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A Never Stop Learning! Article
Are you or your colleagues unwitting members of the Sales Prevention Team?
Many organizations have a “Sales Prevention Team:” people or people-defined processes that lengthen sales cycles and lose deals. Here are a few examples of Sales Prevention Team demo practices to shock and amuse you:
- The Terrible Tabs Death March
- An Online Oops
- “Here Are All the Different Ways to…”
- Setup Mode Horror
- Help, Mr. Wizard…!
- Demo Desperation
- The Guessing Game
- Founders’ Frustration
- Diagnose and Ignore?
- Premature Elaboration
- More Premature Elaboration: A Competitive Oops!
- The Overrun Overview
Each mini story includes a Moral plus one or more resources to help you avoid joining this sadTeam. Enjoy!
The Terrible Tabs Death March
“The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.”
– Ernest Dimnet
I joined a face-to-face demo where the vendor presented a screen with ten tabs and then proceeded to march through each of them, one by one, in detail.
It was very interesting to watch the body language of the audience as this demo progressed. The response to the initial page was positive. It was a well-constructed dashboard, and it looked good.
The next tab was received with moderate interest, but by the third tab many of the audience members were visibly sagging in their seats!
By the fourth and fifth tabs nearly everyone had checked out (perhaps even the presenter, who had clearly presented these tabs many, many times!). And there was an audible sigh of relief as the final tab was described.
This was a classic case of the presenter following the old, established, traditional demo pathway: a slow, painful march towards no sale!
The Moral? Focus on the Specific Capabilities your prospect needs to solve their problem!
Resources:
See Chapters 5-9 in Great Demo!
An Online Oops…
“It’s the little details that are vital. Little things make big things happen.”
– John Wooden
A lack of situational awareness can be costly.
I was watching an online demo a while ago when one of the prospect team members asked a question. The salesperson chatted to the presenter, “Ignore that question, that guy is an idiot!”
Sadly, the salesperson didn’t realize that he had included “Everyone” in the chat, not just the presenter.
End of demo, end of sales cycle…
Moral: Be careful of what you chat and to whom!
Resource:
Chapter 13 in Great Demo!
“Here Are All the Different Ways to…”
“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify!”
– Henry David Thoreau
I was watching a demo of a data visualization tool and things were going well until an audience member asked, “Can we change the color elements of these dashboards?”
The presenter answered, “Oh, absolutely! I’ll show you…!”
And with that, the presenter showed not one, not two, but three separate ways to configure the dashboards, including drag-and-drop, editing pane display options, and (I’m not kidding) writing code to execute complex filter searches. These explanations consumed about fifteen minutes of the one-hour demo.
Now here’s the sad portion: all the prospect wanted to know was if they could change the color scheme of the panes! A simple “yes” would have been sufficient.
The Moral: Listen carefully to how people ask questions; you may only need to respond, “Yes!”
Resources:
The Elegant Art of Managing Questions and Time
Chapter 8 in Great Demo!
Setup Mode Horror
“Life is too short for you to be the caretaker of the wrong details.”
– Alexandra Stoddard
I watched a ninety-minute demo recording and noted two rather astonishing things…
Astonishing Thing Number One:
Approximately half of the demo was consumed by setup and configuration items, including setting up the environment, configuring the application, creating and editing templates, forms, reports, dashboards, etc.
This wasn’t astonishing on its own, perhaps, until…
Astonishing Thing Number Two:
At the end of all this setup activity the vendor proudly declared, “Of course, you won’t have to do any of this. We take care of it during implementation. It’s all done by our Professional Services team…”
Wait. What did you say?
You just spent forty-five minutes showing stuff your prospect will never need to use? (Enter your choice of an appropriate exclamation of surprise and astonishment here ______.)
But wait, there’s more: A bonus Astonishing Thing!
I called the presales manager who had sent me the recording and asked, “Why did half of the demo present capabilities that your prospect will never use?”
They responded, “Oh! We’ve been told that these are key differentiators and that we must include them in every demo!”
Moral: Don’t take guidance from the Sales Prevention Team!
Resource:
Stunningly Awful Demos – The Painful Irrelevance of Setup Mode
Help, Mr. Wizard…!
“Tell me, old friend, when did you abandon wisdom for madness?”
– Gandalf to Saruman
Software wizards are intended to make a complex workflow simple to use, but only if a reasonable path is followed! Here’s another true story:
The presenter started a wizard to execute an analysis of business data and was still walking me through the options sixty minutes later!
Once he’d finally completed that portion of the demo, I asked him to show me how to execute that same workflow using the wizard the way someone would typically use it on a day-to-day basis.
How long do you think it took?
Two-and-a-half minutes start to finish.
Moral: Execute all demo pathways with the fewest number of clicks!
Resource:
Page 157 in Great Demo!
Demo Desperation
“Wait! Don’t go away, we haven’t gotten to the best stuff yet!”
– Vendor rep watching people leave the room…
It was an important opportunity, and the vendor organized a two-hour face-to-face demo with the prospect’s team of twenty to make sure there was sufficient time to cover everything. Sadly, discovery had been limited to the confirmation of the prospect’s general “pain,” a few demographics about the number of users, and tech stack requirements.
With this limited information, the vendor began the meeting with fifteen minutes of corporate overview presentation followed by their standard demo, starting with system configuration, then general navigation, followed by function after function in a long, linear flow. It was a perfect example of a stunningly awful Harbor Tour!
A few minutes into the demo portion, one person excused themself and left the room. And since the vendor never asked for introductions of the prospect’s team, the vendor had no clue that they’d just seen the key executive leave the room!
Ten minutes later two more prospect players quietly headed for the door. As the meeting reached one hour, several additional people mumbled something about “having another meeting…” and also slipped away.
