Accelerating your deal velocity requires a modern demo process. Read on to learn how you can accelerate your deal velocity with these tips from Bob Riefstahl.
According to extensive 2Win research, it’s become clear that accelerating your deal velocity requires every member of a sales engagement team to be more responsive to prospects. Our learnings included:
64% of respondents believed that they want access to information like product videos and demos like they experience in their consumer lives.
55% of PreSales engineers believed that buyers are more directive in what they want to see in a demo.
75% of the time, it takes more than 3 days from a demo request for a vendor to deliver the actual demo
It’s clear buyers are frustrated with organizations that don’t have a way to allow them to experience a product demo before a formal engagement. They are further frustrated by a general perceived lack of responsiveness by vendors post-demo. This could be slowing your sales cycles down, when what you need is to accelerate your deal velocity. If your clients and prospects are receiving a similar experience, it is time to modernize elements of your demo process.
Pre-demo steps to accelerate deal velocity
Here’s the situation: You are a PreSales engineer and have been assigned to perform a demo for a significant prospect. You completed some initial Discovery and learned much about their critical processes and pain points. Your AE told you that the demo would be 90 minutes long, but you have 120 minutes of material. After all, you’ll need to cover an overview of the navigation of the product, demo meet-minimum functionality, and an overview of your dashboards.
To make matters worse, your sales leadership insists that account executives provide a company overview at the start of every demo. The leadership also requires the AE to reserve five minutes at the end of the demo for the next steps (a good practice). Realistically, you’re left with a little over an hour for your demo (at best).
If this scenario sounds familiar, you’re not alone – many of our clients, including some of the world’s largest and highest growth technology companies, have this exact same challenge. Here’s a suggestion to accelerate deal velocity: Use a tool like Navattic, Walnut, or Reprise to quickly and easily send a personalized interactive demo of your navigation, meet-minimum functionality, and dashboard overviews. Be sure your technique is sound, and you don’t commit any 2Win Demo Crimes like Field by Fielding or Data Dumping. Send your curated, fundamentally sound demos to the stakeholders before your formal engagement and study the analytics that Navattic provides to see where the stakeholders are most-engaged in the shared demo. These analytics will also help you further your discovery and learn where the stakeholders spend the most time with your recordings. Suddenly, you can make the most use of your 60 minutes of live demo time to focus on what really matters, including the client’s crucial pain points and your competitive differentiators! And to maximize your effectiveness, use 2Win’s Tell-Show-Tell technique to deliver opening context and closing benefits for every demo topic.
CAUTION: Don’t accelerate your deal velocity only to lose said deals
The use cases for this type of demo technology are vast. However, if your PreSales team produces automated demos that contain demo crimes like So What?, the Data Dump, or Field by Fielder, you will almost certainly accelerate your deals to a loss. There is simply no replacement for skilled, effective, and memorable demo techniques delivered by well-trained and proficient professionals. To ensure your team delivers a personalized client experience, you should employ best-practice discovery techniques. And let’s not forget that every demo should tell a story.
Post-Demo
Many demos conclude with a set of follow-up items for the PreSales Engineers. If you want to accelerate your deal velocity, try an alternative to scheduling a second demo or writing a painfully lengthy email that no one will read: Record a personalized follow-up demo in a tool like Navattic and send the demo to the stakeholders. With the link in hand, the stakeholders can review your demo (once again created with the Tell-Show-Tell technique), and your account executive can time their follow-up with the consumption of the demo. No more painful group meetings to try to schedule, and no more stakeholders frustrated by a perceived lack of responsiveness. Besides, this is a perfect way to differentiate your organization from your competition! Your prospects and clients will see you as a modern, responsive and creative team, and they will project their future client satisfaction on your ability to deliver a crisp, to-the-point demo follow-up.
Conclusion
Stop swimming upstream against your buyers’ desires like a salmon trying to reach the breeding grounds. Instead, go with the flow, meet your buyers’ needs, and enjoy improved pipeline velocity across all your opportunities by addressing today’s demo challenges with a new, creative approach. And, don’t forget to train your team in Discovery, Demo, and Storytelling techniques to ensure your sales velocity accelerates to a win!
