Barry Mueller: We have an amazing panel right now where we're going to discuss “showing product fast without compromise”. I'm Barry Mueller. I do product marketing here at Demostack.
We also have Laura here. She's the CRO at people.ai, formerly Global Vice President of Revenue at Unity, also former head of sales at Google Cloud. So a pretty cool track record. Laura, what's something else? That you could tell us about yourself to get this day started.
Laura Palmer: Okay. I guess I'll just share a random fun fact. Like when I graduated from university, I went to UC Santa Barbara here in California, and I wasn't ready for the real world yet. The job market was. Not great. And so I ended up taking a job at a company called club med, if anyone's ever been to one of those and I was a sports instructor there and I would not give up those two and a half years that I spent traveling around the world and being in resorts where everybody's very happy all the time.
I wouldn't give that up for anything. So that was my first real job out of college. If you can call it a real job, I work my tail off, but there's a fun fact
Barry Mueller: Love that. That's an awesome fun fact. Love it a lot. Brent, he is the VP of Solution and Value Consulting at Gainsight. Recently found out he's a big Chiefs fan.
What else is something I don't know about you, Brent?
Brent Krempges: Yeah so I'm a Chiefs fan. I've been a diehard my whole life. I'm not one of those new ones in the last five years. Went through a lot of pain and agony. I think the only other one I would add is I actually just hit 10 years at Gainsight today ironically.
It seems pretty crazy. They gave me a kudos, kudos. That was a good way to start the day. Bring back some good memories. So happy to be here. Amazing.
Barry Mueller: We definitely plan that. So that'd be at your 10 year anniversary.
Thanks for coming on and Todd. Todd is the global vice president of solution engineering at salesforce founder of Q branch. Todd, maybe can you tell us something that we don't know about you?
What are the evolving roles of presales in today's market?
Barry Mueller: I've noticed this shift with presales and that role today. Brent, maybe you can start up, start us off and tell us what's been changing the past few years for the presales world?
How are things different than they were, let's say, five years ago, either at Gainsight or in general?
Brent Krempges: Yeah, I'll speak, I think, from my own personal experience of what some changes have been at Gainsight, and I think one of them has been, I think, We've seen a significant shift just in terms of valuation of SaasS companies.
And one of those shifts being the emphasis of multi-product strategy. So I know we saw PLG was really big three or four years ago, and I feel like a lot of the shift has been around multi-product. And that's where Gainsight's really focused a lot of our organization. Focus is on multi-product strategy, but I think with that actually comes a lot of challenges with what to demo when it comes to specific products, how that aligns to discovery to ensure as you're forming and, going through that strategy.
So one of those challenges has been like, and obviously Todd at Salesforce has had this challenge a lot longer than we have at Gainsight, but it's. What to actually show that may align differently to what your prospects think they need in terms of a feature or product. And so really, again, discovery is so key, but I think, as I've just seen, that the multi-product focus has really given us a new dimension of some of those demo bottleneck strata challenges.
Barry Mueller: I love that. Todd, what have you seen in the past few years? That same question to you, what have you seen in the past few years that has changed for the presales function as a whole?
Todd Janzen: Oh, I was going to make a joke before this and my fun fact wasn't going to be nearly as good as Laura's.
It's best we skipped it, to be honest. No. I was going to make a joke besides probably being on mute. I'm going to have a muddy dog come tackle me and maybe like some drilling in my walls which is still possible.
One of the trends I'm seeing and maybe this will relate to what Laura's going to say is I see sales engineering or solutions being pulled all over the company. Not just in kind of the mid funnel, but up funnel, down funnel, and especially when it comes to renewals.
And I think some of that is self inflicted, right? We're seeing some layoffs and downturns and some of these companies, right? And certain departments are getting slimmer.
So we're getting pulled. I think that's part of it. The other part of it, right?
