Sales Management Podcast
Cory Bray, 8x author and co-founder of CoachCRM, digs into hot sales management topics.
Sales Management Podcast
96. Demos with Mike Kavanagh
Mike and Cory dig into sales demos with a bunch of actionable takeaways in this short episode.
Welcome to the Sales Management Podcast, your source for actionable sales management strategies and tactics. I'm your host Coach, CRM Co-Founder, Corey Gray. No long intros, no long ads. Let's go Part two of two. Second time we've ever done this before, because we have interesting topics to talk about. Mike Cavanaugh is here with me and we're looking at. Should account executives, salespeople, closers, should they demo during the sales process? Mike, how are you?
Speaker 2:I'm great. I think this is a really important topic. By the way, this is, it's a passion aggravation. It's all of the above for me.
Speaker 1:I love it. The emotions are flowing and it's going to be fun because him and I are going to agree and disagree at the same time on this topic, which is going to be mind have been identified and can be tied back to capabilities within the solution.
Speaker 2:I don't want to see this show up and throw up demo anymore. It makes me want to bang my head against the wall.
Speaker 1:I agree with everything you just said. The thing where we might disagree is I think they should be able to demo inside and out and go as deep and wide as the product will allow them to.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay, I think that depends on the product, though. Okay, so-.
Speaker 1:Okay, not SAP not.
Speaker 2:SAP. Okay Well, sap Salesforce.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, but even then they're assigned to a tech. Nobody's selling Salesforce as a broad solution right?
Speaker 2:No, they're not selling the 2,700 SKUs at Salesforce.
Speaker 1:Yeah, You're selling sales cloud. You're selling marketing cloud, whatever. So if you're selling marketing cloud at Salesforce, I think you should know every aspect. Yeah, Okay.
Speaker 2:That's fair, yeah, and I mean the more the more, the more specific the solution. And if you're an industry specific, absolutely. I work for a company, true Context. We did a lot in field service automation and I to this day, could probably still do a demo because I knew the product inside and out and I think that made me a better seller. But every demo I did was tailored to the conversation we had during the discovery.
Speaker 2:And this is the problem I see a lot with, especially with young ladies who are still learning. They get trained really well on the product, which is awesome. I love that. That's great. And they're so proud of the product they want to just show it and they want to show 2,700 features. I saw it and I was at Zendesk for two and a half years. Zendesk is an incredibly powerful platform. It can do a ton of stuff, but the buyers are coming to us. They don't need all 2,700 features. They need to know how you're going to solve the problem that came to you for and I think that's where I see the overload of demos it's death by demo sometimes.
Speaker 1:I agree. And then they start showing stuff before they uncover the next pain point.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and and because and this is the other part because they're trying to squeeze it in or the and this is where I think sellers need to learn to push back and the buyer signs up and this is again changing behavior. But the buyer shows up, they speak to an SDR or BDR and don't get me started on like the SDR role and like me answering questions of a 23 year old if I'm buying Salesforce for the third time like please stop, please, just I'm begging you. But they've answered those questions. Now they've been promised a demo, but the AEs this is where setting the right expectations through the process need to come in, like the BDR or the SDR or whatever needs to say hey, this call isn't going to be a demo or, if it is a demo, it's going to be very brief. They're going to ask you questions because they really want to understand and tailor it to you. I think that's where a lot of the bad experiences happen is the expectations I've said correctly.
Speaker 1:Well, it starts on the website with the marketing team, because it says book a demo.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:And then marketing wants to book a demo because book a demo is going to convert at a higher rate than talk to sales. So then the marketing KPIs and the board meeting are higher. And then the SDR they want to promise a demo because that's going to convert higher than do you want to talk to another salesperson verbally? Because that's going to convert higher.
Speaker 2:All right, I'll let marketing have the book. A demo. Fine, it bypasses the SDR. Use Calendly, use Chili and I'm not getting paid by Calendly or Chili Piper or any of the 1700 other solutions to do this. But, like if somebody is that interested in seeing a demo, there's so many ways to have a prerecorded like Harbor Shows those highlight features, right Like there's tools out there now that they can do that.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:You know, set the right expectations for the buyer. Buyers don't have. I've been a buyer of software many times. If I come to your website and I say I want to see a demo, I've done my research already Right, I I'm looking to see something, or I have a specific question. I want to see a specific thing, Right, that's. That's where I think the problems come up and A's are being taught to just demo the whole thing and that's where the that's what drives me crazy in this, in this current environment.
