No One Wants To Book a Demo (Do This Instead)

90% of B2B marketers are trying to “book a demo”. But your prospects? They don’t want to talk to you. Here’s what to do instead that gets qualified leads eager and excited to talk to you.

P.S. If you're looking, here are a few things to help you:

- Hang out with 20 marketing directors for 2 days in Orlando, FL at the Momentum conference. You'll walk away with a simple strategy that works, the skills, plan, and confidence to make it happen. ​Click here for details.​

- Download the Marketing Director Roadmap to get the one-page blueprint to succeeding as a marketing director.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

This is the Marketing Director Daily, and I'm Tim Parkin. Book a demo. Here's the truth. Ninety-nine percent of B2B marketing websites talk about booking a demo. Or scheduling a call. Or getting a free trial or something like that. And the truth is, nobody wants to book a demo. Your customers, your prospects, leads, they don't want a demo. And yet, what does your website say? What do your emails say? What do those ads you run say? Book a demo. This is a huge problem because there's a disconnect between what you need and what the prospect wants. Nobody wants to book a demo. Even when they're at the end of their buying stage, their buying journey, they really don't want to book a demo. And we're going to talk about this today and what you should do instead and how to get people to actually schedule calls. But this is a huge problem because most B2B marketers have a goal, they have an outcome, they need to deliver, which is a qualified pipeline. You need people to book a demo. You need people to schedule that call so you can pass them onto sales and you can hit your quotas or targets. But the reality is nobody really wants to book a demo. And so if you keep offering something that people don't want, you're not going to get the demos or calls or qualified leads or pipeline that you actually need. And maybe this is you right now. Maybe you've seen this already. You think we put the buttons on the page to book a demo. We've sent emails out about booking a demo. And yet, here you are, nobody's booked a demo. And it's not your fault. It's the problem understanding why people book a demo. Because here's the truth. One, nobody wants to book a demo. They know that it's a sales conversation. They know that they're going to be pressured or persuaded to make a purchasing decision. And they want to avoid that. Even at the end of the buyer's journey, nobody likes to be sold. But number two, this is the stunning fact to realize people don't want to talk to you right now because they think it's a sales conversation. But people want to talk to someone. And if you can make yourself the person they want to talk to, they're ready to talk. They are talking to people. They're just not talking to you. And the reason they're not talking to you is because they are afraid, they're scared, of being put in a sales situation, in a sales conversation. But I guarantee you, if you talk to actual buyers, actual prospects, qualified leads, they're talking to people. They're going on LinkedIn and talking to their peers and what people are doing. They're researching things and quote unquote talking to the people on forums and articles. They're listening to podcasts, and maybe it's a one-sided conversation, but they're listening. They are having conversations to learn and to figure out and to decide. They're just not having those conversations with you. And the more you understand this, the more apparent it becomes and obvious it becomes of what's wrong and how we can fix it. And so I want to dive into this today because nobody wants to book a demo, and yet 99% of you are saying book a demo on your website. And so I want to encourage you to change this and let's talk about how. The buyer's journey, a lot of people think is somewhat linear. I'm sure you're probably more advanced than that, and you know that people might research stuff and click stuff and see some ads and talk to some people and all that. But I have a different perspective even beyond that, which is there are two stages, two phases on top of the buyer's journey. The first half is emotion, and the second half is logic. It's been said that people act based on emotion and they justify with logic. We act based on emotion and we justify with logic. It turns out we are all irrational. I am irrational, and I imagine you and everybody you know are irrational. And this is not necessarily a bad thing, it's how we're wired. It is hard for us to make purely logical decisions because we have fears, we have emotions, we have desires, we have wants, we have aspirations. And so almost no decision is purely logical. And this is why we act based on emotion and justify with logic. And therefore, when you put a button on your site to say book a demo, it seems logical. People would want a demo before making a decision. But it misses completely the emotion of that decision. So if you want to book more demos, here's what to do. The first thing is don't call it a demo, because that's a clear giveaway that it's going to be a sales conversation. I'm not saying to bait and switch people, but we need to reframe the conversation you're going to have with them. Because if they perceive it as a threat, they're never going to take action. So number one is to change the name of what you call it. Number two, and perhaps more important, is to change the structure and the outcome of your calls. Whether you have a demo or a sales call or any other type of call