Is that the buyer wants to be educated and they want to be educated earlier. So if we find ourselves being pulled up into the funnel and all over the company to help revenue that's because of the buyer.
And that's really a big trend I'm seeing across a lot of companies. Cool.
Barry Mueller: Love that. Laura I know you're coming in from the CRO perspective, but we'd love to hear your perspective on this. Yeah.
Laura Palmer: And at Unity and at people.ai, I run sales engineering, right? So my teams are there.
I'm a big fan of show, don’t tell. I'm like a visual person. So I believe that people want to see. What you have and experience it before they ever talk to a salesperson. We're always looking for creative ways to highlight pieces of what these products can do much earlier than you used to have to do that.
That was something you had to almost earn as a potential customer, right? You had to make it through a qualification process before we'd show you a demo. And now it's if you've got a great product, why not get it out earlier? So that's definitely one.
The other thing I'd say is personalization. So we even think about how all of us as individuals interact with what's happening online. If I go shopping for something, I expect personalization. I would expect the same in any demo I'm going to spend time seeing.
At People.ai, there are many different personas that will interact with what we've got, the data that we collect and it's how you bring that data to life in a demo and it depends on what's the role in the company.
There's a lot of pressure to make these things spot on and speak to that person that you're talking to right out of the gate.
Barry Mueller: Of that Todd, you want to tap on that motion of a different perspective from the buyer?
Todd Janzen: Yeah, I see there's just two things that are in conflict, like sellers want to be sellers, right?
And they feel like their prospect needs to be sold to, and buyers don't really want to be sold to. If you put up a quick survey at the beginning of their journey, it's do you want to be sold to or educated? I feel like very few would choose to please sell to me. I can't wait for this.
They're trying to make a smart buying decision. And so they're really trying to consume as much information as possible. And to Laura's point, the easier that you can make it for them, the more you can help them see themselves in your product. The earlier the better off everyone's going to be.
So I think we certainly saw this shift at the beginning of the COVID. I can go buy a Tesla without talking to someone. That's an incredible experience. If you were so inclined to want to buy a Tesla. We have all these expectations we have as consumers, but when it comes to B2B buying, it's just awful.
Barry Mueller: Yeah. I think Brent can talk more to that personalization.
Brent Krempges: Yeah. I think it, really goes to what Todd was referring to is that I feel like so often, like we do expect what we have for B2C products, but then there is also. The reality is we're still in sales and there is this education piece that we all need to continue to focus on.
Why is customizing demos so important?
And so it's shifting the way that our sellers are selling to being able to continue to educate because there are only so many things when it comes to the content that you're pushing out on your website or forms that you can read, et cetera, but there are still things that you need to educate buyers throughout that process.
And so what we found is that there is that level of customization when it is to the product that you're actually going to show that is pulling that prospect through the sales cycle of educating them. But when you put that spin of the things that you've researched specific to that prospect and do the things that you want to show them, it's going to, what Laura is referring to, you've actually bought the right now to start to talk to them about maybe it's products that they didn't realize they actually do need. But by showing that you've put in the effort, you've started to tailor that towards them.
That's going to open their eyes up to what Todd was saying. Like you are actually selling to them, but you're selling to them in a way that's more educational. I'm going to allow you to start to move that deal in the direction that you know you need to throughout your sales cycle.
Barry Mueller: Love that. Todd, before you were mentioning this seismic shift, if you will, is that presales is involved in different places where later earlier that's creating more pressure actually for the presales function. So one of those pressures leads to a demo bottleneck, something that Gilad discussed in today's intro.
Which function is the biggest bottleneck in the sales cycle?
What is that bottleneck to you? And how is it that presales can get around some of those bottlenecks with some of these changes?
Todd Janzen:
Yeah, I like that you guys are using that term because I've been saying for a while that solutions or presales, whatever you choose to call it, is one of the largest bottlenecks in selling today.