Speaker 1:Right, cause when you're a buyer, one of the few things is happening Either you used to use it like we've all bought things several times, hey, what's new? So I want to know what's new. Cause I'm curious, like, what am I? What do I do? No, what do I not know? What have I been missing? Or you say, hey, I've got a specific problem to solve, like, can you solve it? And do I actually believe that you can solve it? Cause that's all demo really is. It's just information, asymmetry cure. Buyer thinks this, seller thinks this and we got to get them on the same page.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it again to your point. Right, like somebody who's coming to your website and raising their hand and saying I have this problem. They know they have a problem. I've never gone to a website and signed up for a demo because I have 30 minutes to kill. Right, like I don't do that. Right, I'm coming because I've identified a challenge in my business. The job as a salesperson is to really hone in and help. You know, maybe them unpack that problem and really under you know, maybe they yeah, they know the problem, but what's the deeper levels of the impact of that problem? Not doing something right? So they create urgency and all those things, and that's where I think no one's ever won a sale because they did a great demo.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a good part of it, but it's not the reason someone packs a piece of software or buys anything.
Speaker 1:Well, and then people throw you for a wrench sometime and they'll say, hey, I just want to see a demo, just show me what you got, and the best salespeople can flip up a screen and do the same exact discovery they were going to do. I think I call it demo brain, where people just feel like, oh my gosh, now I'm in presentation mode. You're not in presentation mode, you're not giving a keynote speech, you're just doing discovery with something on your screen.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean. So you know. I think it comes down to like okay, well, let me, let me walk you through a common scenario that I, a lot of our customers, buy this solution for. Right, like that's how you can start. And then you start to ask questions like, hey, is this relevant to how you do things today, or how does this differ from how you do things today? Right, yeah, the demo becomes like a PowerPoint presentation. I'm like, please, god, no.
Speaker 1:Choose your own adventure. Yeah, so yeah, I'll start off and be like look, our product does a lot of things. Either people are concerned about ramping people in their organization. Concerned about ramping people in their organization, they're anxious that their sellers don't have the skillset that they need to have, or they're worried they don't have any visibility into how performance ties to their enablement activity. Like where do you want to start?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And they just they're telling me where they want to start and then they're opting into whatever pain question. Just ask them. And then I'm like, okay, cool, I just did discovery.
Speaker 2:Whoa, let's go. It's exactly. And learning being good at demo, I think, is it's a hard skill. There's a lot of hard skills in sales. I think running a good demo is definitely up there.
Speaker 2:For me, it's you know, getting really good at doing discovery throughout the sales process. And then the other thing when I talk to AAs, it's about forecasting, but demo is probably depending on what you're selling is, that is that, you know be just another tool in the arsenal for how, like discovering the pain, really figuring out how big is this? Like an annoying problem, or the house is on fire and if we don't fix it, we're going to be homeless, right Like that's. That's the issue. That's how a demo should be an aid to doing better discovery.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And when you, when you build out your discovery questions, one of the things that we always have people do is tie it to features. So the exercise I'll verbally articulate this it's in a sales playbooks, the builder's toolkit, one of our books that we wrote. If anybody wants a free hard copy of sales playbooks builder's toolkit, shoot me a note. Free stuff at coachCRMcom. Free stuff at coachCRMcom. I'll flip it over to you. So the framework is you start with the feature and then you say, for each feature, what are all the benefits of the feature? And at this point people like Mike start freaking out. He's like, oh, my God, Corey's going to talk about features and benefits. Well, you know, we're going to talk about them for a second, Then we're going to throw away one of those columns. So we say here's the feature, here's all the benefits of the benefit. And then we say, okay, what personas have that pain? What market segments have that pain? What's the impact of solving that pain, and how well are we positioned to win? So is it something we uniquely?
Speaker 2:do. Is this really our wheelhouse or are we kind of on the edge case where we can do it but it's not perfect?
Speaker 1:Exactly so. Now we've got this prioritized list of pain points that tie to personas and market segments, so we can ignore that features and benefits piece. We've just got this really core discovery document that we can integrate conversationally. But then when we find something, we say oh gee, whiz, we found these three pain points. How are we going to orchestrate our demo? Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. So we're working forward, then we're working backwards and it's all in one thing that, yeah, I mean, that's the skills that are really good.
Speaker 2:If you're fortunate to have great sales engineers in your organization, that's what great sales engineers do, and if you can distill that down into a consumable way for AEs, it's going to make them much better.
Speaker 1:But if it's my choice.
Speaker 2:They should be able to do demo, but if they can't do it effectively, then I'll stop it and we'll rip it out. We'll have somebody else do the demo if we have to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, you got to give the ball to Jordan, as they say.
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, love it.