with a prospect, we need to be clear first internally, what is our goal? What is the outcome? And more importantly, what is the value we're going to deliver on this call? In other words, in simple terms, why would someone want to book this call? That's the key thing to figure out. And that will inform not only what you call it, but what you do on the call and then how we communicate that value. So let's take a real practical example. If you go to almost any B2B website right now and you go to contact or book a demo, there's typically a page that has a form that says book a demo, talk to our team, and it asks you 19 bajillion things, your name, your revenue, your company, your email, how many kids you have, your social security number. I'm kidding, but you get the point. It asks way too many things. And then it says submit, and you can submit the form to hopefully book a demo. This is abysmal. It's terrible, frankly. And it's no surprise that people aren't doing this. And hopefully, maybe your form is a little bit better than that. But here's the three things you have to have on your form if you want to get people to actually book a demo. The first thing is to be clear of what is the outcome. If I'm a prospect and I schedule this call with you, what am I getting out of it? Spoiler alert, getting a demo isn't what I care about and want. I want reassurance that this is either the right tool for me or not the right tool. I want confidence that it's going to work and that you've done this before, that you have results or customers or case studies you can show me. I want information and education that how does it work? How would I use it? How would it fit my use cases, my company, our team? So the first thing that your page or form has to have is the value, the outcome. What will I get if I spend my time talking to you? And how you communicate that is typically in bullets. On this call, we're going to do three things: one, two, and three. So I have no ambiguity about what to expect when I get on the call. That when I jump on the call, I should have crystal clarity about the steps that will happen on the call, about the types of things you'll ask me and tell me and show me. Now, once I have an understanding of what to expect, the second thing is you need to make it desirable. And so, how do you make a sales call or a book a demo call desirable? Well, you have to add things that people find valuable or interesting or unique. So one of my clients inside the coaching group did this and she had her president on some of these calls. And so when you scheduled a call, you got to not only talk to the company's team, the salespeople essentially, but you would talk with the president of the company. And the president of the company is a thought leader in his industry. So when people wanted to book a demo or book a call, they would say, Oh, the president is going to be on the call. I get to talk to that guy who I see on LinkedIn, who I've seen speak at different things. That's impressive. That's interesting. That's valuable. And he doesn't have to stick around for the whole call, but he can pop in, say hi, say thanks, give a little spiel, and then bounce, and the conversation can continue. Now you might not be able to have your president or CEO on every call, and that's totally fine. But that's one example of how to make it more valuable, more interesting. You can see how it goes from just being a demo or sales call to a real interesting connection point where you can actually talk to someone that you want to talk to and not just get on a call that you're stressing out about and trying to avoid. So, first is communicate the value on this page. The second is find a way to make it interesting. And if you don't have some big way to make it interesting, the simplest way is to change the name of the call. Nobody wants a demo, but perhaps a discovery session is better. Or maybe it's a behind-the-scenes tour. We're going to take you behind the scenes and do it. Or maybe it's a live implementation where we're going to help you take your business and your situation and show you how to implement it in our tool, in our solution, with our product or service. You can get creative here, but you can see already that those are much more interesting, much more valuable and desirable than simply booking a demo. The third thing, last thing you need is to make it easy. You have to remove any friction. Friction, as I alluded to earlier, is the number of fields on the form. That's the first thing. Fewer fields on a form gets more submissions. The next part of that is to ask only the essential information. Are you really using the revenue size of a company in your qualification criteria? Can you find that out on the call? Do you need to know their headcount? Do you really need their phone number? Or can they schedule on a calendar link and avoid the phone number issue altogether? Think about the form fields you can eliminate, because fewer fields and less sensitive information will get you more submissions. So here's what to do next. Take a look at your website, at your emails, at your ads, and at your form pages, and say, are you saying book a demo or schedule a call or talk to sales? Because if you are, nobody wants that. And apply these three things to improve how you communicate, how you reframe your demos, your sales calls, your conversations. And if you do just one of these, or if you do all three of them, I can guarantee you'll not only get more calls booked, but you'll have better conversations, more qualified and engaged prospects, and a full pipeline.