And that's not supposed, I'm solutions to the core. I'm not trying to poke fun at the profession. It just is what it is. And really what's behind that comment is that historically. If someone wants to see your product, you have to schedule a human. And it's still largely true right now.
We are still throwing humans at this problem. And I think, we as a profession need to wake up to the fact that that might have been fine four years ago. And especially as we're getting stretched across the stack, four years ago, we would have thrown bodies at it. And we did, and now all of our companies have corrected and they're reducing the head count.
And so I, just to get right to the point, cause I'm dragging this a bit. We need software. We need software if we're going to do this, and I realize, the event we're at today, but every other role in the selling process is using software to get better.
We're at the point where Gong is recording every single word on a call to make you a half a percent better and we are in this space, and it is an exciting time because a lot of software is coming on, onto the scene. It's still early days, but I don't see any other way. We aren’t going to scale ourselves without aggressively using software.
Barry Mueller: Makes a lot of sense. Laura, what are your thoughts on that?
Laura Palmer: Yeah I totally agree. And I'm 10 weeks into this job at people.ai and we just launched a product called Sales.ai and the reason I bring it up is because in the demo of sales.AI is when I see the light bulbs go off for our customers oh my God, you guys can do that.
Okay. I get the text captured through conversational intelligence. If I'm using Zoom or if I'm using. Gong, etc. but it's also the look it's that I want to know it's right there, right? So it's also tied to what they're seeing. It's not just what they're saying. So I completely agree with what Todd said.
We need software to help with this process too, because when people's eyes light up because of what they're seeing, you want to know that product managers want to know that. Sellers want to know that, leadership wants to know that. So I think it's pulling this holistic thing together. And yeah, we're going to need software to do that.
What we'll never, I don't, I will bet that there will be very few companies in Silicon Valley that's rescale up to the levels they were at two years ago. So how do we get more creative?
Barry Mueller: Love that! I wanted to dive into some of them so we're bringing software down to help undo the bottleneck. That's one solution. What are some of the other ways that we can help make the bottleneck better? Brent, do you have any ideas on this?
What is the ideal Sales/Presales Ratio?
Brent Krempges: I think it's in line with what these two are just saying. I think if I look back. Two years ago, everything was awesome, let's say in SaaS. Like I think every company was doing phenomenal. We're getting, we looked at what our ramp is playing for the next two years when it comes to the sales team.
And what I told our leadership was in order to get my team where they need to be, we need to hire ahead. So we need a scrap ratio in terms of where we're at because I need to hire ahead of the SC team because there's a longer runway in terms of onboarding. Now, where I'm going with this is what it ultimately led to is times changed quickly, and all of a sudden I had way too many people on my team.
And what it actually created was, it's like one of my big screw ups if I look back. Because what it created was, it actually hid a lot of problems. And so I feel like good times hide real problems. And so what Todd was referring to is it actually stretched us across the org so far because we had so much bandwidth.
And so where I'm going with all of this is what I've found in order to fix your bottleneck internally, you almost need to expose your problems of the things that the SCs were band-aiding together. And it almost forces a way to say no, if that makes sense..
Cause I feel like so many times we sit in strategic meetings on a leadership team and we're like, yes, we're going to change our ways. SCs will not do X, Y, and Z. And then sure enough, two weeks later, something happens and you're all like, no, it's okay this one time. And then all of a sudden this one time becomes the norm.
And so what I feel like I've learned over these Three years that I've shifted so much is that everyone needs to feel the pain. And there's so much pain that SEs take on at a team level that they don't get exposed until you have a real reason to say no.
So that to me has helped our bottleneck because I no longer have an option of throwing bodies at the problem because the bodies just don't exist, which sucks, but it's helped our problem now.
How can presales get a seat at the revenue table?
Todd Janzen: All right. First of all you were just vulnerable there in front of a lot of people, which was awesome. I'm such a Brene Brown fan. The fact that you just, laid it all out there. But what you said, I think, is the big shift that we really need all SE leaders to start thinking about.
