation (fewest number of clicks or steps)
3. the audience may ask for more detail, this is where the demo becomes a conversation. when they’re satisfied, you’re done.

- [] similar in philosophy to news article inverted pyramid. organise information from most important to least. your demo should be like a news article.
- [] focus on the prospects and what they’re interested in, not every feature you have and are proud of

definitions:
- [ ] sales person — responsible for the overall sales process (sales representative, account manager, sales executive, sales specialist etc.)
- [ ] pre-sales person — provides the technical expertise needed to complete the sale, often referred to as achieving the technical sale or technical win (sales engineer, solutions architect, technical sales person, product specialist, implementation specialist, etc.)
- [ ] selling team — the group of people that are collectively needed to complete the sale of a product or solution to a prospect. as small as a single sales person and most frequently a sales person and a pre-sales person, but often includes one or more of: sales people, pre-sales people, sales management, sales development representative (SDR), business development representative (BDR), customer success manager (CSM), or success staff, professional services staff, development staff, product marketing staff, senior management, financial staff.
- [ ] customer success — responsible for successful adoption, implementation, and realisation of expected value for the customer. renewals and expansion
- [ ] enablement — responsible for identifying, rolling out, and driving the adoption of methodologies to support sales and buying processes, including discovery, demos, POCs, and other sales stage steps.
- [ ] leads, prospects, customers — leads are the available market for offerings, prospects have engaged in a sales or buying process, customers have completed a purchase of your software. leads have different qualifications like MQL (marketing qualified lead) — i.e. exists; SQL (sales qualified lead) — passed prechecks such as BANT: budget, authority, needs, timeline; DQL (demo qualified lead) — complete great demo situation slide; SUQL (success qualified lead) — DQL + happy, renewing, expanding.
- [ ] prospects and customers have buying committees who decide which solutions to implement (including business decision makers, technical decision makers, champions or sponsors who help vendors, business purchase influencers, technical purchase influencers, security and privacy representatives); executives who own the problems and solutions, set goals and objectives, own and distribute budgets; users; IT.
- [ ] no decision means the customer didn’t choose any solution from anyone
- [ ] our objective is to “win” the business long term. this means short term sales with a high churn rate is not success.

- [ ] doing discovery to figure out the specific capabilities that customers need (critical business issues), measurable objectives (e.g. 1 person 1 day from 3 people 4 days)

1. start with the payoff screens and key deliverables
2. exercise the fewest number of clicks
3. presenting capabilities according to prospect priorities
4. turn the demo into a real conversation

great demo situation slide (titled: “what we heard from you)
- [ ] job title and industry (one slide for each key prospect player in a demo)
- [ ] CBI — critical business issue [goal/objective] (this persons top level challenge, best expressed as a quarterly, annual, or project based goal or objective that is at risk)
- [ ] problems and reasons [pain/problem/current state] — what makes it a problem today, what is making it hard to achieve the goal or objective, how are they doing things today?
- [ ] specific capabilities [needs/requirements/solution] — that the prospect needs to solve their problems from the prospects perspective
- [ ] delta [value/gain/change] — the value associated with making the change, prospects numbers (from doing discovery)
- [ ] critical date [critical event/timing/timeline] — a date by which the prospect needs to have a solution in place, and why
- [ ] at a high level, situation slides answer the who, why, what, how, value, when

- [ ] summarise at the start of the demo (overview of specific capabilities that will be addressed), at end of each section, at the end of the demo (almost the same as the introduction overview). after the introduction present the situation slide:
1. introduction — agenda/overview [short]
2. situation slide (or multiple) [1–2 mins]
3. illustration for solution (or multiple) [1–2 mins]
4. do it: in the least clicks present the solution. then summarise what you just did
5. answer Q&A (possibly going through demo again more specifically)
6. if more solutions go back to 4
7. summarise everything we went through, then “i’m glad we were able to invest this time together”, or maybe “thank you for sharing this time”

illustrations:
- [ ] people are better at processing diagrams
- [ ] what not how, WIIFT (what’s in it for them)
- [ ] reports or dashboards showing the final state the customer cares about, CRM screens, alert indicating some action is needed, the identification of a root cause. an indication that a root cause was addressed. the final dish shown first in a cooking class
- [ ] progressively enhanced illustrations is effective
1. describe what your customer is seeing
2. explain how the illustration solves the problems and reasons
3. communicate how much value it represents for your prospect
- [ ] what, how, how much

- [ ] stick to the ui menus in general, if you use a keyboard shortcut then explain what you are doing
- [ ] slow your mouse down
- [ ] “how can we” questions means that you should demonstrate the solution, “can we” questions usually mean just a verbal yes or no typically the demo starts with “how can we” and evolves into “can we” when you have demonstrated your trustworthiness later in the demo.
- [ ] if a capability comes up not found in discovery but that the customer might also want, use a biased question like “many of our other customers in similar situations to yours have found that the ability to set biased thresholds for alerts enabled them to map to changing website volume, they report that this reduced their false negatives dramatically, saving their teams hours each week consuming unimportant alerts. is this something that might also be useful in your practice?” if they say yes then demonstrate it “would you like to see it now?”, if they say no then move on
- [ ] if the demo ends early and there are no further questions, be done. don’t drag out the meeting. “well, i’ll happily give you your 20 minutes back then! thank you for sharing this time”
- [ ] cohans razor: always take the shortest path (and always avoid if/or). sorry occam
- [ ] allow the customer to drive parts of the demo, like filling in forms or providing the options and stuff.

questions:
- [ ] when customers ask questions, try to think about what answer they want to hear. don’t automatically go into technical explainer mode. sometimes a simple yes or no really is what they’re after. don’t get into the weeds. if you are unsure that an answer has satisfied them, ask them if they would like a deeper explanation.
- [ ] if a question is good but it would derail you, you can park it and address it later. you need to write it down somewhere visible to the prospect
- [ ] “stupid” questions are questions that are intentionally combative. park the question
- [ ] when addressing questions, repeat them back to make sure you have fully understood what is being asked (unless it is a very basic question). then after: “does that answer your question sufficiently?”, “is that sufficient?”

- [ ] record your demos to watch the back for review
- [ ] start with the most important prospects first if multiple (executives then middle management then day to day workers)
- [ ] don’t use the word demo, use fake names like Apex or Contoso. for data (e.g people, addresses) use real names, not famous actors etc. possibly use names from your organisation. the closer you get to a sale, the more the data should represent the customers organisation. keep the data up to date (you don’t want a date from 5 years ago)
- [ ] seriously, no zippy mouse. slow it down. people cant pay attention to what your saying and where your mouse is going at the same time when they see your product for the first time.

[Matthew Roche · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are a few exceptionally good nuggets in this book, and the author knows what he is talking about. I think it is an essential read for anyone in enterprise tech product marketing, product management or sales.

I cannot rank it higher, however, because it is a tediously repetitive 450 pages. If the author were to get rid of 200 pages it would be a better, more accessible and more effective book. As it is, it is a barely tolerable slog.

[Juan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great content for sales and presales people. With many examples illustrating every topic. It could probably be shorter and explain the same ideas. A Pocket edition more compact would have been more suitable for me.