It was at this point that the presenter begged, “Wait! Don’t go away, we haven’t gotten to the best stuff yet!”
Now only eight of the original twenty remained, one of whom commented to their neighbor, “I’ll stay as long as the donuts hold out!”
Important opportunity squandered, with no sale resulting.
Additionally, because it was an important opportunity, the vendor had sent a team of four folks to the meeting (including a salesperson, solution consultant, product specialist, and professional services rep) incurring the costs of airfare, lodging, rental car, and food to the tune of ~$5,000, not to mention the associated opportunity cost (pun intended)!
Moral: Do the Last Thing First!
Resources:
Illustrations: Doing the Last Thing First!
Why Structure Demos Like a News Article?
The Menu Approach – A Truly Terrific Demo Self-Rescue Technique
The Guessing Game
“I think equation guessing might be the best method to proceed to obtain the laws for the part of physics which is presently unknown. Yet, when I was much younger, I tried this equation guessing, and I have seen many students try this, but it is very easy to go off in wildly incorrect and impossible directions.”
– Richard P. Feynman
Vendor: “OK, so that wasn’t interesting for you? Well, how about this? Or this? Wait, we’ve got much more…”
Moral: Do discovery!
Resource:
Doing Discovery
Founders’ Frustration
“But there’s so much to show…!”
– SaaS Founder in year two
“When you first released your MVP [Minimum Viable Product], how much time did you schedule for your demos to prospects?” I asked this of a founder who told me her demos weren’t getting the job done.
“An hour,” she replied, “and we generally used all of that time.”
“And how long are your demo meetings now?” I enquired.
“Still an hour…” she noted, “and I’m rushing through the software, but I can’t show everything I want to show!”
I pursued this with, “How often do your development folks release new features?”
“Every few weeks,” she responded.
“And do you incorporate these new capabilities in your demos?”
“Oh yes! I try to show everything!” she confirmed.
“I believe we’ve found the problem,” I told her. “It’s like you’re trying to pack two weeks of clothes for a trip into a bag that only holds one week’s worth.”
I continued, “You’re going to have to prioritize what you show based on your prospects’ needs and wants. Show the most important capabilities first and confirm that they solve the problems. Then show the next sets of relevant features in accord with your prospects’ interests and the meeting time constraints.”
“Just like that too-small travel bag,” I explained, “you’re going to have to leave some things out of your demo!”
Resource:
Why Structure Demos Like a News Article?
Diagnose and Ignore?
“You can ignore reality, but you can’t ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.”
– Ayn Rand
The prospect had invested in several hours of discovery with the vendor, but the vendor’s demo didn’t reflect any of what had been learned…
I was preparing to coach this vendor’s sales and presales teams and had been reviewing a number of discovery conversations and associated demos. In this particular case, I felt the discovery calls (there were two) were quite good. They had uncovered and confirmed several important use cases.
Unfortunately, it appeared that either this information wasn’t communicated to the demo presenter, or the presenter chose to ignore discovery and present their standard demo.
Fascinatingly, about forty minutes into the demo meeting the prospect lead player said, “So, we spent hours with your team outlining our needs and situation. You appear to be ignoring everything we said!”
He paused, looked annoyed, and observed, “You’re showing use cases that are irrelevant and referencing scenarios that we don’t need. You’re like a doctor who did a terrific job diagnosing a specific illness, but your prescription is for diseases that we don’t have!”
He then terminated the demo meeting, ending the sales process for that vendor.
Moral: Map your demos to your discovery information!
Resource:
Situation Slides: A Swiss Army Knife for Sales and Presales
Premature Elaboration
“Chirp chirp chirp chirp…”
– The sound of crickets in an empty room
Because he’d heard prospects ask certain questions repeatedly, he chose to incorporate the answers into his demo “script.”
The result was not what he expected! The more questions that he anticipated and pre-answered, the less successful his demos were.
Before making this change, his audiences appeared engaged as they asked their questions. But now the prospects were quiet and seemed uninterested. By pre-answering questions, he had turned his demos into monologues, removing the possibility for a two-way, bidirectional conversation.
Moral: Encourage a real conversation by letting your prospect ask their questions!
Resource:
The Elegant Art of Managing Questions and Time
More Premature Elaboration: A Competitive Oops!
“Competition whose motive is merely to compete, to drive some other fellow out, never carries very far. The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.”
– Henry Ford
I was the prospect listening to a vendor present their offering. The salesperson was working his way through their product presentation and entered a section about “Competitive Differentiation.”
One slide listed several competitors, and the salesperson began to discuss how his product was superior to the others. I perked up and made a quick note.
Seeing this, the salesperson asked me what I thought about the various competitors.
I responded, “Well, I didn’t know that [Vendor C] had an offering in this space. Many thanks for letting me know – I’ll check them out!”
And [Vendor C] did have an excellent product that, for our needs, was the best fit – which we purchased and enjoyed for years!
Moral? Beware of Premature Elaboration!
Resource:
Stunningly Awful vs Truly Terrific Competitive Differentiation – What, When, and How?
The Overrun Overview
“So, I said we’d only take thirty minutes – but, wow, it looks like I’ve been talking for two hours! Um, hello, are you still there…?”
Moral: Every Moral above!
Resource:
Why Structure Demos Like a News Article?
Preventing Sales Prevention
The Sales Prevention Team is, unfortunately, only too alive and well. To avoid joining this team, even briefly, we recommend a Great Demo! and/or Doing Discovery Workshop, Seminar or consuming the Great Demo!, Doing Discovery, and Suspending Disbelief books.
What Sales Prevention Team practices have you seen?
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