for anyone needing to coach sales reps in DEMOs: Doing a demo without great discovery is Russian Roulette. Good discovery is the first step to understanding if you can solve their problem (fit) and determining if that deal is a real opportunity or just going to take up space in your pipeline. The next step is a demo. Sadly demo’s are where most of us fall down. Too many people think a demo is a demo is a demo. “Just show them all the cool features” says your CTO, “This product sells itself!” says your CEO. That’s all bullshit. There is 100 options out there. There is no such thing as no competition. Doing an effective demo is critical to move the deal forward and to check in on the reality of this opportunity actually closing. Most companies train their people on product knowledge and then tell them to go demo it. Most orgs do a crap job at actually coaching on what good demo’s look like. Here’s the problem with evaluating most demos: Most reps and managers judge demos on how they think they went and how they feel. “I feel like that went well. They really liked me.“”Wow we really hit it off on that call” Being liked won’t close the deal. Your feeling on how it went can’t be cashed at the bank. Feelings don’t close deals. Execution does. Data is your friend. Score your demos. Measure what actually happened, not what it felt like happened. Don’t forget though there is NO WAY you can a good score on your demo if you have not done discovery properly. If you have, use this demo scorecard to help you understand if your demo was more than “they liked me” Big shout out to Kevin "KD" Dorsey for helping me improve this. I had a decent demo scorecard but KD had some great ideas that made it even better IMO. No need to comment dumb sh!t to get the template 🙂 Here - use it if its helpful: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13cgfXjBDZ3mPHDVEfr8HHXTQTuVXE4HRah615okJMqo/edit?gid=0#gid=0
Great template! I particularly liked how you made "soft measures" like using a customer's language an objective checklist item. Job aids like this are supremely useful in getting team members to follow a process, versus Sales By Vibes. Obviously you need a manager to train a thirsty and excitable SDR on each of these 21 line items. Unfortunately, some of those items take months to "master" and a lot of managers frankly stink at training and will throw 21 nuanced pieces of feedback at someone two weeks on the job. If you were to pick your three favorite/most high impact Demo Quality Check items from your scorecard that EVERY sales manager should start with, which would they be?