Our currency up until this point has been headcount. What's going to get us promoted? How big is our team? How big can we grow it? Oh, look, a new opportunity in the company for us to go spend time over here. How lucky we are. We jump at it all the time. We're like, Oh, yes, this is great. And we, Laura, I'm going to look at you because I think we need to shift from our reward and carrot being headcount and growth to revenue focused. We need to be in the cockpit with the CRO. Laura, I know your head of solutions. He's an incredible human being. But I'm sure that's how you're looking at him, right? Don't talk to me about how many demos your team did. Let's partner on revenue.
Laura Palmer: Absolutely. When I joined Unity in 2018, Money was free flowing. It was like, go build the team you need. And to the point, right? Like it's easy to just solve it with people. You come over to people.ai and everyone's going through this right now. As it was a 180 turn right back to a focus on profitability. So it does, it forces you to turn knobs and really figure out like I want my sales engineers on the demos.
That are gonna close. It's you that goes back to what you were talking about is using software early on bringing the humans in what's once something is more qualified. Or having those humans on one to many efforts versus just a one to one. So driving creativity and fin tuning.
And I love what you're saying too. It's so weird that everything we all do is like how many people are on your team, right? Forget it. We should all be proud to say like we brought, and I'll toot my own horn for just a moment. But when I was at unity, we did, we grew revenue 45 percent with less Opex and headcount than we had the year before and the only way we did that was by getting creative and fine tuning, right? Yeah, I totally agree with you. It's so weird it's like lawyers billing hours, right? They shouldn't they get paid based on like The work they do, sorry if there are any attorneys out there and I'm offending anyone, it's just these, some of these models are weird.
Barry Mueller: Love that.. Let's talk about how can presales and in general, sales work together to show that their position is creating revenue. Brent, do you want to start with this one?
Brent Krempges: Yeah. For me, I think it comes down and I think someone had said it in the chat, but it comes down, it's basics, but it's data.
There's just so many things and we do use Vivun. I'll say it on this call, but it's allowed us to understand deliverables and activities by stage in the sales cycle that directly then correlate to revenue that's being brought in. So there's so many times that there's presales best practices that's really difficult to quantify.
And I think by establishing, we are doing X, Y, Z, if it's a proof of concept, if it's a. If it's a demo that we're leveraging a Demostack or a different type of demo, and we can see these activities correlate to faster win rates, lower CAC, whatever that may be. That to us was the key that was ensuring that we captured what we were doing when.
And then being able to pivot, part of our, Todd, you talked about at the top, having a voice at the table during QBRs, where the SC team can sit in front of the leadership and say, when we do these things at these times, it changes, whatever and then being able to make those shifts has been key for us just to, again, do the right things at the right time and not waste time where it wasn't.
Having a positive impact.
Barry Mueller: Makes sense. Laura, have you noticed as a CRO and as a sales leader that presales maybe is talking a different language in the past few years?
Laura Palmer:
I guess one of the things I would say is I expect the SE teams to have a big seat at the table, right? When I'm looking at an opportunity and assessing what's the likelihood of something closing, I want to hear from the SE that has been partnered on that deal too, to tell me that technically we're there.
So I don't know if that totally answers your question, but it's just, it's something that's top of mind for me. And then I'm looking for clues. You asked about how we know that SEs are adding value, right? A lot of it's me you guys, if you agree, but a lot of it's still it's what I hear out there, right? And if I look at, and there's a couple of SEs that are never being leveraged, I know there's a problem, right? There, it's a lot of who am I, who I see getting pulled into the big meetings that I know are adding value. So my response was a little all over the map, but just some things I'm thinking about.
Todd Janzen: I I love your response, and there's some really amazing things in there that I want to just dissect a little bit, because first of all, in your organization, solutions have a seat at the table, and that is something that all solutions strive for, but is really not that common. So kudos that solutions rolls into you.