Speaker 2:Um one quick. I have one question for you. Where do you stand on like doing demo certification for AEs?
Speaker 1:I'm very big on all types of certification.
Speaker 2:You're an enablement? Yeah, of course. No I think it's important. I think the thing I see when I see a lot of demo certifications in companies is like it's testing them on the features and not testing them on how they tell the story. And again it's go back to the story right, like they're testing can you demo this feature? Can you do this feature, this, this, this and this. I want to see how they, how they handle a situational demonstration.
Speaker 1:Well, that's dumb way of doing it. A lot of companies do the enablement dumb ways. I don't know what to tell you. I know they do Cause they don't understand. They think a demo like I'll do I mean, in our product we actually built a demo role play scorecard because people want to do a demo role place and you can do them well. So if they're, if they're keyed up well and you do them well, sure they're fine. Right, and I've there's like three people I've worked with sales leaders internally that we'll do them with, cause they actually know how to run them. Everyone else is a disaster. So when I think about certification, there's there's two, there's two pieces and then there's three layers to the second piece.
Speaker 1:Let me just quickly so knowledge and action. So do you know it and can you do it? So do you know it. So do you know what all the features are? Do you know what pain points the feature solved? Do you know what personas they solved them for? Do you know what market segments? If you don't know something, you can't do it and that's you know we're talking about golf in our last episode.
Speaker 2:If you don't know, you keep to. You got to know all those things.
Speaker 1:So there's 15 things you need to know in a golf swing and they become unconscious competence over time. But if you don't really know them, they're conscious competence. You have to think about them before you do them. So it's the same thing with doing a demo Okay, so do we know the stuff? And then can we do it? Okay, three levels to do it. Do it, do it well. Do it well under pressure. Well, do it. You and I can sit here and do a little role play. You're like hey, corey, show me this feature. I'm like okay, mike, so you're a VP of sales and you're struggling with us. Here's what we do. What are you? And I ask you an opening question. What are how questions get you talking? Cool, fine, but do it well under pressure. I'm in a room with four people, two of them I've never met before. Wow, no, that's good. I think that.
Speaker 2:I think that's a great way to do it. I I um. Very early in my career, I had the unfortunate experience of having to do a certification uh in with my SE and his boss, who just happened to be my mom and my mom, which you want to talk about. You want to talk about a high pressure situation That'll put you on your toes right there.
Speaker 1:Oh wow, that's great.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and she went harder at me than she did anyone else on my sales team. I was like this is unnecessary now. Now you're just, you don't need to play favorites, but you don't need to personally call me out, but but yeah.
Speaker 1:Sounds like it worked out for you, though.
Speaker 2:It did, it did. I left the company six months later, though I was like this has been fun, but I'm going to go do my own thing for a while.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, fly away a little bit. Yeah, no, that's it Okay. So we, we generally agree on that. Yeah, the, the, the, the silly certifications are no good, and I think that the more and I'll I'll say this cause we actually agree on this I thought we were going to get a little debate a little more.
Speaker 2:I think we I mean enablement one. We had more disagreement, this one, I think everybody aligns pretty well.
Speaker 1:I had a guy I had a guy on a previous episode where I couldn't find anybody that could credibly debate the other side, so him and I just yelled at the clouds like Homer Simpson's dad. So the? Uh, the thing I was going to say is that if people don't know the product inside and out, they don't know what questions to ask to uncover the pain that would be solved by the product.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, they can't lay those trap questions right. They can't figure out the the. They can't lay those questions that they know are going to get other either. Uncover the real pain that they helped solve. And if they can't find it, if there's not real pain, then they know there's not a real opportunity. But they have to know what the product does and how it does it to be able to lay those kinds of questions out for people.
Speaker 1:Yeah for sure, All right. Well, this is fun. Ae's demo. Learn the product inside and out, Learn the pain points. If you want to dig into that framework that we've got, shoot me a note. Freestuffatcoachdmcom. Mike, anything to plug or wrap us up with?
Speaker 2:No, I'm all set. This has been a lot of fun and, like I said before, I'm excited about this next phase of sales. I think everybody's going to get the opportunity to sharpen their skills and learn.
Speaker 1:I agree, and I have changed my tune about this I don't think AI is going to replace us in the next 10 years. I've really come around on this in the last week or two. I thought it was going to happen in the next five to 10 years. I don't think it is and we can dig into that in a future episode.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'd love to talk about that one. That's, I'm not convinced. I convinced I can still tell when AI writes me an email. So I think my job is safe for now.
Speaker 1:I love it. Thanks, mike, all right, everybody else. Thank you, corey, next time.