Has anyone conducted studies of best practices for vendor teams when presenting demos, using Refract or Gong or similar tools? It would be very interesting to collect data on the following scenarios:
- Sales and presales as a two-person team (the most likely combination).
- Salesperson with two or more presales folks – I often see a presales “generalist” accompanied by a SME (for a particular product or vertical).
- An overarching account manager with two or more sub-teams (often by product, with a product-salesperson and presales person as a sub-team).
Questions to consider:
- Who should speak at which times during the demo?
- Who (and how) should customer questions be managed?
- Who (and when) should offer summaries?
- How often should there be speaker changes between the vendor players – and how should this cadence compare with vendor-customer speaker switches? (I can’t tell you how many times I hear salespeople “piling on” after a presales person answers a question or makes a point…!)
In Great Demo!, we offer explicit guidance on these practices, but it would be delightful to have hard data that supports our positions or suggests alternative approaches.
Has anyone run the experiment?