So that's first part. The second thing you said is that you want to hear from them in the deal cycle. So not only do they have to sit at the table, you're listening to them at the table, which is incredible. And we as solutions leaders, we all want that. You, what you also said was, I'm going to paraphrase, how we're doing or the performance is still a little bit, like finger in the air and that I think is the opportunity for us in solutions is, and Brent kicked us off with the data,
We need to do a better job of owning our data narrative. And a lot of times we fall short, and it's we did X many demos, and these are the activities, and we need to take it that final step of No, this is how it led to win rates. This is how it led to bigger deals. This is how we grew the deal. And so we all need to take some responsibility and take it that extra mile, especially if we're in a spot where we don't have a seat at the table, it's probably because we're not helping people make that leap.
And the last thing I'll say is as we're getting pulled to other parts of the funnel, all of a sudden, maybe we're making we use consensus heavily at Salesforce.
We're making demo videos that are used for prospecting qualification up in the funnel. Guess what? We better get savvy on things like marketing pipe and pipe maturation. These are CMO terms that probably come out of their mouth a hundred times a day. We should start to get familiar with some of these ways that the business is measured.
We need to stop coming up with our own measurements and expecting people to go, Oh, you know what? You're right. Number of demos really does matter. I'm going to go talk to investors tomorrow about that. No like the deck is set. Yeah. Like there are set financials and EBITDA. There's these set things that we are not going to change.
We got to plug into them. Sorry. That was a little bit of a rant, but Laura, you got me all fired up. One thing I
Should product and presales work together?
Brent Krempges: would add to Todd that I, You left out that I don't think you intentionally left out, but I think is also a key piece of this is also, how do you have the seat at the table with your product team when it comes to roadmap?
Because there's so much that as SCs we hear. And we'll say, but it doesn't actually get heard internally. And so there's also this piece of correlation between the bottleneck may actually be a feature that doesn't exist. And until you quantify that and your product team deploys it, and then there's you draw that data line between I identified you heard you built, we sold.
Now, hear me more. So I think there's also this correlation to product leadership that we can also, I know personally on our team, we can do a better job. But I think across a lot of peers that I speak to, there's just, ensuring that the road map is leading in the direction of where SCs are hearing it because we are front and center to the technology.
Todd Janzen: Yeah, Brent, just to back that up. I spoke to the head of solutions at a fairly large company. And at their last QBR was able to basically say Hey, we didn't hit our numbers. Here's why. Look at all the things my team has identified that are not on our roadmap. The product team is off building their own roadmap.
And this is why we are not closing these gaps and got the respect. And the CEO just said. You're absolutely right.
Brent Krempges: Exactly. [00:24:00] And a lot of times they're like, it's still, I don't know, for me personally, it's usually the low hanging fruit. Like when product hears us, they're like, Oh, that's easy. I didn't even realize that there was that much value in the, in our tan for that.
And it's yeah, let's deliver it in a quarter and let's roll.
Laura Palmer: And going back to technologies role in all of this, right?
So now the SE role is the liaison, not just boot sales. It's the liaison with customer success. The baton pass. Once you close a customer, it's the liaison.
Like you said earlier, Todd, with marketing and building top of funnel, because now we're showing demos earlier in the cycle than we ever have been before. And to your point, like it's that feedback back to product, like that's a big job. And so if there are things that can help standardize, here's how I feed information back to each of these different organizations. I think that's super important.
Todd Janzen: Yeah. One thing I wanted to add there just to make it maybe a little more tangible for folks on the call. Cause I know I'm speaking at a fairly high level intentionally, but if you're using a product like Demostack and you're a solutions expert and you took time to record that demo and that demo is now on the website and customers and prospects are clicking through it, you need to find a way to capture and harness those metrics and take credit for them.
It doesn't matter that it lived on the website, you made the content, solutions are credited with the content. And so you gotta harness that, and I think that's one of the things that's really exciting about this software in this space, is that it is going to start providing us the data to help us justify our roles.
