The six elements of a winning sales demo.
Not all sales demos are created equal, especially when it comes to demos that win deals.
Your sales demo is your direct line to a signed contract, and when done correctly it should give prospects no choice but to purchase your product.
A great demo strategy can even overcome hurdles like poor timing, pricing conflicts, or internal politics within your prospect’s company.
A successful sales demo delivers an undeniable value proposition that removes all doubt about your product. It must showcase the specific benefits for your audience, show them exactly how they would use it in their organization, and demonstrate how it will fulfill their needs and solve their problems.
But how do you create the perfect sales demo strategy? While, as with most things, there is no silver bullet, but you can take steps to ensure you create demos that win deals.
- Understand your product
- Understand your prospects and their needs
- Customize your demos
- Structure your demo, but keep it flexible
- Prove your product can solve problems
- Demo at the right time
How to create a sales demo strategy
Understand your product
Before you can effectively demo your product to prospects, you need to understand it yourself. How can you show value if you don’t know where it is?
To create a successful sales demo, you must first understand your product’s use cases, how it provides value, how current customers have used it successfully, and why your company has chosen to build it in the way they have.
Sales is all about storytelling, and your demo is no exception. When you truly understand your product and the stories around it, you can craft stories that convey the value of your product.
Understand your prospects and their needs
Successful sales demos are not one-size-fits-all. To truly sell, you need to understand your audience, who they are, what they need, why they want it, and what other solutions they are looking at.
Take the time to research your potential buyers. Understand their company and what they do, how they might want to use your product. Also, research the contacts themselves, look at their positions and backgrounds so you can understand their motivations.
It’s also important to go beyond research and look at previous engagements they have had with your company. What pages have they visited on the site? What marketing materials have they engaged with? What was said during the discovery phase or other conversations? Everything contains context into what they are looking for.
Customize your demos
With the information you gained during your research you must customize and personalize your demos to each of your prospects.
Research shows that personalization in sales is the key to winning deals, and sellers must take this information to heart.
When it comes to your demo, ensure that you show your prospects the features that will solve their problems specifically, and walk them through how their team will use them.
You can take it a step further with custom demo instances or demo experience platforms to include your prospect's names, their company logos, their client names, and other familiar information in the demo itself.
Structure your demo, but keep it flexible
Let’s face it. No sales demo has gone exactly as planned. Further, no demo should be monopolized by the sellers themselves.
When it comes to your demo, it's great to have a general structure and agenda but allow prospects to steer it in the direction they want to see. If they have questions or want to see something specific, allow for adjustments to your path.
There is a balance, of course. You shouldn’t allow buyers to steer the entire demo, as there are likely important features and functions that they don’t know about and should see.
Prove your product can solve problems
Buyers ultimately buy the solution that can solve their problems, and it’s up to you to prove that your product can do that in your sales demo.
Through your prior research and discussions, you should understand exactly what your buyers want. The demo is your time to show them that you understand their needs and that you will provide for them.
When you customize your demo, center it around solving your prospect’s pain points.
Demo at the right time
With B2B buyer behavior constantly shifting to mimic B2C buying habits, prospects are doing far more research on their own, involving salespeople later, and now often want to see the product on their first call.
Sellers must adjust to this shift and be prepared to show the product sooner, but without sacrificing quality.
Using a demo experience platform is one such way. Demo experience platforms provide a ready-made demo environment, unimpacted by internal forces like product updates, changes, or data, and is ready to show 24/7.
