Mastering Sales Demos: The Importance of Discovery and Execution

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