Barry Mueller: Yeah, I love that the last piece, this whole conversation I love. With regards to that last piece, Todd it's something that Demostack has specifically built was not only for people to be able to track who made the last product or the sandbox. But even if you're, for example, enabling an AE to demo earlier in the sales cycle, if you created that demo for the AE with the right guardrails, you also will be getting that credit because there's tracking from the demos that you created even for live demos, which I think is pretty cool.
Todd Janzen:
Yeah. I love that example because built into the SE role is AE enablement. Let's bring in some lunch and let's train them up on how to demo. And we hope and we pray that we had an impact and that they will demo, but we have actually no way of measuring that impact. And so that's one of the things I like about a lot of these tools is like you just mentioned, we can start to track some of that.
Barry Mueller: Yeah, absolutely. I wanted to take, to go back actually to something that Brent brought up in the beginning about the shift. And this I think might be Brent's like Gainsight story. He's been there for 10 years as of today. Gainsight now has more products, but I think everyone here has worked with multiple products at their company.
Are demos more complex today?
Is the sales cycle more complex today? Maybe Brent, you can even talk to Gainsight's specific case on having multiple products and sharing your thoughts on that and the demo.
Brent Krempges: Yeah, I would. So I think everyone would probably say yes, like they become more complex, but I think if you have a multi-product strategy or not, I think what's so important is like this profession has just become so much more well defined in the last two to three years.
CEO always says, like the SCs are magicians. And what we found is that it can either be in a simple product where you're telling a really compelling story. It could be a multi-product strategy, but like we're all storytellers.
And what we found is by using Demostack's playbook functionality, it allows us to actually define what that story is. And be able to multiply that story across all sellers. So it's not just the SCs reading a script and then figuring out how to piece it all together because we know the product so well, but it's actually having a very well defined script with very defined assets that are now pieced together very well to then allow for easier enablement.
Because at the core, what we have to do the best of everything is tell a story. And so what Demostack allowed us to do, I will pitch it here is focus more on storytelling versus making sure you click the right thing. And if it screws up, you do the three little things behind the scenes to make the demo flow really well.
Again, we all in the SE profession know what happens there. But that's where we've been able to piece all of this together much easier.
Barry Mueller: Love that. Thanks for sharing that. Todd, maybe you could talk about some Salesforce and the multi, multiple products and how that plays in.
Todd Janzen: Yeah. Gosh, multi-products are such a challenge.
And I think, look, we're on this journey, but given the buyer early on some options on what they want to learn. And I'll use this analogy if you've ever found yourself on YouTube. You got sent there to watch a video, you watch it, and then you look up an hour later and you're like, holy cow, I've just been like watching videos for the last hour, where'd the time go?
How can we enable that for a buyer or a prospect or a customer? What if they want to go from your website down to like deep setup of your product and get educated on that without having to call you? Could we enable that experience? And I think, it's a tall order.
AI, I'm sure, is the answer. It's the answer for everything lately. But, I think there needs to be a little bit of a shift in selling and people don't necessarily want to be sold to, they want to be educated. And sometimes we just need to get out of their way a little bit. And that's hard because at the same time sellers have quotas and they have to, they have to hit numbers.
And so I think that's where the friction comes into play. But something's got to change.
Barry Mueller: Laura, your thoughts?
I agree with everything that Todd said. I don't know if I have something specific to add to that. I just think everything is shifting and we have to be aware of how that shift is taking place.
I always think that my job is to fine tune. Like I picture being in a cockpit, and you've got all these knobs that you can turn.
And you're never going to get it perfect by the way, as soon as you get it perfect, then something shifts again. But just seeing the way I, the way people buy, it's not a surprise because. Again, as consumers, we have these expectations and it rolls into our work environment.
Nothing specific other than that to add.
