Lesson 39 - Demo the Decision Criteria

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Aligning your solution with the prospect's decision criteria is key to advancing deals. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to conduct demos that address specific decision criteria. Your assignment will involve planning and scripting a demo for an active opportunity.

Transcript

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Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, you're going to perform a tailor made demo that meets your prospects required capabilities. Now for med pick, we actually don't call these required capabilities. We call them the decision criteria, but basically it's the same thing. The first step when you think about the required capabilities is making sure that you've done all of your relevant discovery, so ensuring that you've talked to all of the different stakeholders that are going to be involved in the decision making process or are going to be actually using the solution once it's been sold. You need to be making your own list of what those required capabilities or decision criteria are. And even better, if you can ask the prospect of this list, which of these are a must have. So they would be a deal breaker if your solution couldn't provide them, and which of these are nice to have, right? So you get this list of must have requirements. Nice to have requirements. The next thing that you're going to do is perform a gap analysis, and this is exactly what it sounds like. So you need to take that list of features, functionality, required capabilities, decision, criteria, whatever, and you need to compare it with what your solution can actually offer and what your solution is missing. So I have my list of features functionality. I write down all of the different things that my solution can offer, I put those at the top, and then anything that my solution can't offer. I now need to think about, what am I going to present to the customer for this. If this is something that is a nice to have feature, then maybe it doesn't matter at all. Maybe the things that my solution can do vastly outweigh the things that it can't do, and I can still be confident showing my solution. Or maybe I need to show that this feature or function is on the roadmap. So for things that you don't have currently, but you know that they're coming up, make sure that you give an estimated date for when that feature will arrive. For things that you don't have and they're not on the roadmap, you need to understand if there one are any workarounds. So if there are workarounds that other customers have been using in order to get around this feature gap, you should present that along with proof, if it's not something you offer, it's not on the roadmap, and there's no work around at that point, you need to understand if it's a deal breaker or not, because if it's a deal breaker, you don't want to waste your time going down the path of an opportunity for something that your product doesn't have. You just want to earmark it for later if your product ever does get that capability. So we've made a list of all of our decision criteria after talking to all of our stakeholders, then we perform a gap analysis to understand what our solution can do and can't do. At that point, it's time to build a tailor made demo. Now, if you have a solution engineer or solution architect, you're going to want to work with them on this, but you let me grab my notes here. Yeah, so you want to put together a demo that focuses on the most important, highest priority features and functions. First, you want to make sure you definitely show those like, what are the things that if time doesn't allow we definitely need to show these first. You don't want to lose your audience, so the stuff that matters the most to them, that's what you kick off with that's going to make for a great story. Here are some other tips for when you're actually presenting this demo. So first, your demo should be a story. It shouldn't just be here's this feature, here's how we do it, here's this feature you asked for, here's how we do it. You should be telling the story of someone that is in their shoes someone that works in the way that they work, and show how they're solving their high level business problems through the use of these features. So again, I know it's kitschy, but I like to use I like to think about it like a fairy tale, right? We start off in the deep, dark woods. The here are the challenges that we're facing. The product comes along to save us in these ways, and ultimately we live happily ever after. So you want to pretend you're them. You're using the product to complete a specific job or task. So if I was demoing a social media management tool like Sprout Social I would pretend that I'm a marketing manager at their company, and I would walk through the things that I do day to day I would walk through, organizing my social media accounts, scheduling my posts, analyzing engagement, responding to messages, generating reports, whatever the product is doing. Make it as real and as relatable as possible. The next thing that you want to do is get them involved. So you want to be encouraging questions throughout the presentation, and whenever possible, you should be asking them to try it out themselves. So not all products are going to be simple enough for you to do this with. If your product requires a lot of upfront training, then it may be counterproductive to have them try to use the product and then realize that that they're not able to off the bat. But if your product is simple to use, invite them to try it out during the demo, have them do something that is interactive. This approach allows them to experience how intuitive, how user friendly the product is. It also gives them a sense of ownership and comfort with the solution. It also just gets them paying attention and gets them moving. Studies have shown that practicing something getting practical is a far more powerful teacher than simply hearing about it or seeing it. And then the next thing I would mention is every time you demo a feature that aligns with one of their high level priorities, or if you're demoing a feature that is something they've mentioned as a must have, call it out right in the moment. So I might say, you know, hey, you mentioned that multi channel publishing was a must have for streamlining your workflows. Let's take a look at how we can do that now and then, I dive into it. You want to be consistently asking for feedback from stakeholders in the room. So make sure you're asking each stakeholder. Is this making sense? Is this aligning with your needs? Have I successfully shown you that our solution can do the thing that you've required from us? Make sure that you So an example might be, John, does this dashboard provide the kind of metrics that your team would need for performance tracking? And then I wait and I see what they say, and then the last thing? Well, maybe not the last thing, but you also want to proactively address any objections. And the keyword there is proactively. You don't want to wait for an objection to come up, and then address it in the moment. If there's an objection that you know is likely to come up, address it as part of your demo story. So an example of that might be, hey, I know that many companies in your function or in your industry are concerned about how these tools are going to integrate with the rest of their tech stack. So let's actually show you how easy it is to integrate our platform with your existing tools now and then. The last thing, the real last thing, is, use proof points. I know that I've said it a million times and a million different lessons at this point, proof points are incredibly valuable. So as part of your demo, make sure that you're highlighting case studies, customer testimonials, ways that other customers have used these features as part of their day to day or to solve their challenges. At the end of the demo, you should always conclude by asking them if there's anything that they haven't seen, anything else that they would like to see, any features that are important to them that weren't covered, etc, if there's not You should finish the presentation by summarizing the key features that you've covered, um, showing that your product has met the prospects decision criteria and reinforcing the business outcomes that these features are going to provide for them. Remember, a demo is technically about features and functions and showing them what you can do, but ultimately, it should all tie to higher level business outcomes. All right, now it's your turn for today's assignment. You are going to partner with a peer and list out the decision criteria that has come up in one of your active opportunities. You should document all of the key required capabilities and how they align with the prospects, high level business goals, and then you should prioritize this list as best as possible. If you don't have a current opportunity where this applies right now, look at a previous opportunity and map out what their required capabilities were. Once you have your list, conduct a gap analysis, write down what your solution can and cannot do, what the workarounds are. Is this on your roadmap? If it's not, is it a deal breaker, etc. And then finally, create a tailored demo script that directly addresses the decision criteria you've mapped out. Incorporate the tips above, weave together that story, use the jobs to be done, format, involve the customer in the demo, and then ultimately, you want to share your demo script and your gap analysis with your peers, your mentor, manager, new hire buddy, and use their input to refine your approach. Finally, when you're ready, schedule the demo. Use your solution engineer, if they're typically the ones that give the demos, if not, make sure that you've recorded it, rehearsed it, practiced it, and that you're ready to get in front of your prospect and your daily your study guide will walk you through this in detail and. That is it for today's lesson on the daily quota. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time bye. You.