Barry Mueller: Okay, great. I love that analogy of the knobs and the, it's something that Gilad, who spoke earlier and I talk about you, it used to be that the knob was like, oh, higher more SCs. Or if I hire more SEs, then I'll get more customization. And now there's, if I want more customization, then I need to hire more SEs.
And those are the questions and the decisions that people have to make. Or there's other things like tech and enabling the AEs to demo earlier and things like that. I'm not sure how many people on this call have worked on enabling AEs earlier. I think Todd, that's something that you've worked on it seems.
Maybe you can talk more about getting presales to help the AE team demo earlier to show the product really earlier in the sales cycle. Cause that's what it's about. That's part of this conversation. Yeah.
Todd Janzen: It is if you're an SE, this is part of your job. If you're not an SE, it's the biggest secret in the world that AE enablement is part of your role.
And I always like to think about the new AE that starts with the company, right? It's going to take them a good year to get educated and savvy on the product to demo. And I really feel for those people like starting a new tech job, right? It is, there's so much coming at you. And yeah, I'm sure they appreciate the bring in pizza, and let's train you on how to do the demo. But that's on top of a hundred other things they're trying to learn, and how to do their job, and hit their quota, and forecast, and just navigate everything. And so anything we can do, anything. And that's why I love tools like Consensus and Demostack because it could put something in their hands on day one that allows them to educate the buyer. And maybe it's not really them doing it. Maybe it's them hanging up the phone and saying, You know what? After we hang up this phone, I'm going to send you a link to a customized demo. You're educating the buyer. You're still, you still have credibility. And you're surviving.
You're surviving that first month. And you're moving the sales cycle forward. I think I wanted to just use that example of this as the mindset that we need to think about things. It's not just how much more education can we give the poor AE that just started this job. The end customer needs that too.
And that's, I think, the way we need to think
Brent Krempges: about it. For me, one thing I've done is try to have the SCs that are partnered with the AEs actually be the enablers. So instead, Todd, like you were saying I don't think it should be part of AE bootcamp. I think it should actually be more of that, one, it starts to build that partnership, which we all know is key.
But two,
Don't call it a demo. Because as soon as AEs hear a demo, or I don't know, I know a lot of AEs, they are like, They're going to turn it off. It's more of your discovery backdrop. Here's an asset that I think will help you do your job, whatever that job is.
And Mr. and Mrs. AE, hey, let me just show you, this is how you would show this one thing. So I try to coach our team to use that relationship to help the reps know what to show when. And it goes like what Todd was talking about. What story to tell when. I don't know. I've just found not calling it a demo and calling it something else, whatever it is, actually makes AEs a lot more excited to to leverage whatever that thing is.
Should AEs demo?
Todd Janzen: It was Andy in the comments that just said there needs to be some maturity that, like a demo's, not a demo's not a demo.
There are different types of demos for different points and that needs to be part of it.
And Brent, I think that's kinda what you're saying is a demo doesn't have to be a full blown massive thing. It could be two clicks, right? Yeah. Sorry, Laura. Go ahead. No,
Laura Palmer: I just, I totally agree. And like having been an SDR and inside sales, a salesperson, right? There's something about that partnership, especially when we get into field selling. That partnership with the SE and the sales rep. Even it was out at a bunch of customer meetings on the East coast last week, it still is not easy to log in. So you can even just see the screen of your demo that has not changed. Okay. All this tech has gotten better, but it is still just like that moment of trying to make sure that you're going to be able to actually show it to the customer Is horrible. So I love that you're turning it like, like the sales rep should be able to wet the appetite of the customer. And does it need to be a live demo? No. I also think we underestimate now I'm gonna put my sales hat on. The job of the sales rep in that meeting, understanding what's happening amongst the people in the room or on the zoom and like to see when an se shows something and see the reaction, right?
Engage who holds power and who could be a champion and, who's my economic buyer. And why is that person asking that question? Like you can't do that. And do a demo at the same time. So I just totally agree that we should enable people. Love the idea too, of what you were talking about, especially when people are new, empowering them to learn the tech easier, like amazing.
But I'm still a little old school. I'm still a little old school and it depends on your tech, right? I'm not going to go out and show Google cloud tech for God's sake. I'd make an idiot of myself in five seconds. Now. People.ai, I can do a demo. I do a demo. Like I can wet the appetite, but I'm not gonna go deep. Not yet. Maybe I'll get there, but 'cause I use it.
Barry Mueller: That's awesome. I'm seeing a lot of comments. I really as you guys mentioned, Andy's comment, got eight likes that there's different types of demos. Jonathan the CEO of Demostack speaking in session three. We've been talking about this idea of “kill the demo”, even though our name is Demostack, kill the demo, just show the product, right?
Show product, be proud of it. And it doesn't exactly what Brent says. It doesn't have to be the whole thing. It could just be, Oh, here's this feature that I think you might find interesting. And then you discover by showing product and learning more. I think it's super interesting. We have a few minutes left four minutes left.
So if anyone has any questions for these amazing panelists, now is the time I'll read a few of the comments. We have a Q and a thing also doesn't have to just be in the chat. You can also put in Q and A. I'll just read some of the past last comments. I like when an a, you can do enough to set the hook might be 2 or 3 magic moments and then work with their prospects to bring more folks into the deal and go deeper into the solution.
That's something I think we were discussing. Tell a short story by Pam. This is Pam Dunn. Tell a story and show them a quick tour of what that looks like. I think that's something that, a theme that we saw throughout this was storytelling. SEs are magicians. It was funny, Brent, was that you mentioned that SEs are, that your CEO said that SEs are magicians?
For me, that's so interesting because some parts could be just telling a story that seems magical. That's what Disney was all about. What did Disney do well when they started? They told a story. And I think that's super interesting..
Okay, here, we got one question. What is the maturity curve for companies to go from old school sales led demo to automation tool? So what are things we should think through when thinking about buying any type of demo tech if you will, this could be for anyone, Todd, Laura, Brent.
Why is hard to demo?
Brent Krempges: One thing that I may, since we use the tool, one thing that I think has really helped us significantly, and it may be different from old school to your sales process, it may actually be your tech.
So for us. One thing where Demostack helped a ton and not to end this with a commercial, but I'll help you out here is AI. So AI every, I'm, I thought said early, but AI is such a big thing and it's harder than hell to demo because it's dependent on so much data. So you think about the story you're trying to tell for every, for a different type of demo.
AI is actually really hard to get right. And so for us, what we've looked at is demo automation helps actually tell the story with your AI functionality without actually having to go through and manipulate a data model that's going to support that story. So I've looked at it more from the tech and what I need for the tech to tell the story versus our sales process,
which has changed, but where I've leaned in more to it is as our techs evolved, I've realized that
Not all tech was built to sell. It was actually built to do the thing built to do.
And so you may want to actually look at how I want to tell the story and where I have challenges in my own product to tell that story in a simplistic way, more so than your sales process. Cause then anyone could use that tool. Yeah.
Todd Janzen: That was so quotable, Brent.
Our products, I don't know how you said that our products were not necessarily meant to be sell. They're meant to do the thing they're doing, which makes them hard sell. Yeah. Yeah, they're true.
Laura Palmer: That's, yeah, that is a really, yeah
Brent Krempges: We've all sat in the room with our product team and been like, Have you thought about how I'm going to sell this?
Todd Janzen: and that’s like a light bulb moment there, man.
Brent Krempges: Wait, drop the mic. I'll stop now.
Barry Mueller: Yeah, let's drop the mic. Amazing everyone. Thanks for coming on. We have two more sessions for Demo HQ. Always a pleasure to Speak with everyone on this panel. It's been a few times that Todd's been on and Brent and Laura are amazing to have you on for the first time.
So let's thank you for coming and let's start the next session. Thanks everyone.
